I've done other posts about related names in Identities records (e.g. Identity cycles and Forgotten people). Related names are typical of the sort of thing that can naturally link two different ways. Right now in Identities we make the main link to the Identity page for that name and add a [+] after it that does a search in WorldCat.org for both names in an attempt to show people how the names are related. Here's an example from the Lewis Carroll page:
- Tenniel, John Sir 1820-1914 Illustrator [+]
The Tenniel link goes to a page about John Tenniel in general, but the [+] link searches WorldCat for John Tenniel and Lewis Carroll.
The search can be useful, but I've been wondering whether pages devoted to a pair of names would be useful. I also wondered how many there would be.
I don't have the pages yet, but I do have some statistics. The 21 million personal name pages in WorldCat Identities have more than 47 million related names on them, but only 36 million of these pairs are unique (since many Identity pairs refer to each other). Since the pair pages for people with few citations don't seem very interesting I eliminated pages with less than five citations from consideration. I also eliminated relations where they have only a single citation in common, since they didn't seem interesting either. After all that there are a bit more than four million pair-pages.
I'm not sure exactly what such a relationship page would look like. In some ways this is data there has never been an easy way to see before, but I think they would be interesting.
--Th
Note: Dedicated users of Identities will have noticed that the system has been either unavailable or unreliable the last few days. Our server was 'compromised' and it has taken us a bit to recover. We should be back to normal soon.