User talk:Robin Patterson/archive 2007-10 to 2008-11

How does that look

 * The Time moves you requested are complete, including the move of the year articles. After you have reviewed them, drop me a note on any fixups ( I already see that centuries cats are missing).
 * I don't think I ran it, but I have a script to auto upload the time templates from WP. I didn't specify every single subcat- For example- we can move over the chinese calendar and other solar calendars when we need them.  The chinese calendar templates were like 200 odd- don't know why so many, but I figured those would be needless clutter until we have some chinese contributors- Which would be really a huge milestone for us.  Hopefully it won't be so long.  On your note that you would be away on other sites, if they are wikis and you have any need for a Bot, if it is anything I have done already here (move wp articles, fix cats), then I'd be happy to help out- that is unless it is a site advocating violent overthrown of the NZ government, a mime site, or other disagreeable subjects.
 * You are into the time thing- I don't see any issues with having all these templates around for folks to use when they need them. I know the articles I use need quite a few of them, but certainly this move could be more selective.  I just don't have time to cull the list.  Ok to move the lot of them?  ~  Ph l o x   17:16, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

OK- I put in my application for sysop.
After mulling it over for a week, I have decided to proceed with this application: Genealogy:Requests for adminship. Thanks for considering this. I am asking for your support. ~  Ph l o x  02:44, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Additional namespace needed?
Consider Forum:Greene County, Ohio queries. These model what local county sites do for queries, requests to go to the local library to lookup something, etc. We really need it so that people can rely on our site for such global genealogy networking. We could potentially have hundreds and hundreds of these local community forums*, so possibly an additional namespace can be set aside for these.


 * (ok ok- fora for you but only because I know you are such a traditionalist)

~  Ph l o x  19:59, 10 November 2007 (UTC)


 * "Forum" is already a separate namespace. (I hope "Green County" was a typo.) What are we waiting for? Robin Patterson 20:51, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Greene County. Named after a Revolutionary war general. Odd they cap the county, but that is standard for WP.
 * Yes. I understand namespaces, and I know very well Forum is a separate one.  What I am thinking is that it could get very crowded in that namespace if we use it this way.  There are 3700 Counties in the US alone- so that could be one heck of a lot of chatter going on for one namespace.  Maybe won't be a problem for one or two months though ;-)
 * What we are waiting for is a little bit more review on the county model. I will do some small runs.  Also, I will do the date/ county extractions because this won't affect the formating of anyone's articles- a companion info page is created, but it will be invisible to them unless they want to use some of the features it enables.  What we get is uniform births/ deaths by year and by state (province, or other first level subdivision).  ~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   23:59, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

(Main points of above now copied to Forum talk:Index)

phloxbot bot flag request

 * There was a vandalization on psychology wikia that hid behind a flood of changes created by phloxbot on 11/7. That could happen to us too.  At Janitor Jack Phoenix's suggestion I have contacted a community team member to assign a bot flag.  I have put in a request at w:User_talk:CatherineMunro.  Please post there stating you approve the request.  Thanks Robin.  <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   17:32, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

rename warnings
The cat renaming for places and for time categories EG:


 * 1991 births -> Born in 1991
 * Ohio births -> Born in Ohio

has not drawn any response. I started off thinking I would do a two week warning before hand, but this move appears to not be controversial in the least and no one has commented on it. Maybe I should just go ahead and rename rather than do the warn-discuss-rename process? What do you think? I don't want to steamroll anybody, but on the other hand it's silly to make something dragged out if it is uncontroversial. <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  23:53, 15 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Kevin created the Ohio births. Check whether he cares about the slightly longer version you and I and WikiMedia seem to agree on. I doubt if anyone else will mind. The "1991 births" (which is a WP category and seems to have no equivalent on Commons - see the rather inconsistent http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:20th_century) is slightly controversial because of departing from WP; have you done that checking on the templates that include or link to those cats? Robin Patterson 08:56, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
 * OK, we are discussing the move, so it is worthy of discussion and so I will delay it. Short answer is it is a departure from en wp, and I pointed that out along with the reason that is not such a bad thing.  Longer answer there.  Let's discuss it in the proper venue.   <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   09:03, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Your suggested changes
"prior to 1400 • 1400-1449 • 1420-1499 • 1500-1549 • 1520-1599 • 1600-1649 • 1620-1699"

Those 20s should be 50s. To make the thing a bit shorter, maybe the next century should also be just 50-yr groups instead of 20? Robin Patterson 02:59, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Hey fine with me Robin- change them however you think is appropriate. Some centuries were extremely fast paced- like the beginning of the 19th was nothing like the end- at least in those countries undergoing the industrial revolution.  But of course, we need contributions and as they fill up, they can always be split as the local historians decide.  Anyway, if I have some questions about what you are doing, I'll let you know.  The india template especially needs a lot of work.  The periods are all wrong and the sources of info has to be localized- eg.  "Churches"  or "cemeteries" in a country where cremation is the norm.   <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   05:12, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

getting closer to people from/ people of
I have not recieved a response to my query on your proposed scheme change at Genealogy_talk:By_location_category_scheme.

I am not clear on what you are proposing, and in a while I will be getting to the point where the bot shall be renaming the people cats to conform to the scheme, so I'd like to nail this down in the next week. <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  20:19, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Your preference? emigrants always, or immigrants sometimes. to or in
Ohio German immigrants -> -or- (since they may not have actually emigrated to Ohio directly, but may have simply wound up there after some scurrying about for some free land. -or-
 * 1) Emigrants from Germany to Ohio
 * 2) Emigrants from Germany in Ohio
 * 3) Immigrants to Ohio from Germany?
 * <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  01:21, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

You on walkabout?
You've been uncharacteristically quiet. Hope everything is ok with you and yours.... <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  07:55, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
 * In your response on my talk page you commented: "I thought to myself that you could double that in one stroke if you cracked the GEDCOM problem and applied mine."
 * I think you probably figured out that I am not laying down all this massive database infrastructure without a reason. Doubling the number of persons to 20K is not my goal.  That would be off by orders of magnitude.  It's chess.  What happens when we make a massive search target like that?  We WILL get traffic and we WILL form a heck of a lot of first impressions.  The question is- when folks check on the search hit will they see a statistical database like dump just like so many other sites, or will it be polished?  These first impressions are huge.  Will it be one visit or will they be interested in it enough to jump over the wikitext barrier to entry?   So I think it would be a huge mistake to jack up the number of person articles before we have our ducks in a row.


 * Any way we get them over the visitor to contributor barrier is goodness. The create an article page continues to be an area of weakness.  It is not a technical problem- maybe you could persuade someone to take up that challenge and get it to shine.  It has to be made super simple for our target audience with LOTS of help.  We aren't there yet.   <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   16:48, 26 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Good. Robin Patterson 18:09, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
 * There was a request in there. Someone has to straighten out the "create a page" situation.  Will you inspire someone to take on that challenge?
 * Re bot transfers and the html table code you posted on my talk page- Can you give the name of an article where the problem you are seeing occurred? <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   23:28, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Holidazed

 * I will be away from any sort of computing device from 20-Dec to 6-Jan. Hope you will be around to mind the store.  <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   21:52, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

You asked how I discovered wiki genealogy. I googled the name of an ancester, and it led me to this site, where I discovered another user who is actually my 4th cousin Strump 18:35, 20 December 2007 (UTC)strump

Re: MantiBot
Hi Robin :)

I am in charge of MantiBot, but I've just started using it and I haven't really figured out it's more advanced features, or even if it is capable of that sort of thing. I've just been visiting Wikia's big wikis and helping out with double redirects - which can be a real pain and which the bot takes care of nicely without much input from me.

Thank you for the welcome. Have a merry christmas,

Manticore  (talk)  15:27, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Delete Article
Can you delete the article "Corrin Surname" it was accidentally created instead of the Category. Dcorrin 18:37, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Calendar ext.
Hi. I have answered your questions on fp007. Thx for your help in testing! -- Nef (talk) 17:01, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Genealogy in other languages
Hi Robin -- I wondered if I could get your input on this request for a Lacroix family wiki. Should I send requesters like this here, or suggest they create a fr.genealogy.wikia, or something else?

It seems it would be better not to split up genealogical information that could interlock across country lines, but language would be another barrier to entry for some contributors. On the other hand, this requester might not be up to creating an entire French genealogy site on their own -- they just want to work on their own family. That's what seems to be going on at http://nl.genealogie.wikia.com/ (which I tried to email you about before creating).

I'd value the recommendations of your community on this; it would help me to make decisions on future requests for new genealogy/family name wikis. Thanks! — Catherine (talk) 20:52, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Immigrant and emigrants
Thank you for fixing my categories: I was following the instructions at Category:Ancestry from England which you now tell me are incorrect. Thurstan 21:28, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I still managed to create Category:Migrants to New South Wales from England before I realized it was wrong: can you delete it please. Thurstan 22:56, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Genealogy:Info pages
I saw your recent changes to that page.

Now you have a page to store a person's information (/info) and their actual article. The article generates information into templates.

It means, for example, "John Isaac Smith III (1900-1985)/info" store information, such as birth, death, children, etc. Using templates on "John Isaac Smith III (1900-1985)," which is the person's actual article, templates such as and  and other templates, the template will take information from the "/info" page and put it into an infobox, children box, etc.

Manually, you may do the same.

It means that instead of generating it from typing it into a box (like here) but instead copying and pasting the layouts. - AMK152 (Talk • Contributions) 20:13, 24 March 2008 (UTC)


 * But it was left to Robin to change the instructions!!

History of Ireland
Hey Ho Robin

Recieved your not on History of Ireland. I fired up the bot the other day and apparently the wikia tech folks have mucked with some things that has broken the PyWikipedia code. It is going to take a day or more to figure out what is going on, but it's nothing permanent. Just a tedious annoyance.

BUt it will be a while before I can tend to this, because I have to fix some politics in my country first. <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  16:16, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Poss Dup
Hey Robin, I mucked around with the Template:Poss duplicate, It won't hurt my feelings if you change it back or alter it, but I thought I'd see what you thought of it this way. Let me know. Plcoffey 21:23, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Surname article pages
See my response here: Category talk:Candidates for deletion. - AMK152 (talk • contribs) 15:40, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Bot successful
I finally was able to run my bot (User:AMK152Bot) successfully. I fixed all those double redirects. I will be able to do a lot of maintenence jobs, but the bot needs to be flagged as a bot first. - AMK152 (talk • contribs) 01:12, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
 * See: Forum:AMK152Bot, need consensus. - AMK152 (talk • contribs) 03:28, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you
Thank you for creating Wollombi, New South Wales, it was on my to-do list. Thurstan 05:26, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Bot running discussions
As per Genealogy:Bot policy:

''Please do not start running a bot until its nature has been described on its user page and at least a couple of administrators have discussed it with you (not it!) on its user talk page. Bots that seem to be operating without such consultation will probably be blocked. ''

Please see bot discussion page here: User talk:AMK152Bot. The sooner we have discussion going, the sooner these maintenance projects can get going. - AMK152 (talk • contribs) 19:21, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

More gotchas
I think that the regular expression in Hndis needs refining, though I don't know enough to know what to do. If you look at William Levingston, you see that it has picked up William Levingston Martin (1905-1999), which I didn't want. I also think that you will find that "John Smith" will pick up "Johnson Smithers", which doesn't look right either. Thurstan 04:06, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Surnames

 * Um, just realized something, see here: Forum:Surnames - AMK152 (talk • contribs) 03:15, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks
for your welcome, but I doubt I will be here enough to merit a user name. I watch too much Smallville, which is how I discovered Wikia. Best wishes. andy # 2008-07-31T01:02:12 219.103.114.54 (Talk | block) (20,148 bytes) (→Thanks) (rollback | undo)
 * 1) (cur) (last) 2008-07-31T01:01:27 219.103.114.54

Category:Berry (surname)
The bot can automatically move everything from the old cat to the new cat, includign hte categories. All we need to do manually is move the content to the article page and replace the text of the old cat with the redirect. See my latest comments at Forum:Surnames. - AMK152 (talk • contribs) 14:36, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Page Santa Coloma
Hi Robin. I think I have corrected the problems. The main page is now back the English version wiuth the name "Santa Coloma (surname)". Changes were made before by Phlox and AMK152. I found the frames for the English and Spanish versions and erase them, because were over the tittle. I added back links to each version. I think it is clearer now. --Tasc 12:19, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Perry import
Hi Robin!

The wiki host Wikilot closed down a couple of days ago, and we have been helping to rescue the wikis that were hosted there. One small site was for genealogy research about the Perry family, and the owner has agreed to merge his information here to Genealogy.wikia. I am going to import his thirteen pages into some temporary pages in the Genealogy namespace -- I hope that you and the community can help him to integrate the information into your established structure. Thank you very much!

— Catherine (talk) 23:14, 14 August 2008 (UTC)


 * The import was successful -- all were created as subpages of Genealogy:Perry_import. I will direct the creator to that page and invite him to start talking to you about what to do next.  I appreciate your help! — Catherine (talk) 23:27, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Category Link
Hi Robin. No I don't copy anything offline. What page was it? If my template is correct not sure where I got it. Can you tell me what the link was and what the correct version is? Maybe I just typed it. Things change here often. Thanks
 * Looks like AMK152 changed the template I used on the 17th, so I don't think you will see anymore of these. Thanks

The asterisks in the cemetery pages
Robin, I did not really know what the purpose was of the asterisks (*) before the names of the cemeteries or categories. I was following a basic grouping of Country -> State/Province -> County/Parish/Etc. -> Cemetery and attempting to reorganize the pages to fit that standard (much like the current effort to reorganize the surname pages). I thought the goal was to organize the categories or pages alphabetically for ease of use unless they represented some special grouping. That was the premise I took. Please let me know if my assumptions were incorrect. I apologize if I have disrupted the current system of organization. I only want the best and most useable structure out there.

Charles W. Anderson 13:29, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Family Tree Maker
Old Buzzard 03:14, 22 August 2008 (UTC) Aug. 21 2008, Alex Cringan

Robin: Thank you for your editing and comments to the benefit of a new subscriber. There's still a lot that I don't understand, but I will try to pace me 82-year-old noggin as fast as I can.

I learned of Familypedia by Googling wiki + genealogy. Wikipedia did not seem to be the answer I was looking for, so I tried Familypedia.

I have been using Family Tree Maker for many years. Does this place me under any obligation as far as using my FTM files to post on Familypedia? As far as I know, I have not assigned Ancestry.com the right to use my files,even for world family tree, but I do not know what they have been downloading while I have been on line. I had FTM 16 (? latest anyway)  up briefly, but was so confused by it that I went back to an earlier version with which I was familiar.

I see that you are in Wellington. Our vacation in NZ about 15 years ago was among the best we have ever had. Visited friends in Rotorua + Christchurch, but did not get to Wellington.

Also see you belong to a Bird Protection Society and to a Sustainable Living Org. Good. I have been a birder for >65 years. Sustainability/global climate change/population problems are among my interests.

Alex Cringan - a former Canuck in Colorado since 1970.

Bots
Robin, in response to your AUgust 3 inquiry to me, the answer is yes, it does sound trivial, but I have no idea what AMK is using for his Bot. Hopefully it is pywikipedia bot in which case I can tell him a few lines. But perhaps I can do fixup runs after November 3rd. Sorry, Bot runs are time consuming, especially when trying to educate someone else. <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  03:06, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Uploads disabled
Why have uploads been disabled? All the images I have loaded this week, including ones I haven't backed up anywhere else yet have been deleted. Do you know what is going on? --Richard Arthur Norton I 17:02, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Featured articles
See here. - AMK152 (talk • contribs) 23:52, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Templates all round
I see our paths crossed: while you were looking at my delete request, I was looking at Template:Ahnentafel-compact5. After much thrashing around, I found that Template:Ahnentafel-compact2, Template:Ahnentafel-compact3, Template:Ahnentafel-compact4 and Template:Ahnentafel-compact6 all work, so what is different about Template:Ahnentafel-compact5? The answer is at wikipedia:Template talk:Ahnentafel-compact5: this one is more sophisticated, with lots of  #if  calls to allow some ancestors to be missing. Perhaps there is a limit to how many  #if  calls are allowed (like the limit on  #ifexists , which has caused me grief).

Great work with the templates. I was a bit sad to see that you dismantled my use of Template:Died in UK/doc: I thought that was the standard way to document templates. If we seperate the documentation from the template code, we can be confident that editing the documentation won't break the template. Thurstan 09:55, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Good on you. But on second thoughts, I don't think the County categories belong in the "Established in" categories: just having the county pages in these categories should be sufficient. Thurstan 22:02, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Info pages
See my latest reply here: Genealogy talk:Info pages. - AMK152 (talk • contribs) 21:18, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Tabs and info
No, they are the same person: James Madison (1751-1836): I edited his biography first (because it had bad birth and death categories), then moved the whole mess to give him a death year. If we look at the code for (or even just the documentation), we see that you can have "/Biography", "/Ancestors" and "/Pictures" subpages. This seems to be totally independant of the use of the "/info" subpage. I have certainly used the "Ancestors" subpage several times (eg Constance Gertrude Partridge (1887-1970)). These various US presidents that I have been fiddling with this evening all seem to use the /info + /biography form (another is Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)). What was your question exactly? Thurstan 10:31, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

The way I understand subpages: you can create any subpage you like, called anything you like. But the "standard" names are determined by which subpages the "standard" templates use. The two templates I have used are:


 * 1) Template:Tabs person: as noted above, it shows (as default) tabs for "/Biography", "/Ancestors" and "/Pictures", though parameters can be used to show other tabs.
 * 2) Template:Showinfo person: which reads data from the "/info" subpage. However it also shows links for "/Ahnentafel" and "/Descendants" subpages, if they exist.

This seems something of a mixed bag, which could be made more consistent (that word again!): eg why tabs for "/Ancestors" but not "/Descendants"? Given your comment on Michelle Obama, do you favour "/Family Tree" over "/Ahnentafel" or "/Ancestors" (I realize that the first two terms are more specific than the last)? Thurstan 22:46, 5 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I've copied most of that to Forum:Tabs templates and provisionally replied there. Robin Patterson 01:57, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome!
It's always nice to get a welcome on a wiki — lets the newbie know there's people here. :-) I have been trying to figure out which out of this, Rodovid, and Wikitree is the best (i.e. biggest, most active, easiest to add to...) of the genealogy wikis.  Are there others, do you know?  Although, I must say, so far I'm enjoying this one the most (despite my initial reluctance to use Wikia wikis; the 'corporate' control thing, or something, but at least it's far better than ancestry.com!).  &mdash; Sam Wilson ( Talk &bull; Contribs ) &hellip; 06:03, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
 * You're right. And with Firefox's NoScript and AdBlock, and changing the skin to Monobook, I see this site pretty much as (visually) clean as WP. ;-)  &mdash; Sam Wilson ( Talk &bull; Contribs ) &hellip; 08:15, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Info Pages
I really should do that. :oP Makes both my time as well as the various other members much easier. Let me study this info page source code. If you're interested, I was testing a lot of this over at WikiLot before it folded. It was through the parent company that redirected me to this wonderful Genealogy wiki already set up (although with another major family branch, Brearley). One does get tired comparing GEDfiles or having to reference multiple filings. Hoodsdavidscott 03:03, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Category for contributors from New Zealand
In your welcome to me you mentioned Category:New Zealanders contributing to this site, but I think that might have been a mistake as the current category seems to be Category:Contributors_of_New_Zealand. I just thought I'd let you know. --DuncanNZ 00:24, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Finding this wiki
You asked in your welcome how I found this wiki. Well, I've been looking for something like it as I begin to write more articles at the wiki for the software I use http://gramps-project.org and because I'm encouraging GRAMPS users to add Genealogy advice to a more widely used resource, see the discussion on that issue here: http://gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:Portal:Genealogy. You are very welcome to add your thoughts on that issue. --DuncanNZ 00:13, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Counties of New South Wales
I have finally put my finger in one of my misgivings about Counties for NSW (I told you I was slow): I think Wikipedia (and its source, the "1911 Encyclopedia") has got the usage wrong. I challenge anyone to cite any government document the uses the form "XXX County": I believe they are always "County of XXX" (or sometimes "County XXX") (cf. "County Wicklow"). If you google for "Courallie County" (to pick an uncommon example), all the hits are sourced from Wikipedia or yewenyi, while "County of Courallie" will give you government sources, and "County Courallie" will give secondary citations of government records. Thurstan 02:10, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the research. So - you wanna change 3,100 U.S. county pages as well?!!! The subject has been touched on in WP talk, without any such radical proposal. Policy there and here is to use the common name where practicable and for uniformity. If seeking perfection, you're welcome to create redirect pages from "County of Courallie" and "County Courallie" to Courallie County, New South Wales and others similarly (some of which will need to be disambiguation pages for the same county name in different countries and even different states); but that would slow searches a bit. I live in Porirua City (in common spoken and newspaper and most council leaflet language). Legally it is the City of Porirua (or it was, last time I looked at the Local Government Act). "Porirua City - Official Portal of Porirua City New Zealand ... check out a museum, play a round of golf or even go for a dive or horse ride . All these opportunities and more await you in the amazing City of Porirua". Incidentally, I don't think WP got much of its county stuff from the 1911; maybe only the few refs to towns on Counties of New South Wales. The detail on the individual WP pages looks like fairly diligent copying/paraphrasing by a WP editor from http://www.gnb.nsw.gov.au/name_search and other  official sources. Too bad the editor didn't understand the meaning of a term like "(1790-1860)" placed after a person's name; we can fix that gradually. Robin Patterson 03:31, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * No, I don't want to change the U.S. pages! That is my point: common usage in the US is "XXX County". I don't believe that that is common usage in Australia, and it grates as an Americanism. Thurstan 05:22, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Not exclusively American. http://www.devoncountydarts.co.uk/. When I came to live near Wellington we were in the "Hutt County" (legally "County of Hutt", of course) and I worked for the Hutt County (Council). Do Canadians grate too? http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nbyork/ Robin Patterson 05:57, 22 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Thinking about your example, I think there must be a systematic difference between our national idioms: if an Aussie referred to the "City of Sydney" as "Sydney City" people would stare: the vernacular is just "Sydney": I can't think of an "XXX City" example in Australia. The only example I can think of is shires: people would say "XXX Shire" for the official "Shire of XXX", but this would only occur if the "XXX" was also the name of something else. Thurstan 05:36, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Some NZ cities are proud of their titles (and often have to distinguish between the city and the original hamlet it got its name from). And/but there are differences in idiom, as noted on the wiki: outside Oz, a "council" is rarely if ever an area of land. As a worldwide site, Familypedia must sacrifice a bit of local idiom for ease of use and for what you have called "consistancy" but I call "consistency". Robin Patterson 05:57, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * So we should move for "Wicklow County" and "Wexford County" in the interests of worldwide consistency? Okay, I will consider myself patronized into silence. Thurstan 06:22, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Getting Familiar with the New Templates
Hi Robin,

As you mentioned, the county templates and codes you are referring to are relatively new. With time, I'm sure I'll become a fan of using the same templates you and others use. I'm just looking for a simple way to navigate around this wiki and perhaps to help others find their way to the wealth of information stored here.

You may have noticed, I'm using the "Categories" more and more at the bottom of each new article I create. It's kind of nice when more than half of them come up in blue. If it's in red, most of the time I'll just leave it alone. Every once in a while, however, I'll get the urge to create or "open" that category so that other users can see the names associated with that page and maybe add to it. The only catch is that you have to put something in the text box, or it won't create the new page. I'll put in whatever you prefer.

I like the way you have the navboxes set up for each county. It's easy to get to each category from there. I don't mind using the templates, but is there a way to put the navbox below the list of names? It seems to me that the main purpose of the category pages is to show the list of names associated with that county. Besides, we've already seen the navbox since we were probably just at the county page.

I've shifted from using "Category:Born in [name of county], [name of state]" to simply "Category: Born in [name of state]." Those categories are populated with more links to other people from that state. It's nice to have some company instead of there being only one or two names listed on the county level.

By the way, what is the best way for a visitor to navigate from a state article to the people listed in its categories? On a few state article pages (and I see you've already discovered this), I've added a line "See also..." and then the link to "List of Counties in the state of [whatever]." (See http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Ohio&action=history and go back one revision). Some of them were already messed up before I got there :-) This may not be how you want it done.  I don't intend to create more work for you, but let us know if there is a better way.  Anyway, I'd like to see more information related to genealogy on the state pages instead of just a copy of what's already on wikipedia.

Some of the technical discussions in the forum and water-cooler pages goes a bit over my head. For instance, I would not have known to use the template: r-us|Kansas for that particular application. For me, it takes doing things a few times, then adapting as necessary. TreeGenea3 07:48, 26 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Great feedback. I've put it on Forum:Getting familiar with the county-related categories and their new templates for detailed consideration by me and others. Robin Patterson 09:51, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Info Page Tutorial

 * This a better explanation? Genealogy:Info pages/Tutorial - AMK152 (talk • contribs) 00:04, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

County Durham?
Can you shed any light on this question: Talk:George Ashley Cooper (?-1867) Thurstan 09:48, 17 November 2008 (UTC)