Forum:The trouble with SMW Ahnentafeln and descendant lists

The SMW features Ahnentafel and descendants have been running for a while now. There are several advantages:
 * 1) Immediate overview of ancestors and descendants;
 * 2) Automatic detection of common descendants by intersecting Ahnentafeln in Common descendants;
 * 3) Automatic detection of common ancestors by intersecting descendant lists in Common ancestors;
 * 4) Automatic detection on joint ancestors of couples in Couple ancestors and auto-propertisation of consanguinous relationship in Inbreeding test.

The main disadvantage is the clumsy display of long lists of ancestors and descendants. There is a related problem. Both properties are strings. These strings get very long. If the string gets too long, the page gets too big (2 Mb) and MediaWiki will simply stop. This has been the case at two pages, Charlemagne (747-814) and Louis the Pious (778-840), but the trouble could easily spread to others.

There is a simple solution: Limit the Ahnentafel and descendant list to N generations. If N=10, we would still be able to detect 8th cousins which is stretching the definition of "family". The problem with this solution is that I do not know how to implement it.

There may be other solutions that retain the functionality and keep within size constraints. Suggestions are appreciated.

A stop gap solution is to shift the Ahnentafel to /Ahnentafel and descendants to /descendants. This does not solve the problem, but we have at least 2 Mb for each, and we'd need to create a lot of new pages. rtol 07:31, 21 July 2009 (UTC)