Template talk:R from surname

Category Surnames
I will momentarily add Category:Surnames to this template so that this category is expanded by the surname set represented by use of this redirect template. If you have objections and would like to discuss this change, please revert my change and initiate a discussion here. Regards. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 13:02, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
 * This change has been undone after discussion with User:Brewcrewer who is working hard on sub-categorizing surnames. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 00:16, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Using the template to assist sub-categorization
One could add a parameter to the template like "ori" or "lang" (for "origin" and "language" respectively) that would auto-sub-categorize surnames to particular categories.

Present form: => Category:Surnames Future form: => Category:African surnames

The best way to implement might be to allow any value for the "ori" parameter and include available term-category mappings in the documentation. If a term is used for the parameter that is not recognized, the categorization would default to Category:Surnames; but if a new category were created with a new term-category mapping that is used as a parameter value, the category would autopopulate. For instance, if "ori=Burmese" does not have a corresponding Category:Burmese surnames, a tagged surname would end up in Category:Surnames, but when Category:Burmese surnames is created, it would autopopulate with the so-tagged surnames.

I'm only a brown-belt at template-smithing, so if this is a direction that would be desirable to go, I'll need some time to learn some of the subtler syntax of templates.

--User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 22:45, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Issue regarding subcategory class labels
I'm not sure how labels like "Japanese surname", "African surname" and "Czech surname" would be equally well handled by a common parameter. For instance, using "national origin" would not be good for African or Czech (the first is a continent, the second a former nation, Czechoslovakia). One could go with "geographical origin" - that might work across the board. "Ethnic origin" would be problematic - that would work for Japanese, but not for African (tremendous variety of ethnicities) and maybe not for Czech (not familiar enough with European ethnography to say). --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 22:45, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Editprotected request
Wish to add the following text:

Category:Surnames
Folks have been adding the surname template after this template, or adding the category directly. Please restore the former use of this category, so that redirects will be found by folks looking in the allincluded Surnames category for similar names.

After existing category:

--William Allen Simpson (talk) 15:26, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, there was no opposition to this suggestion so I have implemented it as requested. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:22, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * But there are often already articles on the surnames themselves or disambiguation pages for people with the surname. I don't think Category:Surnames should be added to the redirects.  McLerristarr /  Mclay1  15:57, 28 August 2010 (UTC)


 * I think all that's necessary to do is to just add Category:Redirects from surnames as a subcategory of Category:Surnames. -- &oelig; &trade; 15:28, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Redirects
Two points:
 * All that are needed are one or two shortcuts unless more existing shortcuts are found. The procedure is, if one wants to include new shortcuts, they should first be created and only then they are added to the documentation page.  Otherwise, they will show as  and may confuse other contributors.
 * There are good reasons to show all existing redirects in the Redirects section. They are then available for use by anyone who may want to use them.  Also, if an administrator does not want so many redirects and wants to delete some of them, they have a list to use for that work. –   Paine Ellsworth   C LIMAX ! 19:29, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Category:Surnames override
This template adds pages it's used on to Category:Surnames, could we add a parameter or second template to override that. That category may be a good thing in the vast majority of cases (I have no opinion), but there are exceptions. For example this category is on both Obama (a redirect) and Obama (surname) (a page about the surname), and it should probably only be on the surname page. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 04:55, 24 October 2013 (UTC)


 * – read below –  Paine Ellsworth  C LIMAX ! 02:24, 13 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Can you undo this? Category:Redirects from surnames is a hidden category. Excluding thousands of redirects from Category:Surnames because of a single instance of doubling up is not something I agree with. &mdash;Xezbeth (talk) 12:57, 13 May 2014 (UTC)


 * The reason this was done was because is a subcat of .  I will happily self-revert if you can justify why thousands of entries in a subcat should also populate (over populate?) the parent cat at the very same time they populate its subcat.  What's the sense of that?  Why do you feel that thousands of redirects must populate both a subcat and its parent cat? –  Paine Ellsworth  C LIMAX ! 16:37, 13 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Because Category:Redirects from surnames is a hidden administration category. Per the description "Do not include this category in content categories", it shouldn't be in Category:Surnames, which is part of the encyclopedia. Suppressing Category:Surnames on a redirect like Obama makes sense, but removing it on every single surname redirect just because of that is overkill. In addition, while I'm not sure if it's the done thing elsewhere, Category:Surnames currently has a template that says "For convenience, all surnames are included in this category. This includes all surnames that can also be found in the subcategories." I've been using it for my own convenience since 2012, and having to monitor a separate category for redirects is going to be annoying. &mdash;Xezbeth (talk) 18:34, 13 May 2014 (UTC)


 * You have made a good case for a revert. If there were a way to suppress it on redirects as you described above, would that be useful to you?  Would you use it?  –  Paine Ellsworth  C LIMAX ! 00:34, 14 May 2014 (UTC)


 * The suppression has been added by using "nocat" in the 1st parameter as in:
 * The same has been done for R from given name, as well. –  Paine 
 * The same has been done for R from given name, as well. –  Paine 


 * Thank you, and I'll definitely use nocat in future, mainly when there's a primary topic for a surname in addition to a separate surname article. &mdash;Xezbeth (talk) 05:33, 14 May 2014 (UTC)


 * YW! and check out the redirect, which shows the workings of the nocat param. –  Paine Ellsworth  C LIMAX ! 13:47, 14 May 2014 (UTC)


 * There are still something like 36k pages listed in this Cat. I'm not clear whether that's
 * bcz not enuf editors, to keep up with the misuses of the template, give a damn, or
 * bcz the instances that are left are all appropriate. Could we have the status clarified,
 * so we know whether it might be worth investing the energy of working out a kluge that could be a long-term solution? --Jerzy•t 05:01, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Is there any specific reason why you think this is a problem that needs a solution? I'll go ahead and ping Emmette Hernandez Coleman and Xezbeth to see if they would like to comment, since they know much more about the surnames category than I do.   Paine   u/ c  13:19, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
 * There's only 15,000 redirects in the category. There are hardly any primary topic surname redirects that also have a corresponding surname article, so as far as I'm concerned there isn't a problem that needs solving. &mdash;Xezbeth (talk) 13:58, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Nope, that was the full dump: I inferred from the existence of the template that pages carrying it are problematic in some way (which i am otherwise quite happy to remain unaware of), that could be alleviated by having the template draw someone's attention to them. Perhaps the template should be enhanced to say something like "As of September 2016, the remaining pages bearing it have been deemed sufficiently low in harm that diversion of resources to eliminating the condition (the one the templates are triggered by) would currently be more harmful than ignoring the currently known instances." Or something simpler, written by someone who knows why creation of the template was desirable. --Jerzy•t 03:32, 14 September 2016 (UTC)
 * You seem to be assuming that all of these rcats and their tracking categories are here to capture bad/problematic redirects, and in some cases this is true. Rcats that capture CNRs and those many mainspace rcats that, under certain conditions, will populate CAT:WRONG place redirects into categories that can be monitored and used by editors to fix the redirects.  However the vast majority of rcats and redirect categories allow tracking just to keep track of the redirects, not because there is any specific problem.  How would one go in and "fix" the redirects that populate  or ?  There's nothing really wrong with those redirects, they just need to be tracked and monitored.  Sometimes it's the quantity of redirects in a category that is tracked, and so on.  That is why I asked you to be more specific, because just to assume that these templates always capture redirects that are problematic in some way isn't always a correct assumption, which may be the case with this rcat, R from surname.  There is nothing problematic about most of the redirects on Wikipedia, and tracking them is a job for a community of staggering proportion, which is thankfully what Wikipedia is.   Paine   u/ c  04:50, 14 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Ah, i think i get it! I prolly looked at the markup on the page i'd edited, then the places-used count, never saw the template text, and didn't care to dive into whatever presumably obscure situtation would make editors put Rdrs at so many surname pages. Ironically, my memory was not quite sharp enuf to imagine (without both colleagues' patience, and 2 days' subconscious mulling) why thousands of Rdrs from surnames should exist, tho i would like to have: only now do i recall the Rdr from Greenberg to, IIRC, a toy manufacturer (rather than to Joseph Greenberg, American linguist!) back around 2003/4. (IIRC, the Rdr had been created by, uh, an obscure Georgian linguist who claimed apparent OR as evidence that Basque was a close relative of Georgian, presumably against Greenberg's increasingly persuasive evidence that almost everything in Europe, and in South and West Asia, belongs in a Nostratian Nostratic super-family that includes the Ural-Altaic and Indo-European families.) With a little luck, telling you this will help make it a lesson-learned for me, to look at the Rdr's wiki-source.) --Jerzy•t 11:20, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 25 July 2019
Remove the duplicate full stop at the end of "It is used because Wikipedia has only one article about a person with this surname, or because one individual is the most likely topic sought by this surname (other persons who share this name might be listed at an anthroponymy article or at the end of a disambiguation page)..". Geolodus (talk) 06:30, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅ — xaosflux  Talk 13:22, 25 July 2019 (UTC)