Tidying England categories - is it possible?

Question

Specifically I want to mention the England Surnames and England Name Studies, which feed down into the counties. Do we need both? Do they serve separate purposes?

Another question is the duplication of e.g. Camden, London and Camden, Middlesex. Both are valid categories and, even of we reduced them to one only, they would continue to recur.

In general many categories are created by people who have not looked to at the advice or to see what already exists. There are hundreds if not thousands of profiles that could be better allocated, but for anyone to undertake this task would take years.

Any positive suggestions on tidying and making managers aware of the issues would be welcome. Given that the purpose of categories is to group profiles, there seems little point in having ones that only contain one profile and may never acquire others.

Comments

I can see the point of Hampshire Corneys, Derbyshire Pitmans etc, grouped under the relevant ONS, but in England I doubt if it serves any purposeto group them under Hampshire Surnames etc as well.  It might work better in small American counties.

English Pedigrees is the beginning of something much bigger.  It's a good idea but it needs more layers.

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I agree, but why Surnames and Name Studies?

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I agree.  Surely the Name Studies ought to come under the One Name Studies Project.

Where do I find the England Surnames, please?

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Exactly.

In England. :-)

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Hello Martin! A One Name Study is for any descendant who has either taken the yDNA test or who would like to collect and share information that would be helpful in further exploring our One Name heritage.  It is a valuable reference point for people studying lines that cross or intersect and may have originated from the same name.  There are a lot of other things that the One Name Study helps you learn about the particular surname you are wanting to learn about.  Please contact the project leader, Alison Andrus-373 if you have any questions or would like to get involved.

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Well, duh! Why didn't I think to look there? *scratches head at stupidity*

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Hi Barbara,

No I'm not interested personally, but could someone take a look at the categories called Name Studies and see where they ought to fit?

My interest is trying to tidy up England so that it has a logical structure.

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Hi Ros,

My smiley was trying to say that politely.

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And I realised that, that's why I added a joke after mine.  It is so difficult getting emotions across in emails/posts, isn't it?

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Name Studies group by name, so you might have Hampshire Joneses, Devon Joneses, Kent Joneses all under Jones Name Study.

Note the idea is to put the profiles in the lowest-level boxes, not directly into the top category.

You have to break them up, because the Previous/Next system won't work right when you have 200+ profiles with the same LNAB.

Surnames sort the same subcontainers geographically, so Kent Surnames would contain Kent Smiths, Kent Browns, Kent Joneses etc.

Having said that, higher-level non-profile-containing categories aren't that big a deal.

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But surely Hampshire Joneses, Devon Joneses, and Kent Joneses could be sub-projects of the Jones Name Study, rather than categories of their own in English Name Studies.

I understand about England Surnames being sorted geographically; it's really just another way of looking at the Hampshire Joneses, Devon Joneses, and Kent Joneses.  So perhaps we could keep that category, but merge the other two (England Name Studies and One Name Studies).  Is this do-able?  Can One Name Studies have sub-projects (or sub-groups, or sub-whatever-they're calleds')?

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"You have to break them up, because the Previous/Next system won't work right when you have 200+ profiles with the same LNAB."

 

I have four One Name Studies, so naturally most of the profiles contained therein have the same LNAB.  And the Previous/Next system works just fine.

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Yes, they should be subsets of the Jones Name Studies.

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Maybe I'm being thick, but I still can't see the need for [England Surnames] where it says "This a Geographic Sub Category for Profiles grouped by Surname (Normally for One Name Studies) " as well as [Englland Name Studies].

Sill, if that's what people want.

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While I'm at it, I can't see the need for a category for the illegitimate children of Henry VIII with two profiles. Why not Illegitimate children of Charles II? Or any other monarch? What purpose do they serve?

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I believe these categories cover the same thing - though "England Surnames" might be used by people who are not doing a one name study.    I bet these will be the minority or these categories were created before the One Name Studies Project created guidance on categorisation for these projects.

We have the same challenge in the Irish Roots Project - to me these are duplicate categories and personally, I would encourage people to use categories linked to the One Name Studies projects to drive consistency.

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Absolutely.

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Looking at Category:Surnames, it's not under a Project, but that's probably because it goes back to 2009 before Projects existed.

But it was a kind of Project - there's a collection of space pages with names like Xyz Family History, done in 2009 by a handful of people including Chris, and mostly not touched since then.

But the subcategory hierarchy has been used for other purposes, including one-name studies before the similar rival Name Studies hierarchy.

 

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Certainly Martin, I believe you can tidy England categories, but it needs an approach established, adopted by all and applied uniformly. What we have now is to say the least, "random".
For England, and indeed Wales, Scotland & Nothern Ireland, I believe you  create the main categories of Counties that formed the early local government and usually the source of historical genealogy records. Towns/Parish's within these Counties form sub-categories. Plus incidentals. Whilst Wikitree is a "family history" site, we should of course recognise the modern places. By relating these modern places to the historical base, you creat the source reference, and both its historical and modern geography. In future years when local government changes occur, which no doubt they will, this principle ensures a continuity to both geography and history.
Take your reference to Camden, London (The modern) & Camden, Middlesex (The older). Both exist, and both should be sub categories of Middlesex. Neither categorised as Greater London. Indeed Greater London should be explained whilst emphasied that it's not a  sub-category of England.
I am not saying it will be easy to tidy England but with a team of volunteers, I believe it can be done. Some England Counties have sponsors, and if we all work on the same premise, this is a basis of achieving the objective.
Frankly England Surnames & England Names Studies are two unnecessary categories, which we are now stuck with but need to be managed the best we can. Probably make them sub categories of England.
I have added the foregoing as both a comment & answer.

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Martin, re Category: Illegitimate children of Henry VIII of England.  I've moved it to Misnamed Categories because Category Names General Rules says "If a category could only contain a few people do not create it."

 

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Great. That is an improvement.

Answer 1

WikiTree wizard Aleš asked me to define some rules for errors of missing categories so maybe we get Errors defined in Sweden when a location Category is missing.....

Example of rule is 

If Västmanland in the location field (born/dead) then we should have a category that ends on (U) ==> one of the Swedish Parish categories

Status is that the list is defined with counties and the matching (?) but no errors are generated... The future will tell if this is a good approach or not

 

Answer 2

Yes, I believe you can tidy England categories, but it needs an approach established, adopted by all and applied uniformly. What we have now is to say the least, "random".
For England, and indeed Wales, Scotland & Nothern Ireland, I believe you  create the main categories of Counties that formed the early local government and usually the source of historical genealogy records. Towns/Parish's within these Counties form sub-categories. Plus incidentals. Whilst Wikitree is a "family history" site, we should of course recognise the modern places. By relating these modern places to the historical base, you creat the source reference, and both its historical and modern geography. In future years when local government changes occur, which no doubt they will, this principle ensures a continuity to both geography and history.
Take your reference to Camden, London (The modern) & Camden, Middlesex (The older). Both exist, and both should be sub categories of Middlesex. Neither categorised as Greater London. Indeed Greater London should be explained whilst emphasied that it's not a  sub-category of England.
I am not saying it will be easy to tidy England but with a team of volunteers, I believe it can be done. Some England Counties have sponsors, and if we all work on the same premise, this is a basis of achieving the objective.
Frankly England Surnames & England Names Studies are two unnecessary categories, which we are now stuck with but need to be managed the best we can. Probably make them sub categories of England.

Comments

OK if you really want a standard determine what it is post it on the top category of each county.   AND/OR create ALL the city/village/hamlet  pages to fill in all the county. That way no one has to create a page on there own.  (I am guilyt of this) I go to Wikipedia and try to follow the Village, hamlet, region, county, country, management district, historical district, etc whatever!!!!!!    When I find an ancestor from 1500 and they lived in "so and so" I just want to be able to categorize all the family members there.

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England Surnames and England, Name Studies exist as part of managing the parent.  IE if you had hundreds or thousands of name studies to be listed under England, they'd swamp the top-level category if they weren't hived off into a subcategory.

Also, within England, Name Studies, you can organise "member categories" under first letter of surname, instead of lumping them all under E for England or N for Name, which doesn't scale very well to those future hundreds or thousands.

The same principle would apply to Yorkshire Name Studies if it were thought that a lot of name studies should be listed under Yorkshire.  But that's what I'm doubtful about.

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@ Linda

Thanks for that. I agree that it is the basic problem, But the idea is surely to group many more than one family. It is two-fold - getting a basic structure and getting people to use it.

Answer 3

Please see this G2G thread for the Category Structure for One Name Studies agreed between the Leaders of the One Name Studies and Categorization Projects.

Comments

Thanks for that, Maryann.

I can see that [England, Name Studies] fits into that with appropriate links. The problem is England and County Surnames, which seem superfluous.

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The thread mentioned above is only about the internal structure of the name study itself, ie the categories that end with "...Brown Name Study".

Actually every surname is different and every study is different and there's no need for the police to get involved.

They could just say that the people working on Brown Name Study can create any category that starts with "Brown Name Study...".

Same principle as personal categories - [[Category: MyWikiTree-ID plus anything]].

The trouble starts with the collections - the "... Name Studies" categories.  These aren't mentioned in the thread except for the reference to the FAQ.

The "By Location" chart in the FAQ is also on the ONS Project page and was lifted from the Flaugher Name Study page, but it's not right - "United States, Flaugher Name Study" and "Franklin County, Pennsylvania" are both missing.  It should be more of a lattice than a chain

> [[Category:United States of America]]
> > [[Category:United States, Name Studies]]
> > > [[Category:United States, Flaugher Name Study]]
> > [[Category:Pennsylvania]]
> > > [[Category:Pennsylvania, Name Studies]]
> > > > [[Category:Pennsylvania, Flaugher Name Study]]
> > > [[Category: Franklin County, Pennsylvania]]
> > > > [[Category: Franklin County, Pennsylvania, Name Studies]]
> > > > > [[Category: Franklin County, Pennsylvania, Flaugher Name Study]]

with another implied chain

> > [[Category:United States, Name Studies]]
> > > [[Category:Pennsylvania, Name Studies]]
> > > > [[Category: Franklin County, Pennsylvania, Name Studies]]

Personally, I think there's a case for a general indexing-by-surname facility, which could use the Surnames categories.  The Name Studies categories seem superfluous as the Surnames categories do the same job the same way.

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Incidentally, since Sweden is mentioned on the other thread, I see the Swedes have a different system.  None of the members of "Sweden, Name Studies" is called "Sweden, X Name Study".

I think they're taking the view that a study of a Swedish name will be primarily Swedish, not just a minor adjunct of a US study.

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But that's just the problem. It isn't just a Swedish study, but neither is it a US study. A name study is a world study surely.

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We could be missing a level here.  What I'd expect in Surnames is a lot of categories like "Surname Bradford" or "Bradford Surname", but there aren't many.

The blurb says "family histories", but I'd look for those under "Family Histories".

"Surname" categories would just be collection-points.  They'd be especially useful for collecting up variant spellings.

Name Study categories do that, but (a) not everybody wants to do an ONS, and (b) they aren't Open enough, they tend to be seen as personal projects.

Answer 4

It would seem to me that England -- http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:England -- is a higher level category that you would not want profiles to be directly attached to.  You presently have 194 profiles attached to it, all of whom then need a more appropriate category.  Some may already have a more appropriate category and just need England deleted, but I suspect many do not.  

I would suggest looking at the profiles as a first step in thinking about whether re-organizing is needed, because these are real "live" examples of unmet needs.   Yes, some people were maybe just too lazy to find the right profile, but perhaps others couldn't.

Comments

Grandmothers and sucking eggs spring to mind :-)

I believe this is already under way as is disposing of the London, England category into more appropriate ones. The problem is that many profiles cannot be edited, so it is a question of asking the managers nicely. In most cases where I have done this I have had success, but one or two have not replied.

But it's a long job. Any volunteers?

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Martin, categorizing does need top down attention, but it's always helpful to take a "bottom up" look, too which is why I suggested looking at the mis-categorized Englanders in the England category.

I have a couple of English ancestors in Shrewsbury whom I've never categorized.  One is http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hosier-42 who married a Waring, and about 4 generations later her Waring descendant in Maryland was associated with a Hosier there.  So my questions to see what the England Categorization project would mean in practice would be -- how should I categorize my Hosier ancestress, and how would the One Name studies possibly help me see if there's a connection between the Hosier in Shrewsbury and the Hosier, 4 generations later, in Maryland?

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Sorry, Jack, your link doesn't work. I presume you meant -42.

Geographically, I would certainly put her in Hanwood, Shropshire rather than just England.

I'm nothing to do with the One Name Studies. so I can't answer that question. I was just questioning the place of surnames within the England category.

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I've never quite seen the point of adding person-profiles to geographical categories.

Any placename in a bio can be made a link, Wikipedia-style.  Category membership isn't needed just to link information.

But if the link goes to a category page, I'd like the members to be other useful information pages.  As it is, any useful pages added to a place category will tend to get lost in a list of names.

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RJ, what a radical thought.  In my mind, and from what I've read, the categories are ONLY about individual profiles -- grouping them together and then giving them context.  What would the point of a category be if there is nothing to categorize?

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Putting useful links on category pages is one of my main aims. See one I created yesterday here. The photos are my own.

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Good question.  Writing a book, you have to work out what goes in each chapter and the order of the chapters.  But with a computer, you can only index the pages.

There's no point in working out what order you'd put the pages in if you had to, because you can't.

It's like, you can have any number of indexes at the back of the book, but the Table of Contents at the front, in page-number order, doesn't exist.

And if I'm looking for a person, I'm usually going to start with the name.

In principle, a book could have a name index sorted by place, so if I'm looking for Harry Croxton of Bumpton Bishop, I go to B and scan the people under the place.

But I've never seen that in a book.

Good websites have Browse as well as Search, and categories are WikiTree's Browse.  But I don't think they're often used that way, at least, not to find people.

Answer 5

Could I just thank all those who have contributed here, before it gets too long :-)

My real concern was with England (or perhaps the UK) as a category. Hence the top-down comment. Until people can see a logical structure we will still get too many confused categories. I am hoping to get a small group together to work on this. It will take time, but if we make progress I'm sure we will keep G2G up-to-date.

Thanks again.

Comments

Two thoughts about the top level England category

- it's a pain picking out the counties, even if you know which they are, which of course many potential users don't.  They could be put in a subcategory.

- all the England and English members could have sort keys, so eg England Cemeteries sorts as Cemeteries under C, instead of them all being lumped under E.

As a minor experiment, I've put County Durham under D and Greater Manchester under M, which is where you'd look in a normal book index.

"English knights" duplicates "Knights bachelor"

Actually the whole England / GB / UK thing is a mess.  To look up any topic you first have to figure out how it's been allocated and subdivided.

Categories are basically an indexing system, but an index is no use if you need to know the stuff you're trying to find out.  Pedantic classification of information is beside the point in an index.

I could see a case for showing all general topics under a top-level British Isles, and using the countries for subdivisions within topics as appropriate in each case.

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Thanks for those thoughts, RJ. They could be useful.

Answer 6

To be perfectly frank, since there up to 1.5 million English surnames (some now extinct or short lived), there seems little point in trying to get them all into one study. There are name studies for that purpose.

As for sub categories for Camden or anywhere else, they will be covered by the appropriate name study with its own sub category of, say Camden, London or Middlesex. The problem with trying to fit names into a category such as Camden, Middlesex or London, is that parish and county boundaries change over time, some counties disappearing completely (eg Huntingdonshire, Cumberland, Westmorland and others). It is far better to have individual name studies broken down into sub categories like Cumberland, Westmorland and the new county Cumbria which encompasses both as well as parts of Lancashire (depending which applied when an individual was born, married or died). Trying to stuff 1.5 million names into an England name study, broken down into county sub categories seems to me to be a futile, redundant exercise; and an unnecessary diversion from what we should be concentrating on - name studies (fully sourced of course).

I'm pretty sure that WikiTree wasn't created so we can wander off on pointless exercises when we could be spending our effort on creating properly sourced profiles and meaningful name studies..