Naming Conventions for the Historical Tree on Geni

Randolph Eric Jones wrote:
"Could we get Geni to change the font it uses from sans-serif to serif?
At the moment I and l look the same
But ‘I’ = uc ‘i’
And ‘l’ = lc ‘L’ "

I am opposed to the use of serif fonts to solve this (real) problem. Serif fonts are appropriate for printed text, at 600+ dots per inch (dpi). They are not appropriate for video displays, at 72-120 dpi. At least not for someone whose eyes have existed for over half a century.

The solution is the use of a sans-serif font other than Arial. One that solves the problem that Randolph describes is Verdana, which I use extensively in Word documents. However, there are issues with using it on the Web:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/verdana.html
Moreover, non-Windows computers may not have Verdana installed.

Perhaps Geni personnel could find an appropriate sans-serif font that solves Arial's problems, but please: no serif fonts.

Philip

Look at this name = de l'Isle

That was typed using lc and uc letters
if it was all uc it would look like DE L'ISLE

Ah, yes. Typography. Testing to see how some actual Unicode roman numerals might display on Geni:

Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, Ⅼ, Ⅽ, Ⅾ, Ⅿ
ⅰ, ⅱ, ⅲ, ⅳ, ⅴ, ⅵ, ⅶ, ⅷ, ⅸ, ⅹ, ⅺ, ⅻ, ⅼ, ⅽ, ⅾ, ⅿ

And check some more temporary results on display in the 'Overview > About', 'Name' & 'Display Name' : Rein Selbỳ Linno

Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, Ⅼ, Ⅽ, Ⅾ, Ⅿ
ⅰ, ⅱ, ⅲ, ⅳ, ⅴ, ⅵ, ⅶ, ⅷ, ⅸ, ⅹ, ⅺ, ⅻ, ⅼ, ⅽ, ⅾ, ⅿ

The only problem is 50

Reg, excuse my pun, the family Snot, I wonder how they got their familyname? Were they really snotty?

You can see why they dropped the S

Was going to suggest maybe that this would explain the character of the Sheriff of Nottingham in the story of Robin Hood, but then I got all caught up in ancestors in the Vermandois... always a distraction, always a distraction.

I was just editing a profile and had in interesting thought.

We are entering the historial-geographical locations for birth, death and marriage.

What do we do about place of burial?

We can enter the date – no problem.

What do we do about the place of interment?

After all we can still visit the gave or site of the grave. It exists today [hopefully].

Therefore, should we use the location as it is today?

I have been inserting present burial locations, while specifying in the About Me section when the body has been interred in another location before being moved to a present location.

Now a good question would be about cremation. How people handle cremations should be interesting...

I think the question should be

Why does Geni only have a burial field?

[I do not think that translates very well]

What would you do if you find an entry showing the Latin version of a name?

Dealing with Russian, Latin version usually means the version that we in the Western countries write in, as opposed to Cyrillic.

Latin language version of the name? If that was the dominant identity of the person, I'd use that. If there was a name by which the person was better known, I'd use that instead. Plenty of medievals that went by both Latin and local versions of names...

Problem - I am using the English language version of a name and another member is using the Latin language version.

I know that at the time most documents would have been written in Latin rather than English. But it does mess up the flow of names used in Geni.

But then Latin was not the everyday language in use at any period in England.

If I have two or more versions of a medieval name (this is very common among the Anglo Normans, who often had a French and English version, for example), I'll put the variation in parenthesis "Guillaume (William)" within the first name field if it's a translation or variation "Adelais (Adela)". I know that sometimes if it's an alternate name, depending upon the conventions for that part of the tree, people will put a space-slash-space between them (e.g. in the Old Irish trees).

Reg, if you and one other are the only managers of these profiles, your best bet is to try and work it out with the them.

Another possiblity for these varieties of names is to use the MOST LOGICAL (i.e. English for English, French for French) name as FIRST NAME, and use the Middle field for the other known name through sources. AND: always LIST all these varieties with explanations on which source etc in the Overview for the profile.

Remember that a SET SPELLING of your name is a very modern invention ...

Following someone's suggestion, I went ahead and edited the Wiki that Anne Marit posted at top of the discussion (http://wiki.geni.com/index.php/Naming_Conventions)

What I did was add comments to the ill-considered "stick titles in the suffix" advise to the effect that doing so was controversial (i.e. I wrote that using the suffix for titles was controversial). I did not remove anything that was already there, in proper Wiki style, merely added the fact that not everyone thought the practice was a good idea.

And then Shmuel Aharon Kam goes and undoes my edit, so everything I wrote.disappeared. No edit of my edit, no discussion, he just deleted it.

So I'll repeat what Ben M. Angel said: if you want our buy-in, you need to ask for it, rather than simply mandate a policy. (OK, so Geni themselves can mandate anything they want, but the rest of us are collaborators).

I'll also point out that "One True Way" will never happen; there will always be people who, for excellent reasons, end up doing things differently. The best we can realistically hope for is a set of guidelines and some intelligent implementation of those to a given case.

Malc.

Malcolm,
We DID have discussion, plenty of it, right HERE. You presented your case and didn't supply any real alternative (The "Display name" is rather problematic because Geni uses it inconsistently). So your suggestion was turned down.

I didn't delete on my say-so alone, but consulted with others as well. It wasn't a delete so much as a role-back, i.e. using Wiki ADMIN tools to undo your edit. I WILL shortly do so again, BUT will also add a comment to the top of that page, that should satisfy you, AND link to THIS discussion for debate. As a convention, that page should probably be LOCKED as well, precisely because making ANY changes to it, should be done very carefully.

The reason I removed this change, was that it did NOT add any actual content to the page. ANY single item in ANY convention is going to be "controversial". If it wasn't, you would NOT NEED a convention, because everybody would do it that way on their own. So the ONLY thing that adding "this is controversial" achieves is to WEAKEN the convention. I could just as easily add that "content" to EVERY single line of the convention. But if I did so, anybody reading the document, would see it as the empty mockery of a "convention" that it is.

As Anne, and other explained in response to many of the recent comments, these are NOT externally imposed by a cliche "because We say so" rules, but rather those agreed upon and found acceptable by the COMMUNITY. Many of these historical profiles have 500+! managers. If it's acceptable to them, then yes, we will Make It So. It seems to be you who are insisting on Your Way.

Of course there will never be "One True Way", if only because people can be so ornery, and also as explained to you, no-one is asking you use these conventions on profiles that you are the sole manager of, but historical profiles having more than 10-20 managers (let alone Master Profiles) WILL use this convention. The "buy in" of individual collaborators or managers is not really required. You might as well insist that 330 million USA citizens ratify the constitution.

We DO constantly have people challenging the convention, or just ignoring it, but if we let these changes remain, then within a month, the entire historical tree would be a complete mess. It was precisely to REDUCE this mess, that the Curator Team was created. This convention was created and in place for at least two years before that, and there was NO need to enforce it. Now that we HAVE the tools to do so, we would rather NOT have to do so (by wholesale locking of profiles), because it would reduce everybody's experience of the site.

While everybody agrees that this convention is NOT perfect, it IS the best that we have formulated, using the EXISTING tools and fields we have on Geni today. When these tools improve, I am certain the convention will improve as well.

In summary:
1) Yes Geni IS a collaborative site. This means that the Community is Boss.
2) No one person gets to decree rules.
3) While Wikis are supposed to be collaborative, SOME management is required, especially when this weakens the... collective effort.

I think your comment is echo from the old Sovjet ( or the current North Korea) system - the top guys are always tight and - you do not understand.

I think the naming convention is so improtant that it should be discussed before it was implemented.
By the way I cannot see the community buy into it in the 100 merges I see every day.

Knut,
you're free to say what you want, contrary to what you might think, it IS a "free country". :-D

Sarcasm aside, you might notice that this very Public Discussion was started on January 5, 2010. This was less than a month after Geni introduced the Discussions feature. The initial version of the Wiki page was created on November 12th, 2009. That was preceded by many months of debate both in the open Geni Forum, and before that group "discussions" via Geni messages amongst a large group (50+) of the managers of these profiles. After we hammered out an initial version this was presented to a larger group of the relevant managers.

So YES, this naming convention is SO important that it WAS thoroughly discussed before it was implemented. As I said above, it is STILL is constantly being debated. Welcome to that very debate. If you read through this discussion you will see that the convention DOES change with developments on Geni. When originally written the Suffix field was a preset pull-down menu, not the free-text it is now. This was changed at the top of page #6, which you yourself then commented on.

Back when this convention was hammered out, we were no more the "top guys" than anybody else. I wasn't even a Pro user. We were simply some of the more active mergers in the shared historical tree.

In ANY community there have to be SOME rules. As I said, we Curators DO have the means to enforce this. Presently there are only about 2,000 Master Profiles, and only a fraction of those are locked. If we locked down 20 or even 40 thousand profiles, we wouldn't need a "convention", would we? It's very easy to yell "Oppressor" when one doesn't get what THEY want...

I'm not sure which 100 daily merges (out of 25K!) you are seeing, but how is this relevant? Are you saying that because some people ignore the rules, then we all should?

The reasons for my reply is this.
There might have been a discussion although I never noticed it!
The naming convention could have started from two directions
1. With presenting common standards in the field. There might be a couple but when I look at Heinrich I von Braunschweig I get
Albrecht I. (Braunschweig-Grubenhagen) in the German wikipedia (Without any title -that is in the text)
When I look at Louis XIV de France in the French Wikipedia I get:
Louis XIV de France ( the title in the text).
When I look at the Dutch wikipedia I get
Lodewijk XIV van Frankrijk (the title in the text)
and in the Spanish: Luis XIV de Francia (the title in the text)
and last but not least in Swedish: Ludvig XIV av Frankrike (the title in the text).

I am not a specialist in the field but I see a pattern! No titles in the name field!

2. The second way to start the name convention would have been to chose a way that minimized problem when merging this people. Then you should not introduce a thing like titles in the name field since
a) people often have many titles, some of them through different periods
b) you introduce a problem for us normal guys to give the right title. Who knows the proper titles for the Russian nobilities in the right language? The same goes for people in other countries.

Given the above I understand that a standard must be enforced but I think the present standard seems to have been taken on questionable grounds.

When I say that I see plenty of profiles, not using the right naming standard I people either are not aware of a standard (like me up to end of August) or they do not care. Sometimes I wonder if even curator cares.

I know where to find the right titles for the Russian nobility in the right language: Russian Wikipedia.

Sadly, most American readers won't be able to decipher it. Of course then there is the debate as to whose fault that would be, but that's probably another meaningless (divisive) discussion.

As to titles and language, I still think a technical solution is the key. Add a title field (we can concatenate multiple titles inserting dates held behind them), create pages for profiles in different languages (that way the Bulgarians can "take over the tree" without annoying the rest of us), and provide different display options (one with all-caps for last names/maiden names so that the "genealogical society" types can be happy with their display page).

That would be my solution from the front-lines - give up on the naming convention thing and fix the data input. Then we can all be happier.

Wow, that brought the dictators out of the woodwork, didn't it!

Shmuel Aharon Kam:

1. As Knut Stangenberg points out, your assertion that "we DID have a discussion" is not really supportable. Someone posted (on the Wiki) a "fait accompli"; this discussion followed, but:

a) Contrary to your statement, nowhere was "my" suggestion "turned down" in this discussion.

b) The obvious point: who does that sort of turning down, anyway?

c) No obvious consensus was reached in this discussion

d) Real, concrete problems with the "overuse the suffix" plan were identified (not just by me)

e) No one actively supported the "overuse the suffix" plan -- the best you can say is that in some people's opinion it was the least bad option

f) No one at all supported your brand-new claim that "the display name is problematic", presumably because every existing possible scheme is problematic.

g) Even if true (which I dispute), your cock-eye scheme of abusing the suffix field is problematic for precisely the same sort of reasons, plus it "pollutes" the underlying database. That last is not opinion, it's objective fact: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is a complete name, not "Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Associate Justice", which is what you would have if you stuck his title ("Associate Justice") into the suffix, which leads to the question: was he a "Junior Associate Justice" or perhaps he was "Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior Associate"?. [That example may be a bit contrived, but the problem is real].

All that said, you have now gone to contradict yourself: you claim that this ill-conceived convention was "not imposed by a cliche" (probably you meant "clique"), and then go on to bluster and threaten locking things (thereby preventing discussion) and make wild assertions about How The Curator Team(tm) Will Do Things. [I know for a fact that The Curator Team will NOT, actually, do things the way you claim, because I've discussed it with some and they don't do it that way, at least on MY historical profiles -- by which I mean historical profiles that I created -- and you appear to have missed Erica's post on page 18 at #180 in this thread].

As Ben M Angel has pointed out, the fundamental solution has to be technical, whether it is to address whatever real or imagined issues you may have with the "Display Name" field (e.g. to provide an option to display both the entered display name AND the name fields, and/or rename "display name" to something like "formal style" -- which is closer to what it does, anyway).

As to some of your other pronouncements:

1. It is customary in wikis to note topics of controversy. This doesn't, despite your bald claim, weaken the entry, but rather it makes the thing more inclusive, thus more likely to be accepted. In this particular case, my amendment simply offered an alternative which preserved the concept of keeping titles out of the core name fields -- on that there is no dispute.

2. If you, or anyone else, has an issue with my, or anyone else's, stating what is a fact (i.e. that your "abuse the suffix" scheme is controversial), the appropriate thing for you, or anyone else, to do is to *expand* the issue, possibly even split the topic off into a new page. . If you don't like using the display name, go ahead and add material explaining why this solution will cause the sky to fall, or whatever you want to claim.

3. While you pay lip service to the notion that this is a collaborative site, you obviously fail to understand that you cannot really mandate anything. Your only option is to PERSUADE. Which means you have to explain why you think using field X is better than field Y. So given that you now KNOW that your plan is controversial, casually stamping on dissent will NOT WORK.

4. You make the rather bizarrely arrogant claim that I didn't "supply any real alternative". That strikes me as arrogant and bizarre because neither did you "supply any real alternative". I didn't invent the problems with your scheme, I just pointed them out AND then offered an alternative, which you don't like (for some unstated reasons).

5. I know exactly HOW you deleted my changes to that page, and would respectfully point out that it's irrelevant: you deleted them. And you didn't even have the courtesy to let me know that you'd deleted them, although you claim you "consulted with others". How would you feel if I deleted your efforts without so much as a "by the way, here's why I'm deleting..."

I really do appreciate that you'd like there to be One True Way, all in the name of preserving the Collective Effort. But it won't happen. So give up trying to dictate, and start trying to convince.

Oh, and please don't play the "argumentum ad populum" game (where you assert that your opinion is the one that "most people" or "the community" share). It's a fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum. You need to justify your position, not just state it.

Most of what is written in the Wiki is a result of long discussions, and even if you did not participate or it happened before you joined I suggest you just accept it.

I wish the Naming Conventions for the Historical Tree topic would be copied into a separate file and placed as a link for reference to the users who misspell names or would like to have more of an accurate linguistic template rather than a phonetic sound to go by. It would be much easier than to have to sift through various topics in the Discussions to find this helpful (thank you Anne) reference.

Most of what is written in the wiki "Naming Conventions" is according to genealogical standards, which basicly states that you should use the names a person is born with as the main names in a profile, written in the language of were the person was born. I do not agree that "Grand Duke of Kiev" or "Великий князь киевский" should be in a ladt name field, to me that is a job, and most people that got such a title, wasn't born with it. And it is the name at birth that we should use.

I still think all of us should have in mind what I have linked to earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Married_name

Suffixes is ok if they are part of the name a person is born with.

Titles are not ok in a field specified for names. Geni should ofcourse add a field for titles, which timeperiod a person used that title, and open for the possibility to write down all the titles and timeperiods a person used that specific title inside the program, ofcourse with the possibility to add sources directly to the event (in this case the titleing).

I'm sorry that Geni, at the moment isn't up to this task, or having good enough naming fields, but that shouldn't diminish our effort to write names, suffixes, titles and all other genealogical data according to genealogical standards. People, like it or not, this is a genealogical site and I really think we should live up to that.

Per a participant request, I have editted and hereby re-post my 1/16/10 at 7:42 AM item [from page 2 of this discussion; I do not (yet) know how to edit-in-place]:
@Anne M Berge: (A) Thank you! I have only skimmed this discussion, but look forward to learning it. I was led here by @Bjørn P. Brox from Public Discussions » Royalty & Nobility
(B) A brief reminder to be aware of, if not beware of: the lack of firm foundation to some articles in WikiPedia. This has made the news in 2009; I can only hope that it has minimal effect in the areas you refer to, such as biographical / naming information of individuals. Particularly articles with limited references should be used tentatively.
(C) I try to write clearly, and so have found need for characters from other languages. When invited to test a program before public release, I have joined as a βετα-tester. I am accustomed to using PCs running under Micro$oft's Windows OS, and, so far, each version has had under All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map. I have seldom had to go outside of my favored Arial font to find the characters I needed. [I do not think the symbols available in the Symbol, WebDings, WingDings, & other special fonts are needed for Geni, but...]

Hi Remi:

I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you on this point again, specifically with regard to birth names. Take for instance Charlemagne. He was born (most likely) Karl. It's possible that they called his family Carolingian as it was named for Charles Martel, but no one is going to identify him as "Karl Carolingian". In Germany, they know him as Karl Grosse, or Charles The Great. In France, they knew him as Charlemagne, and that name transfered over to how he was known in English.

Closer to present, most people in the English-speaking world, hell, much of Europe, would not recognize a woman by her maiden name. That's what made a "mother's maiden name" (birth name) a useful identification security question before search engines made quick-researching that question easier. We know them by their last married name. It's good to have the maiden name field, of course, because that's an important part of a woman's identity (at least in the parts of the world I was speaking about). But whether or not it's "genealogical standard" or not, it's not generally a useful standard when identifying ancestors.

That said, there are periods of time that the "genealogical standard" becomes useful, it seems to me, when names don't change as a result of marriage. This may have been the result of application of the "genealogical standard" that you refer to on medieval genealogy, rather than on actual identification, but it works for that period. For the English-speaking world, it seems that this changed (based on what I've run up against in my own tree) around the 17th century. Again, that's just on what I've run up against, I've no specific event to pin the blame on why identities changed around then.

It's about identification. If the birth name serves as a useful identifier to someone who is looking at a tree and trying to make sense of it, then by all means, use it. If the tombstone (or even posthumous) name better serves that purpose (with references to the birth name), then the standard should be chucked out the window.

Having said all that, I agree with you that Grand Prince of Kiev is more a job than a name (a князь or knyaz is a prince - I can envision here an aging genealogist getting the translation wrong as "duke" and perpetuating it through a "standard"). Sometimes, though, the "of Kiev" (киевский or Kievsky) part is useful as an identifier. Are you talking about Svyatoslav (I hate Wikipedia's transliteration of his name... я should be ya) of Kiev, or his possible grandson Svyatoslav of Smolensk? Granted, you could use the patronym to differentiate (and it seems in most Russian documents that is preferred), but patronyms are typically middle names in Russian, with a family name at the end. But calling them all Rurikid is awkward, and not really how they are known.

As with most things, usefulness should dictate standards, not tradition. In history, genealogy, anthropology, etc., the easy identification of an individual is, it seems to me, much more important than strict application of "tradition" oriented standards. I will continue to name them as I come across them as they are known.

(Again, a lot of the debate would be solved if data entry were better designed. Until then, this debate is going to keep going and going and going. And it seems to me that the energy used to attack and defend could be better used elsewhere. Here's hoping that the tech gods devise a fix soon...)

I'm sorry to here that you don't like name at birth as a persons main name and instead want to use what you think they were known by, Ben. I have already pointed out that it's only the big parts of todays Great Britain and it's former colonies (ie the englishspeaking countries) that have used name after marriage as identification in historical times. The rest of the world, including most of Europe, have not, so you are wrong in your statement, Ben. Spanish and portugese speaking contries have never done so. In Scandinavia in the last 100 years or so. Please, don't use our modern naming-rules for older times, and please, Ben, use the naming-rules according to the country the person lived in. If you read the wiki-page I linked to, you will see most of the information there.

The reason, Ben, that it is so important to use name at birth, is because it will make it easier to find and identify a persons ancestry. That is a big part of what genealogy is about. It is hard to find a persons ancestry if we only know her name after marriage. I don't see any usefulness in writing a persons last name as it was after marriage, but I see a big usefulness in writing her last name as it was when she was born. It helps my genealogical reasearch to write it like this, only her married name in my database, does not. So it is not because of tradition, Ben, it's because it's going to make our genealogy easier.

My mother is almost 70 years old, got married when she was 21. So she was known by one last name her first 21 years, and has been known by another last name since then. But in a genelogical database (which Geni is) her name is written with her first last name that she used her first 21 years. She has not complained to me about how her name is written, because she knows that's how it is written in a genealogical database, so should you, Ben.

Remi, have you produced a reference for the statement that "genealogical databases do it like this"?
I don't seem to see consistent usage across genealogical databases (if Geni is one, then presumably the databases backing the gazillion other trees on the Web are also such databases).