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HelpRe: How do you determine how many names are displayed for top names of the country?
in reply to a message by LaprasLapis
First of all, I was not aware of the StatsCan release -- it looks like it was recently put together.
In most cases the number of names is limited because that is the extent of the information available. It is common for countries to provide top a 100 list only, though more are releasing exhaustive lists these days. Sometimes, a country provides more names for recent years than it does for older years -- this is a problem for this site's software because it expects all years in a series to have the same number of names. If I want to include these older years, then I have to limit to the least.
In other cases I trim a list to the top 100 because the country has a small population and the lowest names on the list do not actually have many bearers.
There are also technical considerations. Increasing a list from, say, a top 100 to a top 1000 over 100 years adds 90,000 rows of data to the lookup table, which could affect search times.
Looking at the Canadian data in particular, a choice would have to be made... Would we want a top 1000 (actually, more likely a top 500) from 1991, or a top 100 from 1920?
In most cases the number of names is limited because that is the extent of the information available. It is common for countries to provide top a 100 list only, though more are releasing exhaustive lists these days. Sometimes, a country provides more names for recent years than it does for older years -- this is a problem for this site's software because it expects all years in a series to have the same number of names. If I want to include these older years, then I have to limit to the least.
In other cases I trim a list to the top 100 because the country has a small population and the lowest names on the list do not actually have many bearers.
There are also technical considerations. Increasing a list from, say, a top 100 to a top 1000 over 100 years adds 90,000 rows of data to the lookup table, which could affect search times.
Looking at the Canadian data in particular, a choice would have to be made... Would we want a top 1000 (actually, more likely a top 500) from 1991, or a top 100 from 1920?
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Thank you so much for responding! In my opinion it would be better to keep the name lists the way they are. The top 100 for 1920 onwards is more informative than a top 500 for only the last 30 years.