Template talk:Conventions/Name prefix

Proposal to change page sort to ignore Name prefix [25 April 2017]

I would like to propose that we change our sorting algorithm, so that pages are sorted based on what is entered in the Given name field and not the Name prefix field. As it is now, researchers have no way of knowing if anything was entered in the Name prefix field already when they are searching for a page. For example, how will they know to look for Dr. John Smith under "D", Capt. John Smith under "C", or Sir John Smith under "S", etc. If we must sort on Given name, then all of these pages should be listed together under "J" for "John". Does anyone object to this request? --cos1776 20:13, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

I agree. Better yet, offer sort by surname, given name, as in most software that I am familiar with.--DataAnalyst 02:29, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Yes. That would be better yet, but let's think it through. If we look at a list of John Smiths, for example, how would we want these to sort? [Surname] [Given name] [Name prefix] [Name suffix] seems logical to me. Do you agree? --cos1776 17:24, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Why title in the sort? What seems logical to me if you have 100s of John Smiths that all sort into a big clump, is to order them by geography or year born. --Jrich 15:28, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

I was setting the bar low, but Jrich is right. About the only thing better would be if we could choose to sort on any field or field combo we wished. Given that the fields are there, I'm sure it is possible, but I am not sure if we will be able to find someone with both the programming chops and, more importantly regular access, to the raw database. Base code is at Github, so we have that, but I'm not sure if the Search program is also there. I seem to remember it is separate, but I'll have to check again. --cos1776 18:01, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Name prefix field - Abbreviations & punctuation [25 April 2017]

[moved here from card]:

Pending decision. If we want consistency and pages to sort properly within our current program, we must specify either full word or abbreviations (e.g. Captain vs Capt. or Cpt.). The generally accepted convention nowadays is that there is no good reason to use abbreviations in data entry. - cos1776

[from email exchange]:

Full word. I don’t really care about how military titles are entered, but I can’t see people entering Doctor when Dr. is the commonly accepted form in everyday life. Similarly, I think Rev. is far more likely to get used than Reverend. If we want consistency, I think we should make the standard what people are likely to enter. (There are currently 5439 WeRelate pages with Dr. and only 237 with Doctor, and several of the latter are not prefixes but the person’s actual first name. 3181 with Rev. and 273 with Reverend) Maybe it would be better to publish a list of accepted abbreviations – we should have enough data to determine what the appropriate prefixes are. Also, one of the strengths of WeRelate is the ability to upload GEDCOM’s and my guess is that the majority of GEDCOM’s use abbreviations. - DataAnalyst

Re: consistency in this field - I would like to see consistency in all fields, but this one is a special case, since right now Name prefix is the first field used to sort. If we change that, consistency in the Name prefix field might not be so important. If we can't change it, then we just need to settle on something. I agree that "Dr." and "Rev." would be preferable to full spellings, if we must put them in the title field. My personal preference now is to skip the Name prefix field whenever possible and to specify these things as sourced facts instead, especially for military titles, since for most people, their time in the military was but a small percentage of their lifetime. I realize that we will likely get pushback on enforcing this, so if military titles must stay, then I also prefer abbreviations for them (e.g. "Capt." vs "Captain").

Re: GEDCOMs - I am really monitoring the incoming GEDCOMs carefully these days and standardizing all entries, so I am confident that we can keep a handle on most files coming in. The ones we can't monitor are those from admins who import on their own without peer review. Hopefully, we can communicate with them about these conventions and they will help us by adhering to them. So - I guess I am saying that I am not too worried about GEDCOMs, but there is still concern about getting folks to adhere to the conventions when entering data manually and how to monitor or enforce it. --cos1776 19:46, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Why remove Rev. from William Robinson diff? I don't see anything here that suggests elimination of titles is being considered, and besides Dr., it is hard to think of a less subjective, more standard title than Rev. --Jrich 15:31, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

I was actually trying to defer to your preferences. Frankly, from my past experiences with editing pages you are on, I thought you would object to there being no solid proof at the time that he was, in fact, an ordained minister. That type of thing along with the sorting issues as discussed on this page, lead me to no longer use the prefix field until sort is fixed. Cons outweigh the pros and anything that goes in there should be a sourced fact anyway. --cos1776 18:01, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

I do like to see things documented, but I also try not remove other people's stuff unless I can show it is wrong. (Any problem I have with titles is more related to the subjectivity, especially so with Jr. Sr. etc. being always relative to something non-universal; less so with Capt. Sgt. Col. Ensign (of which they may have had several during their lifetime but presumably the highest takes precedence?), strongly so for non-official titles like "founder of sometown".) The page did not seem particularly underdocumented. After all, it showed his graduation from Yale and the source cited referred to him as "Rev.", so about the only thing missing was the date he was ordained, which is given in his memoir (which I added) as 12 Jan 1780 and probably in Sprague's Annal of the Pulpit, so adding the documentation would seem to address that issue reasonably well, and since you added Reverend as an occupation, you do not seem to disagree with the fact of it, thus, your actions seemed to convey some dissatisfaction with the use of it as a title? --Jrich 18:48, 25 April 2017 (UTC)