Talk:Lists of people

Keep This in Mind

When you're creating a "list of famous whatevers", keep this definition in mind.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary says [1] (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=famous):

FAMOUS, RENOWNED, CELEBRATED, NOTED, NOTORIOUS, DISTINGUISHED, EMINENT, ILLUSTRIOUS mean known far and wide. FAMOUS implies little more than the fact of being, sometimes briefly, widely and popularly known <a famous actress>. RENOWNED implies more glory and acclamation <one of the most renowned figures in sports history>. CELEBRATED implies notice and attention especially in print

!e most celebrated beauty of her day | . NOTED suggests well- deserved public attention <the noted mystery writer>. NOTORIOUS frequently adds to FAMOUS an implication of questionableness or evil <a notorious gangster>. DISTINGUISHED implies acknowledged excellence or superiority <a distinguished scientist who won the Nobel Prize>. EMINENT implies even greater prominence for outstanding quality or character !e country's most eminent writers | . ILLUSTRIOUS stresses enduring honor and glory attached to a deed or person <illustrious heroes>. (no signature provided)

I daresay the Be Good Tanyas GWO and DW have been contending over are widely and popularly known -- but probably not "noted" let alone "eminent" or "illustrious". --Ed Poor

'Von' as part of German names

Don't. The 'von' is definitely part of the last name. --Yooden

When adding people with German surnames beginning with von, put them under the letter for the main part of their name; i.e. Otto von Bismarck goes under B, not V. You probably should also write Bismarck, Otto von rather than von Bismarck, Otto. -- Simon J Kissane

and I don't know WHAT the information technologist position (they used to be librarians. *sigh*) is on VON and VAN and such. von Bismarck, Otto; Bismarck, Otto von; cross-references?

I included a few at Biographical Listing/V. Docu 20:08 Apr 13, 2003 (UTC)

To close the 'von'-issue: I have spoken to a bookseller and she said in bibliography it's 'Bismarck, Otto von' if the 'von' is in small caps, but 'Le Carré, John' otherwise. Note that this is bibliography, but it's good enough for me.

This rule for German "von" does not apply to the Dutch "van" or "van der" - the latter is not a mark of nobility. To complicate matters further, there are (Low?) German names like Ludwig VAN Beethoven. - clasqm

For Afrikaans names, one alphabetizes surnames with "De " under "D", "Van " under "V", etc., e.g.: "De Klerk, Frederik Willem" and "Van Rensburg, Anna" when listed by surname; but "Anna van Rensburg" and "Frederik Willem de Klerk" (note the small "v" and "d"), when written normally. - Jeandré, 2003-06-28t20:18z

In Dutch as written in the Netherlands a name as Jan van Kampen can also be written as Van Kampen, Jan. This is not the case in Dutch as written in Belgium (Flanders), where a capital V is written in both cases, unless it denotes nobility, in which case it is always written as van. To make matters more complicated, if both van and de (or den, or der) appear in the name, any combination of small and capital letters can exist (Van De, Van de, van De, van de), and they are always written as such. D.D. 20:26 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek is always refered to as just Leeuwenhoek rather than as van Leeuwenhoek, despite his being Dutch rather than German. I would guess this is only because his name is awkward enough without the van, but it should properly be van Leeuwenhoek. I put him under 'L' for now, though. - Tim

Importance of this type of page as metadata

This discussion whether the page with this biographical listing is at all needed just supports the importance of metadata system. With the metadata system this kind of pages would be generated automatically saving all the manual page creation process.
Just one word of metadata "biography" will make it work like a charm.
No more error-prone,mundane and incomplete listings.
Kpjas

Agreed. I'd love to see such a system put into place. -- Stephen Gilbert

Names to be by Given (first) name as well as Sur (family) name?

Regarding Jesus Christ: I think he should be alphabetized under 'J', just like Alexander the Great should be under the 'A', Scipio (often called Scipio Africanus) under 'S' and Richard Lionheart under 'R'. Although I must admit that there are some less clear-cut cases: Julius Caesar should probably be under J, but is often put under C (Julius is his family name), while Napoleon is often put under N although his family name was Bonaparte. -- Andre Engels

Is there any reason why Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ can't both be under both J and C? -- SGBailey 23:48 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Is this a 'meta page'

I think this page serves as a meta-page, like Wikipedia FAQ and Recent Changes: it's a page more about Wikipedia than an entry within it. Coupled with a page chronicling advances in society, it might eventually serve as an alternative category scheme. Just some thoughts. --KQ

Make More Informative?

The more I look at these growing lists, the more I begin considering that they should be made more informative. Would there be any support toward a basic format that goes

Name, (years), nationality, area of fame ?

We could strive to include these (appropriately wikified) wherever possible. A few other items may be optionally added in some circumstances such as an author's language when it's not clear from the nationality. Individual entries should very rarely exceed one line in length.

Famous people by country?

About starting a possible new page, I've seen (in the subject page Biographical Listing) that different possibilities are used. In this case the new page can be:

Given that it seems there is not a naming convention on this detail, I'm not sure about the best name. Does someone know? Thanks. -- Juan M. Gonzalez 23:33 Sep 7, 2002 (UTC)

Another page on this matter is List of reference tables, also known as List of lists. -- Juan M. Gonzalez 23:51 Sep 7, 2002 (UTC)

Well, I've started it at Famous Germans. Others may move it or add redirections, etc., if necessary. -- Juan M. Gonzalez 00:44 Sep 8, 2002 (UTC)

OK, they moved it to List of famous Germans. I guess this is the correct place. -- Juan M. Gonzalez 00:47 Sep 8, 2002 (UTC)

Juan, we can unify the title format as [[List of famous {the noun for people from a nation)]], all other possible formats become redirects only. Well I'm doing the redirection now. 01:01 Dec 6, 2002 UTC User:kt2

Fictional Characters?

Okay, people don't want fictional characters on this list. So where should a list of fictional characters go? Cartoon characters, television characters, video game characters. - Shoehorn 28 Oct 02

We can affirm clearly on the page that the lists are reserved for people in real life with redirects to lists like List of fictitious people where all lists of List of cartoon characters, List of television characters, List of game characters should go. Creating such lists of fictional characters is encouraging wikipedians to write more pages, which is exactly what wikipedia is looking for. My major concern is some wikipedians prefer not creating pages for those fictional characters. Some users think creating individual page for each character that ever appeared in the Simpsons series was redundant although pages for main characters were definitely needed. We shall leave the decision to each wikipedian when one considers creating a new page. 01:41 Dec 6, 2002 UTC User:kt2

Criteria for inclusion?

Foolishly started looking at the "listing of noted [religion]" pages without getting advice first. So, better late than never...

Questions:

Is there a relevant policy page in the wikipedia space that I haven't found?
Should lists of people be "listing" or "list"? (I vote "list")
Should links to people without wikipedia articles be included? (I vote no)
Should it be "noted", "influential", "famous", or what? (I dunno)
Should there be a parent category for these religious links? If so, what should it be called?

Criteria for inclusion:

Should self-describe as the relevant religion. If Fred Flintstone says he is not a discordian, he should not be on the list of discordians
Should be widely viewed as being of the given religion. If most people (discordians or otherwise) think Fred is really a devotee of the Church of the Sub-Genius who is only pretending to be discordian to generate slack, then Fred should not be on the list of discordians
The religious status should be mentioned and discussed on the relevant biography page. If Fred's discordianism is not important enough for it to be talked about on Fred Flintstone, then it's not important enough for him to be on the list of discordians
The biography page should back-link to the relevant list (for the same reasons)

I think the third category takes care of a lot of the discussion over whether someone should be included or not. For example, Tom Cruise is listed at the list of scientologists page, and this is appropriate because his status as a scientologist has led to protests outside his films, has put him into the papers a few times. Likewise John Travolta. By contrast, Tina Turner is on the listing of noted Buddhists, but her religious views aren't even mentioned on her biography, let alone discussed, so her Buddhism clearly can't be that noteworthy.

However, advice and suggestions welcome... -Martin

List only names?

I am of the opinion that anything that is not a name here should not be linked. For example

Karl Marx communist-marxist
Karl Marx communist-marxist

Vera Cruz

Merge People into Main Page?

In Talk:List of reference tables, I suggested to merge the "People" section from there into this main page. List of reference tables includes a detailed section of lists of people by profession and by religion, but lacks the lists by nationality. Shall we have all of them twice or include them just here? Docu 20:23 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Looks Great! MyRedDice just started with what I had in mind. For a List of people by profession, you might want to build on the structure from Reference tables. Docu 12:29 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

Heh, I think I'll have lots to do in converting all the nationality lists, adding/correcting the back-links, and fixing redirects. Maybe later. Personally, I think list of people by occupation is better because profession is sometimes used in an exclusive way. But then, do we want a list of garbage collectors? ;-) Martin

Maybe we do, could be pretty cool what type of obscure things they sometimes find ;-)

Possibly if the subsections would remain on the same page, their names would be less an issue. Docu 13:02 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

My preference is for short, heavily linked, category pages - I think this is the most efficient way to get people where they want to go. For example, having list of people by belief as a seperate article allows me to put a link to religions of the world there, where that link would probably not be appropriate here on list of people. But that may be a matter of taste - I'm happy to bend to any consensus that forms... Martin

I re-arranged the page a bit more. I suppose a list of people by occupation would be fine, possibly organised in a similar way as the different lists by nationality. I haven't started harmonising the names of the individual list (as Martin for lists by nationality), but tried to include the name of the different articles (lists) as is. Docu 23:04 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

Pacifists and Vegetarians?

I wonder if I should put pacifists and vegetarians under by belief - possibly in a seperate section. How obvious would that be? Martin

Good question, I thought about placing them in "by occupation", but it isn't really obvious either. I wouldn't mind leaving them here. Docu 11:34 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

List of unknown people?

Maybe there should be a list of people noone has ever heard of... Cyp 00:06 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps we could dynamically generate it? Go to an online directory service, and filter the list of people against all those who don't have wikipedia articles... ;-) Martin

Rename these pages?

I'd like to start moving the subpages of this article (Biographical Listing/A through Biographical Listing/Z), but am in a quandary about what to call them. In other instances, "starting with" works well (List of Biblical names starting with A, List of rare diseases starting with A, etc.) In keeping with the name of the real main article (List of people), presumably it should be List of people starting with A (which sounds funny, since people don't start with letters; but then again, neither do diseases. Most people will probably know what is meant). List of names starting with A sounds more like a simple list of first names, rather than significant individuals. There's always Biographical listing starting with A, but that's getting away from the convention of naming lists "List of..."

Anyhow, before I dive into it, I just wanted to get some suggestions from others. -- Wapcaplet 13:51 29 May 2003 (UTC)

Biographical Listing/B is approaching the 32k warning limit, and A C M S W are getting near. It needs to be broken up. I was *just* about to start in to Biographical Listing/BA and so on when I came across this. I'll wait until we have some more feed back. Frankly, I think Biographical Listing A would be fine. Amillar 14:35 29 May 2003 (UTC)

Adding Hidden Metadata

I'm currently using some scripts to add dates and descriptions to the Biographical Listing pages. The lack of real metadata here makes it sloppy. There is an obvious structure between the Biographical Listing pages, the List of whatever People pages, and the birth and death entries on the List of historical anniversaries and year pages. But it is all parsing of free-form lists, with many exceptions. I've abstracted it to

 *[[Page name|Lastname, Firstname]], (born-died), comment

for Biographical Listing pages and

 *[[Page name|Firstname Lastname]], (born-died), comment

for Listing Of pages.

Right now, I'm tracking 350 pages to collect this information. I'm adding dates and comments to existing entries, but I'm not resorting or adding new entries. My next task is to add new people to the Bio lists, but not until they're broken up because they are reaching the 32k size.

Thoughts or comments? Amillar 14:35 29 May 2003 (UTC)

Sounds like a difficult undertaking! I think your formatting sounds good. Obviously the birth/death date information isn't going to be available for some people. The comment seems to be predominantly a profession name, so that's likely to be possible for just about everyone. And you're right, these lists are getting long... undoubtedly they will only get longer as Wikipedia grows.

This may be way off, but perhaps we could consider developing some kind of special markup for pages about people (or other categories), and automatically generate lists such as this one? With the new articles that are constantly started, this list could be pretty high-maintenance. Maybe this has been suggested before, but something XML-ish like:

[Category="person" LastName="Cantor" FirstName="Georg" Birthdate="03/03/1845" ...]

And so on... stick these at the beginning of individual articles and they'd be added to the auto-generated list. Similar things could be implemented for countries, cities, states, or whatever else we see lists of. I dunno :) I have no concept of how the scripts and other code here work, so maybe this is not as easy as it sounds. Developers? Anyone know? -- Wapcaplet 17:52 29 May 2003 (UTC)

I personally agree that putting some metadata into a personal article is the best way to fix it. Note that the scripts I'm using/discussing are not part of the Wikipedia servers; they are just better ways to do manual edits of the same old Wiki pages.

Thoughts on Metadata: There are a number of name formats we need to handle. Firstname Lastname, or even Firstname Middlename Lastname are just the beginning. Here are a few pulled off one page:

Kaunda, Kenneth David, (1924-), Zambian president
Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir James, (1804-1877), English doctor and educationist
Keating, Tom (1917-1984), English forger of art
Keaton, "Buster", (1895-1966), US silent film comedian
Keiko, emperor of Japan, (unknown)
Kierkegaard, Søren, (1813-1855), Danish philosopher
King, Lady Augusta Ada Byron, (1815-1852), English writer, claimed as the first computer programmer

Only one matches Lastname, Firstname. Also, Lovelace, Ada Byron is also listed on the "L" page, like many others with multiple variant entries. van Leeuwenhoek, Anton and Leeuwenhoek, Anton van. Then there is Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, and Pope Pius III.

I'm thinking something like this at the bottom of the article, either hidden (not sure how) or after a line separator:

Category: Biographical Listing

SortName: Byron, Ada

SortName: Lovelace, Ada Byron

Summary: British author, first computer programmer

Birth: December 10, 1815

Death: November 27, 1852

which the average wikipedia user can edit. Plus it would be easy to collect with "what links here" from Biographical Listing. -- Amillar 19:31 29 May 2003 (UTC)

I like this. Hidden (somehow - in an HTML comment, maybe, but then I don't know if "What links here" would work) would be okay, unless we can determine a format that looks presentable as part of the actual article that could be automatically parsed. The latter might be quite easy, if we determine a convention to follow. There would probably need to be some kind of delimiter around the metadata as a whole, to indicate its presence to whatever automated script looks at it. Extending your example:

Category: Biographical Listing

SortName: Byron, Ada

SortName: Lovelace, Ada Byron

Summary: British author, first computer programmer

Birth: December 10, 1815

Death: November 27, 1852

I suppose it may be necessary to define different kinds of metadata, if we expect this to be useful in a wider variety of articles. Perhaps the category would be enough to distinguish one kind of metadata from another, though. Anyhow, stick a line separator in there and the metadata itself forms a nice footnote of sorts. I imagine a similar technique could be used to give an article context within a larger scheme, much as the "See also" and "External Links" do now, or "Preceded by" and "Succeeded by" do in articles on monarchs and the like. That's probably getting ahead of ourselves, though. -- Wapcaplet 23:02 29 May 2003 (UTC)

I was just about to ask about all this on the Pump, good to see I'm not the only one. One thought is that one could have multiple categories, so for instance List of programmers, List of authors, List of British etc could be auto-updated as well. For people whose dates are uncertain, allow 650s BC and the like, and alternatively the floruit when we only have a single mid-life date (unfortunately common for the ancients). Is anybody else thinking hard about metadata support? Manual maint is breaking down under the press of articles. Stan 21:35 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Just experimented in the sandbox, links inside HTML comments are not seen in the "what links here" output, which might or might not be good, depending. (It would be good if you wanted the box's contents to be redundant with article proper - having a birthdate in the metadata doesn't relieve editors from having to supply in text somewhere). Stan 21:46 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I was afraid of that. Good idea about multiple categories, too. Really, the categorization thing could be extended to just about anything that can be categorized - people, places, things - anything we might conceivably want to have a list of. I'm not sure whether including links to each of those categories would be very encyclopedic, since a single person might (conceivably) be in lots of different categories. I think I'll post a note to the Village Pump about this; we could use some other ideas. Meanwhile, maybe we should find a better place to discuss this... -- Wapcaplet 00:19 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Improving the Alphabetical Index

Excellent improvement of the alphabetical index!

Possibly one of the following suggestions on sourceforge.net may make it one possible to create the lists automatically, but obviously they may not happen soon or at all:

[2] (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=629323&group_id=34373&atid=411195) Simple article categorisation system
[3] (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=678429&group_id=34373&atid=411195) Implement cataloguing same way as links to other langugages
[4] (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=713184&group_id=34373&atid=411195) Automatic reverse linking

For the sample above, I prefer the format I used on List of Swiss people (#1), rather than (#2):

Kaunda, Kenneth David (1924-), Zambian president
Kaunda, Kenneth David, (April 28, 1924 -), Zambian president

To remove the subpages, I'd convert Biographical Listing/A to

BTW: Biographical Listing/B being a list, the 32k limit is less important, see: Wikipedia:Page size and Wikipedia talk:Page size

User:Docu

Except that the pages are about to grow a good bit bigger as I add more people. -- Amillar 13:47 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Actually I don't like much meta-data because the trouble is introducing meta-data means we go to maintain duplicate data, which is a common problem in software enginering. That is, we have to put two birth and death date into hidden meta-data part and actually text.

Besides, I don't think it is a good idea to put information about category to each article. For example, you might want to break up List of Japanese cartoonists into List of Japanese female cartoonists and List male cartoonists. It is tedious to change the meta-data of every article. You can use a script? But no everyone can use a script while everyone can edit/categorize articles now.

I believe in wiki way, whose one part is that wiki is not programmatic. Some works are tedious but I think the endurence of text is more important than that. -- Taku 03:55 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)~

Well, wouldn't it be better to maintain information (like birthdates, etc.) in two places within the same article, rather than in any number of lists that the article might be linked from? For example, Galileo Galilei is listed, along with his birthdate, on:

All of which (presumably) must be separately maintained. Since his birthdate data is not localized in a central place, care must be taken to ensure that all of these agree with each other. Meta data would (ostensibly) eliminate such problems, since many of the list-style articles could be auto-generated by pulling meta data out of each article.

As for your example about a list of Japanese cartoonists - breaking up the list into male and female wouldn't necessarily entail the creation of a new category, it would just mean that additional meta data would be used to generate a narrower list. For example:

Category: [[Japanese]], [[cartoonist]], [[male]]

Then this info could be used to generate several lists: List of Japanese, List of cartoonists, List of male cartoonists, List of Japanese males, List of Japanese male cartoonists, etc. -- Wapcaplet 12:17 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Actually I changed my mind. I think meta-data can be a great help for us to maintain tedious jobs. Besides benefits told above, we can use that for many other purpose. For example, the title of an article is often disputed and because of technical reasons, sometimes ugly. Take iMac, C Plus Plus. It should be nice if they are displayed with a title iMac and C++. There is also interlanguage problems. Use of meta-data might help that too.

I have some idea about the specification of meta-data but I am not sure I should go to there already. Introducing meta-info into virtually any article is a fundamental change. -- Taku 01:52 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

You make a good point about article titles. Although it happens rarely, sometimes the best title for an article just isn't allowed by the software. Yes, meta data could be nice for that! There are probably a lot of other good applications too, but it might be best to start easy and expand later.

I don't think the addition of meta data has to be a fundamental change, really. The link:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=629323&group_id=34373&atid=411195

provided by Docu earlier seems to be a really nice suggestion - putting articles in categories using markup similar to what we use now for inter-language links. It may be a little more tricky to incorporate additional info (such as birthdates and the like), but getting a good categorization system started may be relatively simple. I'll read up on the comments at sourceforge and see if I can get in contact with some of the developers to see how hard it'd be to implement this. -- Wapcaplet 02:34 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Days and Months in addition to Years?

Koyaanis Qatsi has tried an experiment at List of people by name: V, namely to add days/months, plus links to years. I'm curious as to what people think; to me it seems very cluttered with data that I don't really want to know when I'm scanning for Vale-whatshisname that was a Victorian-era painter. Years and notability seem like the right compromise between a bald list of names and lengthy replicated minibios. Stan 18:26 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

In my personal opinion, it is not helpful. I also feel that it is extra clutter that does not enhance the ability to find people. I think the lists should be used for assising readers in finding articles about people. The lists should not be articles themselves. The days/months information is very useful to track for people, but the lists should not be the repository of that information. I'm sticking with the opinion that metadata within a person article (in addition to appropriate sentences in the article body) is the proper place to put that information. -- Amillar 19:16 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I agree; it's a noble effort, but it is information overload. Simply having the additional links is an increase in clutter-factor (since now it's harder to spot what blue stuff is important). I much prefer the [[Name]]/years/comment format, also. -- Wapcaplet 19:24 8 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Japanese Names?

I am confused by listing-manner of Japanese people.
I hope it should be standardized ,but Kurosawa Akira("Kurosawa" is last name & "Akira" is first name) is in K and Miyazaki Hayao("Miyazaki" is last name & "hayao" is first name) is in H now... -- Lupinoid

Names beginning with accented letters?

What do we do about people whose names start with accented letters? Just drop the accent and put them under the non accented version? -- SGBailey 23:48 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Way of denoting timelines?

Is there a standard for denoting timelines for living persons ? For e.g., List of people by name: Ha says "Hawking, Stephen, (born 1942)" and List of English people says "Stephen Hawking, (1942-)". I thought the practice of using a trailing hyphen was frowned upon, and was to be replaced with (born 1942) or (b. 1942) Jay 13:56, Sep 20, 2003 (UTC)

Personally I'd use (born 1942) as Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) suggests for biographies, but if you add a series of people based on a list with DOB and DOD, it might be easier to add them as (1942- ). -- User:Docu

Certain lists may be offensive

Lists of people by name, nationality, profession, etc OK. Physical disabilities, sexual options, race and etc is sick. Ok, i admit i'm being NPOV and that there are people wnating to catalogue every other people. So i propose here, like i did in VfD, to create a WIKILISTS, to contain all these trivia-related lists and topics - A wonderful place for people to prepare for QuizShows... These things could be removed to there. Cheers, Muriel Gottrop 09:46, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Regarding replacing nonexistent links in the master index

This is in response to a message from user:Jerzy to my user page user talk:rfc1394. (I don't know what the command sequence is to put a username and timestamp on a page yet.) I had placed this on that page thinking it was the page that send Mail notification but discovered it isn't. I also realize I think this should be at user talk:Jerzy so it will notify you of my response, so I'll put it there so you'll get mail.

This is about my editing the master page that has all 700+ two letter combinations to try to eliminate some of the nonexistent links.

In adding the extra letters, it was my thought that either the original block table should be fully populated, or if it was not, that the pages it links to be properly indexed even if no entries were present. Seeing 'red' on the missing items (pun intentional) items made me consider that this was inadequate. Either a block of entries should be connected together - the way the letter X is - or they should be empty but properly cross-indexed.

If there are no entries for a particular page, the answer is to cross-link to one of the other letters before it that does exist, have it add the empty letters, and link back to that page so that there are no nonexistent links.

Once a two-letter gets 'big enough' to have some entries, then it can be split off into either its own page or its own plus whatever follows it. The question on how big is 'big enough' is arbitrary, but I'd say if an entry has at least 1/2 a page, say ten items or more (unless the items before it have less than ten each) then it's probably time to split it. Also if the page gets above 20 entries then definitely split it (subject to the provision that there be some entries in the letters before it.)

Paul - Rfc1394 - Wed, Dec 17, 2003 13:07 EST / 18:07 UTC(GMT) Update 13:12 EST

This page is supposed not to contain fictional characters. Aren't Biblical characters fictional ? On a side note are Biblical characters mythological and are mythological characters fictional ? Jay 19:02, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Suggestions for new lists

As series of suggestions for new lists of people, removed from the list:

As lists of lists should generally not include non-existant lists ( see Lists of lists ). The number of lists added and the fact that they may already be available under other another names, make me think that they wont be created soon, but listing them here makes it easy to check and add them back once they are available. -- User:Docu

King Arthur

The introduction says he isn't listed but he is in List of people by name: Ar! --Grouse 22:14, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

These lists may not be worth it

I'm not sure that these "lists of people" are appropriate or worth any time to manage. Reasons:

1)People become famous all the time. The creator of Buffy the Vampire slayer was under notable atheists for christ sake! So how do we keep up with it, and how do we screen who goes in?

2)The lists are pure opinion. On:

    a)Who is famous
    b)What category they fit under
    c)What the categories are
    d)What the categories should be
    e)What is the best form of organization
    f)If the person deserves to be added to a given category.

3)These lists are in no way like a real encylcopedia. For lists like these there are whole seperate encycolpedias and even there are specialized. Examples are: Great American Authors, and Notable Leaders of the 20th Century. (These are about 10-12 volumes each!) Ask to create a People Wiki if you want, that might be an idea.

4)It takes up a lot of room. I don't want to to hear "its just text" I'm sure that the list are already several MB, and I can imagine them growing to Gigs upon Gigs of space! I mean, these are "free" servers after all!

5)Too much overlapping of categories. Quite frankly it is gonna be a mess real soon.

6)If these people are that important they should have their own page!

So basically I believe these pages should be meta, its own wiki, or deleted. Its time consuming, resource costly, and not appropriate.

--Windfinder 14:21, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I've never understood why some Wikipedians are so keen to kill all the indexes. These are such a useful way of finding articles. I for one, use them all the time. Ambivalenthysteria 23:56, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I too find these lists very useful and informative. Pitchka 17:18, Oct 14, 2004 (UTC)

List of famous Wikipedians

Personally, I'd be interested in a list of active Wikipedians who are famous or well known in the real world. Perhaps the inclusion criterion should be Wikipedians who have a biography article started by someone else? Seabhcan 16:43, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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