Talk:Allen (surname)

Suggesting this whole page be deleted simply because the DAB MOS is badly written is a fairly poor joke. What is more, it is just wrong to say people are not referred to by their surname. Who can know that? -- Charles Matthews 15:34, 24 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Not a joke. No page links to Allen (surname).  No one is likely to enter "Allen" in the search box to find "Tim Allen".  Can you find a citation for any of the people here that does not list them by their full name? That's how you know. The only real content here is "Allen is a surname", which can be handled by Wiktionary.  List of people with the last name Allen (which is what this entry should be called) already covered by the List of people by name: All, which is why WP:MOSDAB reads the way it does. -- JHunterJ 15:43, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

First point: it is never a criticism of pages of disambiguation and the like that nothing links to them.

Second: you say that  No one is likely to enter "Allen" in the search box to find "Tim Allen". You can't possibly know all the ways that people search the site. Many come from a search engine page. The search engine can find 'Tim Allen' on the page. It is a common enough situation to know you want a 'T. Allen' (for example, scholarly and scientific references often given an initial), and then a list by surname is useful. A list with TOC by initial is more than good, it can save a huge amount of time.

Thirdly, the 'list of people by name' is not maintained. Its structure is not convenient for maintenance. And it inverts names, which would throw out searches by exact phrase in a search engine.

Fourthly. as I have just written on your User Talk, the WP:MOSDAB page is very general, and the case of surnames is very special (with well over 100000 such pages on enWP for living people alone). It is only a guideline, and says that clearly.

Your deletion suggestion has no merit at all, and shows clearly why policy wonks can do actual damage to the project. Charles Matthews 15:52, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I have sent this to the wikien list, since I think that the whole business that pages should be subject to manual pages written for quite other reasons is thoroughly misconceived.


 * I have been arguing for a while that the disambiguation by surname is a very special case. Now, a rash of users misapplying the WP:MOSDAB 'rules' (they are merely suggestions) are starting to delete and prod lists by surname.


 * I need hardly say that this kind of pedantry is completely negative for the navigation of enWP. Please can we urgently have some guidelines that apply so that what is going on at Allen (surname) and its Talk need not be repeated.

Charles Matthews 16:01, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

And what do you mean, 'no page links' here? Allen links here, as you'd expect. Would you care to correct your statement on AfD? Charles Matthews 17:49, 24 August 2006 (UTC)


 * It's been pointed out there already. Yes, I would expect Allen to link here, to disambiguate the surname from its other uses, not to find a list of people with that surname. -- JHunterJ 17:54, 24 August 2006 (UTC)