Familypedia:Familypedia data dictionary and conventions

This page is mostly a data dictionary of properties used at Wikipedia but also describes some of the architecture of Familypedia. This is intended to provide technical documentation for those creating templates or interested in the formal structure of Familypedia's database.

Internationalization
The Main, Help, and Genealogy namespaces are divided into pseudo namespaces designated with a standard suffix using language codes corresponding to wikipedia language prefixes. The typically two letter codes have a period preceding and are enclosed in parentheses. For instance the french language article would be San Francisco (.fr) and the German would be San Francisco (.de).

Common information for a person or place is held in a single article called an smwbasepage, and all pages of all languages for the same person or place would have and smwbasepage property with the same value pointing to the same page. Property values for the person or place are saved only on this smwbasepage.

Names
All names- (person or place) have multilingual values. EG: given_name for William the Conquerer is Giullaume in French, the name for The Hague is Den Haga in German. The name in a language is found by accessing the smwbasepage property in an article and looking up the language name in that smwbasepage.

Person names
Familypedia's formal definition of Surname, Given name and Middle name may be counter to conventions or intuition. The meaning of these terms at Familypedia only has to do with their Taxonomic order. The primary name sorted on is the surname property, the second name sorted on is the given name property, and the third sorted on is the middle name property. These properties must be translated in the manner that is proper for a language to reflect this taxonomic order. Taxonomic order has implications other than sorting. For example, Spanish names have compound last names and compound given names. For Juan Pedro Gómez Martínez, the father's family name is Gómez and the mother's maiden family name is Martínez. So what does Juan Pedro consider the primary taxonomic name for his father? It's Gomez- his family name. So the Spanish form should label the "surname" property with a name that would lead a Spanish speaking person to insert "Gomez" rather than "Gomez Martinez". Does this mean that surname is equivalent to family name? No. In the case of Icelandic last names, the primary taxonomic name is the patronymic formed from the father's first name. Nor does surname mean "last name" either, since surnames can come first as is the case in China, or in the case of compounds, where the final name may be the mother or grandmother's maiden name.

given_name
This is property is stored as a single value. Compounds are allowed but are not stored as an N-Ary value list. This is not the value of the person's true given name, but the secondary taxonomic name for the person. Illustration: Paul McCartney's true given name is James, but it would be confusing to sort the article Paul McCartney in any other place than following McCartney's whose first name begins with O.

middle_name
This is property is stored as a single value. Compounds are allowed but are not stored as an N-Ary value list. Many cultures do not properly have middle names, but do have a third order taxonomic names. These should use the middle name property and the term used on the form for that language should indicate whatever word corresponds to this name.

Names displayed to the user should be stored in the short_name or full_name properties. Names should not be assembled from given, middle and surname properties because not all data