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I am all with you concerning the reliability problems of "baby name" websites. And for me there is also a difference between tiny and small, in fact a whole order of magnitude: something small can easily be 10 times as big as something tiny.

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But my view concerning fabrication is different. I certainly saw much of it in the last 5 years of intensive Googling while building my name database from scratch, but often "plagiarisation" is an even bigger problem.

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An example that I recently encountered: What does the name Ayanna mean? Baby name websites mostly tell "beautiful flower" in Swahili. Well, this is a likely candidate for a fabrication, because people knowing something about Swahili or even speaking it know nothing about such "beautiful flowers":
http://research.yale.edu/swahili/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=2&page=3

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But look just how many websites tell this probable nonsense? There must be dozens of them! If fabrication is really widespread I probably should see a wide choice of different purported meanings for a name like Ayanna whose meaning is probably unknown and thus attracts "fabricators".

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But instead widespread copying of information seems to take place. 1 fabrication once at an unknown place and time in the past, but dozens of copies that nearly drown interesting information about the name.

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And why not? Let's suppose I want to make a quick dollar on the Internet and see that baby names are all the rage. I hope to make a small fortune with advertising and products for parents like many such sites seem to. I thus need a name database pronto. Now do I start with a name list and fabricate meanings where none are readily available? Hell no, I just copy the names somewhere, and shortly afterwards my site is running...

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Maybe it even overestimates the capabilities of some of these people assuming them to be able to decently fabricate.

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Rene     www.AboutNames.ch