Talk:Fisher (surname)

Organization

We find in Cat's Cradle:

... the vice-consul in Montevideo is a Hoosier!

(or something pretty close) as proof of the influence of people who call Indiana home.
In its current form, the accompanying page serves well a similar purpose: to show from A to Z just how cool it is to be named Fisher! On the other hand, taking seriously its claim to be a Dab page, it is incredibly inefficient: users are supposed to come here because they are looking for someone referred to elsewhere as "Fisher", or whose given name they also heard but have forgotten. They probably know more -- roughly the particular Fisher's cause of notability, perhaps, so that the description following the name probably helps them know when they've arrived. What they don't know is the the given name: if they knew that, they'd have gone straight to the bio, not to a multi-screen list.
The other thing they are likely to know is the time setting of the desired person's activity. Time entails a natural and intuitive mode of organization that causes of notability lack (and even tho the duration of people's notability varies, their births and deaths almost invariably bracket it), so ordering them by date of death, or probable death (almost always the end of the period when they can do one more notable thing, and for moderns, the determinant of when the reader stopped thinking about them regularly) is usually helpful to those searching.
OK?
--Jerzy•t 21:31, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

An interesting idea, and I understand your point, but the page is not so long that one could not just scroll down and see everything there is to see, then click on the name of interest. The birth and death dates are indeed quite noticeable on the page as it is now organized. What say you? Sincerely, your friend, GeorgeLouis (talk) 17:37, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

• You're suggesting picking out the dates in the right period by looking at each one in sequence. But as soon as they implicitly detect the sort key, humans instinctively apply binary search, and become much more efficient. Our article on the subject should provide estimates on effort saved as a function of list length, if you are unfamiliar.
  --Jerzy•t 14:02, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
  
• Sorry to have been distracted from this other issue:
  By

  just scroll down and see everything there is to see, then click on the name of interest

you surely meant

scroll down something like 6 screens to see everything there is to see, trying to remember which screen is now the most likely so far, then
scroll back up an average of 3 screens or (up to 6), then
adjust up or down for memory failure and/or the shifting of screen boundaries that results when the page length is not an integral number of screens, then
click on the name of interest.

(I think i was correct to drop "just", since i didn't substitute "finally" or "laboriously".
--Jerzy•t 01:22, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I didn't think it was that hard, but then I have a Mac Mini! OK, I have no objection to your re-sorting by date, but that means that they must all have a date. Are you willing to do this? Feel free.Or, to speak in Wiki-talk, Be bold! I would suggest, however, that the fictional Fishers be put in their own category. Good luck. I am eager to see what it looks like. Your friend, GeorgeLouis (talk) 04:55, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

• I quite agree re the fic-chars. (Sorry i neglected to say so earlier.)
  --Jerzy•t 21:11, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
  

(→H: + v-stats; expand Dab lk as entries)

I'm not at all sure what this means. In puzzlement, GeorgeLouis (talk) 06:06, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

• Good question, George. Hopefully these are good answers:

1. →H is in effect provided by the system in the edit summary box, when you do a section edit on the section titled "H", and it links to that section. (Hmm, that should lk to an explanatory passage; i'll try to remember to see to that, but ask me a question if approp.) You can make such a lk "by hand" in an ed-summ, by typing /* H */, but you seem to get only one actual section-lk per section-edit edit-summary; maybe that'll change.
2. + v-stats means "I added vital statistics [to the entries]." The vital statistics approp to Dab entries (of real people only) are (when available) years of birth and death -- and you may sometime see me summarize w/ "rem vulture hyph", which is short for

   The hyphen in [e.g.] "(1950- )" makes it look like we're hanging out like vultures waiting for them to kick the bucket, so i took the hyphen out (and prefixed w/ "born" so no one is confused about whether they are still alive, or just dead with their birth year unknown).

3. expand Dab lk as entries means that i found a line (an entry in the list that is the main substance of the page's content) that was a link to another disambiguation page, and thus in effect an incorporation by reference of the other page's contents; to avoid the user having to go to that other page, i "expanded" the reference implicit in the link by replacing it with a series of entries that essentially duplicate the entries on the other Dab page, in the spirit of the expansion of a computer-language text-substitution macro, where "expansion" IMO is a term in the spirit of a polynomial expansion.

--Jerzy•t 21:11, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Another ??

Some of the entries have fl attached to the dates. What does this mean? Yours, GeorgeLouis (talk) 21:28, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

The scholarly abbreviation fl. has been adopted as the WP mechanism* for indicating what is described by floruit. (Dabs are different in various ways from articles, and non-linking (in Dabs) of "fl." may or not be explicitly mentioned somewhere in MoSDab.)

*It took me maybe 5 minutes to find that in the MoS. YMMV in similar cases, since i've had some years of practice!
--Jerzy•t 21:11, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

• Thanks for the reply, but that rule is just plain silly; it smacks of elitism and reeks of the 19th Century. Your friend, GeorgeLouis (talk) 18:09, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
  • Presumably the "rule" you refer to is the guideline

  When the individual is known to have been alive (flourishing) at certain dates, [[floruit|fl.]] is used to link to floruit, in case the meaning is not familiar: "Osmund (fl. 760–772) ..."

  Something is needed to avoid clunky wording, and we didn't make it up. IMO it's a good thing if users learn some small things they weren't looking for when they consult a 'pedia.
  --Jerzy•t 21:10, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
  

Harold Fisher, Michigan architect

What happened to the article about Harold Fisher? He was an architect from Michigan that designed over 300 churches in the midwest USA. He was given an award as the oldest working man since he still worked at age 100 making his designs. Some of the church designs are rather famous.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Cherylyoung (talk • contribs) 15:47, 11 June 2009

You'll find him at Harold H. Fisher. GeorgeLouis (talk) 18:11, 11 June 2009 (UTC)