Category talk:Guantanamo detainees known to have been released

Naming Conventions
WikiProject Biography would like for every article in the project to have a DEFAULTSORT value on the article page and a listas value on the talk page. Many people have been and are working to make this so. (Last April there were almost 400,000 Category:Biography articles without listas parameter. Now there are fewer than 50,000.)  Many of the workers use a bot which cannot read a notation on a page but will apply a value to a page that lacks one.

As is noted in the first paragraph of Arabic naming conventions, "Because of the importance of the Arabic language in Islam, a large majority of the world's Muslims use Arabic names (ism), but it is not common outside the Arab world to employ the full naming conventions described below." [emphasis mine] It is necessary for a person who is very familiar with Arabic naming conventions to put the correct values on the pages of persons who use that convention in order to prevent a bot from concocting a value which will be wrong. As noted in the emphasized portion, non-Arabs who use Arabic names should have values that are in keeping with the naming conventions of their cultures. Pakistanis are not Arabs and have "family names" or "surnames". Afghanis are also not Arabs and I have been told that they have clan names. I have tended to make the analogy with other cultures with clan names and called the clan name the "family name".

Thank you for your cooperation in reducing the size of Category:Biography articles without listas parameter.

JimCubb (talk) 19:45, 3 September 2009 (UTC)