Talk:William Swainson

I would like to correct a page (English Wikipedia: William John Swainson)

I am the great-great-grandson of William Swainson. I appreciate your page information however I am concerned that the title "William John Swainson" is incorrect as are the references W J Swainson. I have tried to make changes on the page with little success, but can't change the title. Please note that his son (and my great-grandfather) was named William John Swainson (Willie).

Unfortunately, in 2007, someone added John as a middle name to Wikipedia (with no source to verify the change), it is starting to be added incorrectly to websites. Interestingly, Wikipedia's sources link to places that show his name as William Swainson as do the sources on this page. Wikipedia has now been corrected so I would love to see this corrected. Regards Tim Swainson SwainsonTimbo (talk) 04:23, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your contribution. This page links to 403 pages. I remember when it was simply William Swainson and suddenly started to change to William John. Doing the changes manually will be hard, may be is a task for a bot. I will treat it on the Village Pump. Hector Bottai (talk) 16:37, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your help. Yes, once an error is made it is difficult to completely fix. I will pick away and hopefully everyone will get on board. Much appreciated. SwainsonTimbo (talk) 20:16, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

@SwainsonTimbo and Hector Bottai: Thank you for this information. I haven't seen this discussion until now, but now that I'm aware of the problem I'll be happy to amend all the incorrect links later today. Best regards, Tommy Kronkvist (talk), 03:41, 3 January 2025 (UTC).

That would be fantastic - started but so many I was hoping that someone could do this for me.

Thank you so much the family appreciates your help

Tim Swainson SwainsonTimbo (talk) 03:45, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

┌──────────┘ @SwainsonTimbo:  Done. It took some 316 edits, but now it's all corrected. As you can see in this list of all of our 639 pages that links to the "William Swainson" author page, there are still three so called redirect pages. Namely "Swainson" plus "W. Swainson", and indeed also the incorrectly named "William John Swainson". However, a click on any of those three links will automatically route the user to the main, proper William Swainson page.

The three redirect pages are only retained as a precautionary measure: it's nice to know that our users will always end up on the correct author page (via automatic redirects), in case any of our editors adds a link saying just "Swainson" instead of the proper "William Swainson". Without the redirect pages, any such "shorthand" link wouldn't work at all. A bit like the link to your user page User:SwainsonTimbo doesn't work, since you haven't created a user page for your account. Not that you have to.

The incorrectly named "William John Swainson" redirect page will only be kept for a week or two, to ensure that there are no link hiccups between the many different Wikimedia sister projects, such as Wikispecies (i.e. here!) and Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource, Wikibooks, etc. The different projects often use inter-wiki links in between themselves, and occasionally it takes some time for their respective databases to catch up with each other. But the page will be deleted soon enough, so don't worry! The other two redirect pages, "Swainson" and "W. Swainson", will likely remain.

I hope the new year greets you well. Regards, Tommy Kronkvist (talk), 06:57, 3 January 2025 (UTC).

thank you so much, you are wonderful. Only found how bad it was before Christmas. I have already contacted about 100 websites that are wrong, not a good time to try and get anything done but hopefully more will happen after the holidays. I have contacted 75 people on the My Heritage Web site. It has spread like a virus. If I can find more people like you, who knows may be one day it will be sorted. The family will really appreciate what you have done. Thanks again Tim SwainsonTimbo (talk) 07:54, 3 January 2025 (UTC)