User talk:Phlox

 Feel free to Drop me a note. Archived talk: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Ahnentafel template

 * I can't seem to figure out the problem. At Template:Ahnentafel, when I test it, the bottom part of the 2nd great grandparents looks messy I am using the following templates with it: Template:F and Template:M. I checked through all pages involved, and there seems to be no problems with them. Perhaps there is something I'm missing? I thought maybe you could help. Thanks. - AMK152 (Talk • Contributions 00:52, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Have to rush out to do a little shopping for the wife, but without looking at it, my guess is that you have run into the pre-expand limit. If you look at the source html for the page, and search for pre-expand you will find that it has exceeded 2MB.  see .  There are ways to reduce the expansion size.  I outline some of these  here.  If you are having trouble applying these tricks, let me know and I'll try and do some reduction and maybe you can do the rest following the example.  Ok?   ~  Ph l o x   01:44, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Okay, thanks I'll check out those pages. - AMK152 (Talk • Contributions
 * I can't seem to figure how to fix it perhaps an example? Thanks. - AMK152 (Talk • Contributions 02:18, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Try

This generates 64 levels and pre-expand is only at 300K so it has pretty good capacity.

The templates are somewhat esoteric, so I left the debug printout of the Antefandel whatever string that is passed to the display routine. You could pass this output to a graphic display as well.

The basic problem I went after in this optimizaiton is that typical templates keep retrieving the same information over and over. I take an approach that allows the templates to look up a particular father exactly once. Everyone else then re-uses that information rather than make another call. You will see how I do this by examining the template.

By the way, the other info templates are also in varying degrees of lack of optimization. They will be rewritten, and this may affect the formatting of info pages. However, I will run a bot that will make the conversion, so just keep on generating them as you have, and I will flip them over later- probably January sometime.

I left it with some stuff to fix, but you get the idea. If I can help out further, drop a line. Have fun. ~  Ph l o x  20:38, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks! The only thing is, if a person's ancestors go back only 3 generations, the "great grandparents," "2nd great grandparents," etc. would appear. Unless there is a way to make the headings appear only if there are individuals under it, I could just create separate templates (AncestorList/display/1), (AncestorList/display/2), (AncestorList/display/3), (etc.). Other than that, I looked at the examples and I understand a little bit how they work. Probably the more i work with them, I'll understand completely. - AMK152 (Talk • Contributions 21:30, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, those headings can be done conditionally. I'll fiddle with it later today and add some things I should have put in there.   ~  Ph l o x   23:40, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Just one question. How does generate Template:XA, Template:XB, Template:XC, etc.? - AMK152 (Talk • Contributions 00:08, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

XA retrieves the string. Generate then passes that string via parameter 1 to display.

See for conditional display of groups. I am thinking that exploding these strings (like the way I stored article and fullname in the returned list with .ar and .fn ) is better than doing template gets on the info page. Reason why is that it doesn't run into these pre-expand limits as quickly.

<font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  17:29, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Santa Coloma
Thank you very much Phlox for your help in organizing the page Santa Coloma. --Tasc 12:30, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Findagrave
Can you peek at the Findagrave label in the Template:person, it seems to be damaged. --Richard Arthur Norton I 19:48, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Response on your talk page- think I got it. <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   18:04, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Out of office
Phlox shall be out of the office from 2007-12-20 to 2008-01-06. Expect no responses to communications during this period. <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  18:04, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Are you back yet? - AMK152 (Talk • Contributions) 20:31, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Welcome back! I've been thinking we could use a Forum page with a name like Forum:Unfinished projects where you and anyone else can write a couple of lines about things that are or should be in progress (with links to relevant pages), so that others can see what's going on and:
 * avoid the duplication that comes from ignorance of something's existence
 * join in if interested
 * continue if original promoter has very long absence

Robin Patterson 01:29, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Well- one nice thing about long absences is that folks that may have felt marginalized have some space to reassess and come back in. I don't know if that has happenned, but it gives folks some space to look at the scope of what is being proposed and think on it well before we take a step off the edge.  The scope of what I have in mind as you know is rather radical.  Huge jump in numbers of articles, central role for info pages, support for county level forums for gathering microhistory data.
 * It's not bitty stuff. What I am working on now is also somewhat large in scope but it should die down a bit and I should be able to contribute more.  What the order is, offhand I guess I don't have any strong opinions I guess what goes first largely depends on what the current contributors think the priorities here are.   <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   07:28, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

History of Ireland
Inspired by recent Irish contributions, I've just imported History of Ireland from WP and commented out most of the images and some of the templates. Please do your clever template:wp thing to it. And maybe copy over the dozen templates we don't have - most look as if we should have them. Robin Patterson 11:21, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply on my talk page. It's good to have the job on your list somewhere. Then what about history of other countries that produced lots of emigrants? Maybe a bot could copy them over and doctor them all in one or two easy hits... . Robin Patterson 01:43, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes Robin, that would be trivial. If you could simply list the names of the WP articles- each name to a line, then that would make it easy for me to feed the Bot.  Warm regards,  <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   21:19, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, thanks, let's start with these:
 * History of Albania
 * History of Argentina
 * History of Australia
 * History of Austria
 * History of Austria-Hungary
 * History of Belgium
 * History of Bosnia and Herzegovina
 * History of Brazil
 * History of Bulgaria
 * History of Canada
 * History of China
 * History of Croatia
 * History of Czechoslovakia
 * History of Denmark
 * History of England
 * History of Estonia
 * History of Finland
 * History of France
 * History of Georgia (country)
 * History of Germany
 * History of Greece
 * History of Guernsey
 * History of Hungary
 * History of Iceland
 * History of India
 * History of Indonesia
 * History of Italy
 * History of Japan
 * History of Latvia
 * History of Liberia
 * History of Liechtenstein
 * History of Lithuania
 * History of Livonia
 * History of Luxembourg
 * History of Mexico
 * History of Moldova
 * History of Montenegro
 * History of the Netherlands
 * History of New Zealand
 * History of Nigeria
 * History of Norway
 * History of Pakistan
 * History of Poland
 * History of Portugal
 * History of Prussia
 * History of Romania
 * History of Russia
 * History of Scotland
 * History of Serbia
 * History of Slovakia
 * History of Slovenia
 * History of South Africa
 * History of Spain
 * History of Sweden
 * History of Switzerland
 * History of Tanzania
 * History of Turkey
 * History of Ukraine
 * History of the United Kingdom
 * History of the United States
 * History of Wales
 * List of extinct states

Robin Patterson 06:37, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Russian genealogy?
Hi Phlox -- I've gotten a request at http://requests.wikia.com/wiki/Ru.Dozmorov for a genealogy wiki in the Russian language about the Dozmorov family. Since I understand you are very interested in multilingual support here, can I ask your opinion on the request? Do you feel I should direct the user to add information in Russian here, or suggest creating a separate ru.genealogy wiki, or some other course?

I'd also like to consider merging and closing http://nl.genealogie.wikia.com which has only a few pages, and http://stammbaum.wikia.com which is empty, and redirecting the urls here. What do you think?

http://pt.genealogia.wikia.com/ on the other hand has a fair number of edits.

http://geneamarine.wikia.com/ (a French wiki for ship's manifests and such) had a promising start -- they might also be worth reaching out to.

Thank you for your support,

— Catherine (talk) 01:38, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

PhloxBot went astray - categorically
http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Category:Ohio_navigational_boxes&diff=next&oldid=121191

Please check whether there are more of those big deletions and reverse them.

Robin Patterson 14:58, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

New bot: AMK152Bot

 * Please see this discussion, in regards to flagging it. - AMK152 (talk • contribs) 03:35, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

I hope you can help with other bots
It is my impression that PhloxBot can do more things than AMK thinks his bot can do. For example, adding the same piece of text to the tops of lots of pages in one run. I would like you to coach him now and again if he is interested.

Good luck with the campaigning!

Template help
Template:Marriage date and age and ago I need it to do an additional calculation to combine the "age" and the "ago" calculation. Think you can help? --Richard Arthur Norton I 04:13, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Other Wikia Wikis
Hi Phlox,

I was trying to get your Family tree template to work on other Wikia Wikis, but found out that you have a special field "min-width" installed here that doesn't seem to function elsewhere. How did you get it to work here?

Thanks,

&mdash; Nathan (Peteparker) (Earth-1218) (talk &bull; contribs &bull; email) 18:34, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

"Died in Somesuch County, Mystate"
Hi! As one of our top editors, you can be among the first to know that it is now very easy to create a category page for "Died in Somesuch County, Mystate" in the United States. (We have a growing number of similar templates for several continents, listed at Genealogy:County navigation templates.) See Template:d-us. When you see that a person page is in a category like that but it's a red link, you can very quickly fix it and thereby make the link much more useful. (I probably don't need to include that last sentence for you! Looking forward to seeing you busy again here in a couple of weeks.) Robin Patterson 06:34, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Using AMK's bot
Could you teach AMK to use his bot for things like my April 2008 request? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:13, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Category redirects

 * Category:Time, date and calendar-related templates. Some others need it; is it noticeably more efficient to do several in one session? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:58, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Let me verify my understanding of your request. You want all pages currently in Category:Time, date and calendar-related templates to be reassigned to category Category:Time, date and calendar templates, correct?


 * Absolutely. The standard target situation for every page that's in a category that contains Template:Category redirect (q.v.). — Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:34, 24 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I can do very large numbers of these in one run yes. Just post me a list of the problem categories as you did above.  Is a delay necessary to post a note for comment in forum, or is this non controversial and can be done immediately?  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   16:03, 23 February 2009 (UTC)


 * There are still, I'm sure, many category redirect jobs needing to be done (and more will arise in future); as it has not been done for a long time now, such a run is perhaps due or overdue. Wikipedia seems to do it at intervals of no more than a week. Ignoring the numerical cats and starting at http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Category:Category_redirects&from=A - first cat has been given its redirect by PhloxBot and is empty, which suggests that PhloxBot did some moving; second cat is empty and needs a re-redirect, which is outside the scope of this discussion; third cat is Category:Alabama counties, another PhloxBot improvement, which has four items to be moved, doubtless meeting with your approval. Going on a bit, we find lots of "Surname" cats, which should all be empty (because there was an agreement that AMK's bot would empty them one way or another) but one never knows (because AMK found that he wanted to replace some of the agreed bot procedure with manual work); the first three are empty, and there are none beginning with "A", which suggests that someone (probably AMK or Thurstan) has been tackling them systematically. How would you feel about an overall run that reassigned every cat link indicated by the redirect in any cat that is in that Category:Category redirects? Or do you have to specify the target specifically, not programmatically? (Note that some of the templates have "Category:" as part of the target). — Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:34, 24 February 2009 (UTC)


 * In case that recent one is controversial, I can give it a week for anyone to complain. I doubt if anyone will complain about our shortening that particular category name in the same way as Wikipedia (the origin of the original) has shortened it. I've had no complaints since shortening a similar one many weeks ago. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:34, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok, I'll do a mass run. While I am at it, I'll look into creation of a maintenance bot that you describe.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   03:14, 24 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I did the time calendar-related one, and discovered that the maintenance routine that cleans all the catredirect categories is currently broken for wikia software. This is not unusual because they are constantly fiddling with the UI.  It just means I have to get into the debugger and figure out what the heck the original authors intended, then figure out how to patch it back up.  I have to drive my girl to her ballet class so I'm not going to do that right now, and actually, it's not real fun so for now I am just going to a mass move in the less automagic way.  Achieves the same effect, but we won't be at a place where I can just hand the script over to you to run.  Yes, you.  Don't freak out on me, it is no big deal.  Once everything is set all you have to do is type a command and when you get back from the pub the thing is all tidied up.   - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   22:25, 24 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Last time I looked at py-wotsit-bot's documentation it gave me a fairly clear indication that it would not work on my ancient OS, Windows ME. If it had been less off-putting, I would probably have tried to relieve AMK of the strain of being chief bot-driver. So can you give me some assurance? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:04, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
 * You might be right. Oh well, chalk it up to cheerful but naive yank optimism - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   16:06, 1 March 2009 (UTC).
 * I guess that you looked at WP for "the maintenance routine that cleans all the catredirect categories". Maybe some other Wikian has noticed the same thing and got into the debugger and produced a solution for another Wikia, in which case you may not need to do as much as you feared. Let's ask on the Central Wikia mailing list. You can explain it precisely, so you should ask. http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l — Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:04, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I ran into the problem and couldn't figure out what was wrong for an hour, so I had to move on (actually my girls had to move on- had to drive them to school.) I'll have another go at it.  In the meantime, I can run cleanups in an ad hoc way, I'd just like to get to a fully automatic way so that you can just point other bot operators to the phloxbot scripts and they can run them.  With these kids, I expect my attention here will be more not less erratic, so the responsible thing for me is to be trying to make myself obsolete. - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   16:06, 1 March 2009 (UTC).

Wikia-credits
I'm interested in :

From Genealogy, a Wikia wiki. , which Pbot added to a forum page. The links look as if they will work for most, but definitely not all, MediaWiki sites and no other websites. Does that suggest desirable changes? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:04, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I am just a grasshopper, and your meaning is not clear to me, Master Shaolin.
 * Do you want a template that does that?
 * Or one that does it on foundation Wikis or both?
 * Do you want the bot to scan for any inbound links to genealogy on foundation wikis and credit the link this way?
 * Or is this a Jedi mind trick and you meant none of the above?
 * - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  16:13, 1 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Not a Jedi mind trick.
 * I haven't said I want anything in this regard, though I could have been taken to imply that links that don't work on every wiki might be be more use if they did.
 * I'm not aware of having met the expression "Foundation wiki" before today.
 * Let's keep it simple: What is the purpose of that Wikia-credits thing, which obviously took a bit of time to create?
 * — Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:36, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't recall the pages where this wikia credits code occurs. Can you give me a pointer?  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   17:42, 10 March 2009 (UTC)


 * http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Forum:Settlements_established_in_1626_etc&t=20090224214507 near the bottom — Robin Patterson (Talk) 23:49, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

←Oh. This was part of that category move you wanted. For some reason the forum article was in the cat. Anyway, this is a standard message I think I was using when I exported some of our templates to other wikia. I don't know why it was activated- some bug that was activated due to the unusual nature of forum pages. Anyway, by "suggesting desirable changes" - did you mean the bot really ought not do that, or did you mean that the genealogy site might use this message for some other puposes? - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  22:05, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I couldn't possibly have meant "the bot really ought not do that" because I had no inkling that a bot was involved. And now that you explain that it was on pages being exported to other Wikia sites there is no problem, because those interwiki shortcuts work fine on them. If it were part of a proposal to put that sort of origin message on more of our pages for exporting more widely, there would be concern, because the interwiki shortcuts do not work on every MediaWiki site. One that I am familiar with is the NZ Go Society site, where even "Wikipedia:" doesn't do what it does here. Please carry on doing really useful things such as (in no implied order of priority) working out whether there is a way to give every person article an info page programmatically, moving towards an improved GEDCOM conversion procedure, teaching AMK's bot to run the "wp" thing ("wpxfer"?) over pages we import (because there are tens of thousands more that are worth importing), and spending time with your children. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:17, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Template
I just used two separate templates since I wasn't able to get a conjoined one working .... --Richard Arthur Norton I 23:23, 17 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Template:info and Template:Showinfo person are broken. --DennisDoty 13:05, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorted. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:55, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Dutch and Russian
Please see http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/User_talk:Rtol#Dutch_.28and_Russian.3F.29 and the section that follows. The day's other newcomer is User:Zorkiy Sokol. It would be great to have a few words of guidance from you on language matters at times. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:02, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Obama's Swiss ancestry
Ancestors of Barack Obama and http://www.wargs.com/political/obama.html, Nos 388 and 389. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:44, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Herr Messer(lich), bist Du ein Schlacker? Two years here with your illustrious line of Swiss ancestry, pushing and pulling to make us create all manner of info, fancy location pages, categories involving Swiss emigrants, and even more recondite concepts, and as late as yesterday this wiki did not have a page called "Switzerland"!!! — Robin Patterson (Talk) 09:42, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I have been meaning to get around to that. I think it is about 15973rd on my list, which seems to be getting longer rather than shorter as the days go by.  Anyway, the locations look like they will be a lot more tied in much more with the new thing.  We can probably put up plots of pushpins on a google map as a result of a family query.  Also, no more of this making a cat for everything in order to know who was born in switzerland or Connecticut, or Redlands, California.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   09:55, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Happy to have shortened your list (0.01%)!! Happy to see you doing things that most of us can't do (yet). — Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:36, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Years ago
I still want to combine the mathematical functions of these two templates into one: November 23, 2004 Can you help? --Richard Arthur Norton I 16:54, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
 * No sweat. How about a "years ago" (ya) parameter to dda?  Break is default behavior, right?  Eg: ya=yes puts in a br, ya=nobr and it is on same line.  Does that suit? - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   00:03, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Properties
I see you are creating properties. Very good. I guess these can be used to create couples. For instance, shows people who married their first cousin, but not who they married. Should really be displayed as Arie Korver x Anna Korver. If Arie has the property "married cousin" this can be done. rtol 10:39, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You would be able to do this dynamically via a query. It would be a single #ask, so for all practical purposes it would look like a property anyway.  I left some breadcrumb links over the help forum in future of info pages thread.  There are some example wikis that have used it and some good examples/discussions.


 * In db design the rule is not to redundantly code something that can be derived (easily). To do otherwise introduces database inconsistencies.  With that said, wikis are fundamentally unstructured databases.  Anyway, that is my first reaction to the cousin married thing.  We could also hard code stuff like property lived in New Hampshire.  I rather think that "had residence" whose property was "has location in state" is a more proper way to encode this kind of structure.


 * Everything I am doing now is very makeshift, so don't assume too much about what is happening with it. I haven't formulated strong opinions yet.  I plan to be doing a few approaches and then will release a tool so that everyone can convert over stuff as they please.  I am mostly interested that we do this right, and that our decisions will establish familypedia as the premier semantic genealogy site.  Everyone else is playing the quantity game of piling on gedcoms.  We need to play with different rules if we are to dominate.  Our strength is collaboration and quality- that will in the end crush everyone.  So I am of the opinion that we should move towards having a very friendly version of a hard core evidence based system that operates from the notion that genealogies represent multiple and often conflicting believed realities.  All of our so called facts are really just assertions with varying degrees of certainty.  To add a formal semantic layer over fundamentally contradictory knowledge is just GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).  Anyway, that is my thinking as of today.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   16:20, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Got it, and look forward to these enhancements. rtol 18:26, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I know that it is early days, but I have a suggestion about "Property names": there is an asymmetry in using "Spouse", "Spouse2", "Spouse3" etc which complicates the templates. I would prefer the series to be "Spouse1", "Spouse2", "Spouse3" etc, and so on for the various "multivalued" properties (eg AFN). Thurstan 04:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I did that ordinal numbering thing in a clumsy way. I am on it. - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   05:31, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Simple creation person-page with info-page

 * If I may interject here, my opinion is that every responsible contributor should have the option of running a bot if they want. The trouble is that the bot software that we use is too complicated for most people to figure out.  I posted some documentation on how to run pywikipedia python tools, but only AMK was brave enough to try, and admittedly, it is tough for even technically minded contributors.  I have a solution to this problem, but it requires some additional work to adapt to info pages and the new structures.  It is very easy to use and is compatible with most Apple and Windows (XP or newer) systems.  I expect I may have something in a month or so- hopefully you can manage until then.  In the meantime, feel free to post an inquiry on my talk page.  PhloxBot can easily perform thousands of transformations.   Usually if I have a text file in the form (old name)(tab)(new name) I can do this.  Give me an example though because it depends on if you need text in the articles changed as well.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   16:18, 5 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I would be brave enough to try it, but I don't have even Windows 2000, let alone XP. Does py work with Ubuntu? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:56, 9 May 2009 (UTC)


 * what I wanted and discussed with Richard Tol, you did for a part with the procedure "Simple page for person" but what I also wanted was the automatic fill in of surname, given name, fullname, short name, article name, YOB, YOD. Fred Bergman 08:03, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I just discovered that the possibility of simple creation perhaps longer existed. It is not mentioned in the dutch edition of the frontpage, in enlish I saw it !Fred Bergman 09:10, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

flakey navobx- note to self
Tnavbar seems to be the source. If navbar= plain, then the title bug goes away. Maybe same problem with wikiabanner. - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  17:36, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Pioneer George of New York
Page looks impressive, to say the least. I see no toolbar as described, but I saw the thing that opens a can of yummy spaghetti.

I've posted his page to my profile on Facebook, with the following introduction:
 * Semantic MediaWiki is moving Familypedia up a gear! (This page is a "Beta" version but pretty impressive.) Swiss ancestry certainly has its good points.

— Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:01, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * By edit bar, I meant the wikia bar that says edit this page, leave a message, history, etc. Before the "Edit this page" is the Edit with forms, so you obviously found it.
 * The thing I found was a show/hide thing about half-way down. I'll try top left next time. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:48, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Editing with this long form is probably not the preferred mode for users. Perhaps they will learn to click just on the bit that they want to change, like birth, wedding, children, and what not.


 * Perhaps you did not see, but on each of the events is a place for images. Adding an item here guides the user through an upload, and the resulting file name is stored with the article for the contributor.  Further, the size of the image can be set by default, so they don't have to know anything about how to jam it into an infobox.  In similar ways, we can control the decoration to names of counties, surnames and so on.  I am not going to mess with the minutiae yet.  I just want to press to make sure it can do all the hard stuff, or whether there will emerge some hidden obstacle that blocks us from using SMW.  There is a bunch of stuff I find annoying, but all and all, much more usable for normal contributors, and for sophisticated users, I think they will welcome the departure from the frail and impenetrable obscurity of my Info templates code.


 * - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  16:04, 9 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Please don't disparage the info templates code. Great work, which now is well enough documented to get most new users diving in successfully without specific invitation. You will have to persuade them that there's a better way. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:48, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * If the three wikis you've been trialling or discussing SMW on are not enough, try http://thirdturn.wikia.com/wiki/User_talk:DaNASCAT#blank_pages for a starter into that real-life subject to see if maybe Uberfuzzy can help you get some value from their experience. I listed a couple of other possibles on the Help:SMW page. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:48, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, as a doting parent of course I am proud of the info pages approach. They are powerful and I am pleased with their success with new users.  SMW encoding may be an unwelcome transition for some and of course it is up to the community whether this radical departure from info pages merits attention.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   17:33, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Internal error
Why do I get this when trying to save a page on which I have just typed SCat and nothing else? Internal error From Genealogy Jump to: navigation, search

Set $wgShowExceptionDetails = true; at the bottom of LocalSettings.php to show detailed debugging information. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:15, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Most peculiar. I got it again when trying to save the above. Now I can see that the above worked, but my surname page hasn't appeared. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:34, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Internal error
Why do I get this when trying to save a page on which I have just typed SCat and nothing else? Internal error From Genealogy Jump to: navigation, search

Set $wgShowExceptionDetails = true; at the bottom of LocalSettings.php to show detailed debugging information. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:36, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I saw some weird formatting but it appears to have cleared itself. The template is not doing anything odd, so it is likely some wikia staff maintenance activity on the server producing hiccups.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   17:10, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Angela sorted it out in a few minutes, as you may have noticed from the mailing list. --— Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:56, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I have been keeping my head down and not paying attention to what's happening anywhere else. i figure you will tap my shoulder if there is an avalanche or something heading our direction...  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   06:16, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

OS
I use Windows Millennium Edition. Thinking of upgrading to Ubuntu unless, or if, I get a new machine. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:56, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

New contributor
hmm well i wont create a username and all, i just found this wikia thing by chance, it is sooo similar to wikipedia, is it related somehow??? has all the same formatting etc.... i have a username on wikipedia though... 24.0.43.144 17:15, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

New page
Excellent progress on the Semantics stuff. However, if I now start a new person page, I only get a form -- even if the info page of that person already exists. While forms are great for the uninitiated, we should also be able to do things without them. rtol 07:59, 15 May 2009 (UTC)


 * happened at Engeltrude de Fezansac (?-?) rtol 08:05, 15 May 2009 (UTC)


 * no worries rtol 08:06, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

"Dude" in relation to Hoorn
Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th ed: "... N. Amer. informal n. 1 a man. 2 a dandy. ... ORIGIN C19: prob. from Ger. dial Dude 'fool'"

This man not born or married in Hoorn and unlikely to die there.

Am I right in thinking info pages are a key feature of our use of SMW? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 04:51, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * In the vernacular of western united states subculture, a dude is a person of sterling character, and or outstanding accomplishments.
 * The SMW stuff is temporarily dependent on info pages for their data. I put in a patch so that we have a mirror of many (but not all) of the fields in the info pages.  This sort of jury rig was necessary so that I could quickly do some volume tests.  The SMW approach is to have what we think of as info data on the same page as the article, as is the case on the George Spencer Geer (1836) prototype page.  The Geer article wikitext is what SMW pages will look like in the future.


 * As I was remarking this morning, the Geer article is what a largely tabular article would look like. However, it is possible to set the values inline in a text passage like with the robert hester example I was referring to in the 2007 article.  Some folks may prefer this style, and that is in many respects preferable to the tabular form that tends to perform a life-sucking reduction of people's lives into a table of vital statistics.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   05:55, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you for all of that. I'd better check that I've read all your recent replies and essays before I ask too much more. Seems we have at least three of us working on this, with one doing over 99% but the others making an effort. It must be a good thing. I've mentioned it on two of my Squidoo lens updates now and copied to Twitter and Facebook. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:41, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I am scouting out way way ahead of the main party on some of this, so if I lost you, just ignore me. I just want to make sure I don't set it up a certain way that will wind up coming back to bite us.  Speaking of which, did you follow what I was saying about the  migration kmz files?  Next time you are at an internet cafe, check out google earth and how it displays the notes.  Each one of the notes can have linkbacks to the genealogy wikia article.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   06:53, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Nested and recursive queries
Hoping to build a query "What is the relationship between Ms Smith and Mr Jones?". As a first step, I'd need the intersection of the sets of ancestors of both. So, returns my parents, but  returns an error rather than my grandparents. Any hints? rtol 07:55, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Your married cousin test answers my question. rtol 08:10, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

So I can't exactly put it in his article?
http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Henry_I,_King_of_England_(1068-1135)&action=history

— Robin Patterson (Talk) 08:45, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't see what's wrong, should be ok, but I have to turn in. I'll check it tomorrow.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   08:51, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Test
Template:OrderCMTest9 works fine in general, but not for Emma de Limoges (c960-c991). I guess this is because she's a daughter from her father's second marriage. Thanks! rtol 11:39, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * The problem in OrderCMTest9 was Children-S2 v Children-s2. The latter works. rtol 16:51, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Note that I also made children-s2 a subproperty of "family member". This may be wrong. rtol 17:01, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * No. Should be a subprop of children.  Not sure why you are explicitly probing children-s2 anyway.  Children-s2 is a sub property of Children, so you should be picking up all children-s2, s3 etc.  If this is not the case, point me to a specific example.  Thanks.  Also, by the way, don't get too attached to these field names.  We are at the learning curve stage and so everything should be regarded as makeshift and experimental, that could be radically revamped with new names or different approaches?  OK?  I expect we should have things substantially sorted in the next month though.  For permanent work, no one should be encoding assuming the current SMW fields except for experiments.  If people use Info fields, they are safe.  Ok?  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   17:03, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Have a look at Emma de Limoges (c960-c991). "children-s2" returns her dad. "children" returns empty. I agree that "children" should be a superset of "children-s1", "children-s2" ... (just think of the test Married third cousin) but it is not at the moment. rtol 17:13, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I'll look at that. Hopefully it is not a flaw in SMW, because the superprop stuff does work sometimes for these depth searches.
 * Problem fixed. Thanks! rtol 17:51, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * By the way... there is a bottom up search for cousins by following the parentage links rather than the children links. The weakness of this approach is that folks usually add bunches of children but don't bother declaring the child nodes.  Again, we could deal with this if AWB is easy enough to be used by adept folks such as yourself.  Right now, the latest release gets hung on wikia, at login, but I'll deal with that if the awb devs don't get to it soon.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   17:22, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Cousins is easy enough. 13th cousin twice removed is hard. rtol 17:51, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

(undent) Good. Yes. An issue to be sure, and exponential expansion problems are generic to this problem set. There is a caching approach that I am considering that will alleviate some of the server load issues. - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  17:55, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Query depth
I created a "Married third cousin test". This apparently fails (or rather, always returns true) because I nest 4 queries. Is that too much? The "married second cousin test" works fine. rtol 20:16, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * There is a query maximum nesting depth setting for the extension. You could have run into it, but that doesn't seem like a lot of queries to me.  15Queries to get to each set of gg grandparents, so 30Queries max, right?  You are in new territory here.  Let me know if you come up with anything.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   01:21, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Pls have a look at Isabella of Portugal (1397-1472) (experiments). The first query correctly returns Edward II. The second query returns an alphabetic list of everybody. Should be empty. Thanks! rtol 05:38, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I didn't answer this but shall know more when I finish with a radically different approach to this. May make whatever this bug is irrelevant. - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   08:16, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Numbers and info pages
Two questions:
 * 1) I'm a bit lost on the birth and death years. There are properties date-y, but all the info pages have year rather than date-y. If birth year and death year were both properties, I should be able to do death year - birth year to get age at death, right?
 * 2) I know how to write age at death to the page at which I call the function that computes it. How do I write this to a different page, say the \info page?

Age at death is a simple start. If I understand how this works, I'll add inbreeding indices and stuff. rtol 07:52, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The naming conventions of the fields are all screwed up, so I am renaming them soon. The renaming has to do with following uniform rules so that the naming is predictable, also a lot of ordering. Eg so that postpending numbers for events is more simple eg date wedding1, date wedding2, etc. rather than wedding1 date, wedding2 date.
 * Info pages have not been converted properly yet. The current values derived from info fields is very makeshift for the purposes of volume tests on the software only.  That is, Template:Set facts from info is a hack, and not part of anything permanent.  It's just scaffolding that may have some role in the transition, but is not a permanent thing.
 * Date-y and date-m are permanent fields and will be in the final version. These are for partial dates only.  When day month and year are available, these fields are irrelevant.  The reason for the redundancy is that the full "date" field will provide a day even if the user didn't state one.  This usually is = to the day when the user edited the box.  Very prone to error= so we have these partial things.  Anyway, when the info page has all three values, these will get into the date field, not the date-y and date-m fields.  Okay?
 * Really, it might be a good idea to hold off a bit longer on your inbreeding templates. There is something that is not yet done yet that will be very useful for efficient processing of this sort of analysis.  That is, if it works.  If you wait a day or two, I may have something stable for you to work with.  Of course, you may do as you please, but I just think you may have to do substantial rewrites before this thing is stable.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   08:12, 20 May 2009 (UTC)


 * No worries. I'll hold off for a while. rtol 08:53, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Oldest paternal ancestor
It's crawling. Found by great-great-granddad so far.

Please confirm or correct my understanding:
 * 1) To initialise, this puts a tag on my page that says my oldest ancestor = my father.
 * 2) It checks whether my oldest ancestor's father is there and if so, it changes the tag on my page that says that my oldest ancestor = my oldest ancestor's father.

In all this, "oldest paternal" is a local variable in the template.

If I get this correctly, it can be used for many useful things. rtol 07:37, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah. All property values are "local" and they aren't persistent.  If you execute template code that skips saving the property value- even if you did nothing to it, the value goes away.


 * Variations: you could make another that crawls matriarchal line or jumps more generations, or save more info at each generation. As you noticed, if we try to do too many queries we run into server load limits. At first we would have thought that imposed some hard limits about how many generations we could go back due to computation complexity but actually this approach suggests that is not so.  So this shows how you can do a bit of the problem then save intermediate results for processing at the next save.  That suggests that no problem is intractable.  We could achieve immense descendants or ancestors lists compiled by successive saves.  The template code could get a little complicated, but it could be entirely done in templates if necessary.  I rather think that client side processing with AWB would be more efficient and less ugly code, but this technique can be used for lots of useful things.  Have fun with it.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   08:44, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Broken
When clicking on the red link, it says: Add Person (short form): Robert I, Count of Flanders (c1032-1093) From Genealogy Jump to: navigation, search

Error: no form page was found at Person (short form).

rtol 07:22, 22 May 2009 (UTC)


 * No worries. Fixed now. rtol 07:49, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Ahnentafel
Admiring your new ahnentafel. Great work. I'd put "set ahn" in "showinfo person".

Did some experiments. return the set of people to whom CM is the maternal grandfather, while returns all descendants.

More importantly, returns all common descendants of CM and AG. This is easily put into a common descendants template. (Will do later this weekend.)

Now, if we'd have a property that works the other direction with a template "set desc" then would return all common ancestors of CM and AG -- or rather, would show that the two are not related as far as we know. rtol 08:28, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You understand the power. Yes, the inverse descendants lists are useful and should be plugged in.  Using math on the ahnentafel numbers, you will be able to do very distant relationship analysis.  Take a look at the log calculations that i doc'd on the ahnentafel convert documentation page and you probably can do all you want.  It doesn't seem to break, but I will continue an exhaustive build up to some present day ancestors.  We may lose some digits of precision, but I have a way of dealing with that problem if it arises.


 * The only trouble with this approach is how much time it takes to percolate new information throughout the tree.  If the property storage does not have some hidden limit, then it should be possible for descendants to do AND queries to find nearest common ancestors.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   08:45, 23 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Common descendants works like a dream. See Louis the Pious (778-840)/descendants rtol 10:37, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Descendants
Template:Set desc works, sort of. See Emma von Waldeck-Pyrmont (1858-1934). It only works for people with a single child, though. I guess I have to add a line for every possible child? Or is there a short-cut? rtol 15:53, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That's because the query for father or mother only generated one value. If you chop up the multiple values and feed them to your aux1, it will work fine.  There are three ways to do chopping.  The easiest is arraymap, but this technique has a problem if you cannot get the output to use something other than commas.  That might be the case with dumping out children.  The second technique is to use template output.  I think I showed that in one of the demos.  The third way is to use string functions, but this can create very opaque code as you saw in the aux routines.  Wherever possible, if you can write it so that it not only works but is easier for someone following you to figure out, then try and go the extra mile and find an easy to read way.
 * Let me know if you'd like further assistance. Basically, the way I develop these is see what I get from a basic query, like


 * , and make one piece of the puzzle work- like chopping. Then later I replace the "Juliana.."whatever test page with the generalized value (like  in this case.  - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   16:27, 23 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Arraymap is easy but does not solve the problem. I won't solve this tonight. Feel free to experiment. I'll have another go tomorrow. rtol 19:35, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It's your puppy. I could take care of this, but really I have to focus on making sure all the big tasks are solvable.  I don't need to solve them, just know that we could do what we want with a particular database structure.  So if really immense ahnentafel tables work then the descendants thing should work too.  I not yet sure that the way I used N-ary properties is the best way.  I really would like it if the engine could treat these multivalued N dimensional lists as if they were top level lists (that you could sort on each element, etc.)  Possibly we can get around those limitations for 85% of the things we want to do.  I don't know yet, so the bot will be cranking out more of these ahnentafels before I am more confident that things won't break when we do this for all individuals. - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   19:49, 23 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It is now working, building a set of descendants and which can be used to build a list of ancestors and common ancestors. See Richard S.J. Tol (1969-).
 * In the end, I reverted to "Get|Key=Child1", using the slightly confusing fact that Set=Element adds Element to Set. The auxiliary templates do not work on sets anyway, so code would have to be repeated in either case. There is no simple way to get an element from the set return by #ask or #maparray, so I reverted to the older and simpler method.
 * Lists of descendants are larger than lists of ancestors, so I guess you want to do a volume test before we announce this. Just add . rtol 07:46, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Shortcut for us
SMWintro --— Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:09, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Gerard II van Gelre (c1098-c1131)
You marked Otto II van Gelre (c1215-1271) as Generation 15 Charlemagne descendant, so presumably this is by way of Gerard II van Gelre (c1098-c1131)'s possible mother, Clémence of Aquitaine (1060-1142). I have recorded this as being the predominant theory in Gerard II's info page. If this is incorrect, then please change it back. I don't know anything about the subject. If it is correct, then 12. Gerard II van Gelre (c1098-c1131), 13. Hendrik II de jongere van Gelre (c1117-1182), 14. Otto I van Gelre (aft1145-1207), 15. Gerard IV van Zutphen en van Gelre (c1185-1229). However this would make Gerard IV's son generation 16, not 15. - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  03:42, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Lineage Charlemagne to Otto II
Charlemagne Karel I der Franken 742-814 & Himiltrudis Chimiltrudis (Himiltrud) Amatrau ca 745-ca 777 &/771 Houdiard Hildegard in de Vinzgouw von Schwaben ca 758-783
 * 1) Lodewijk I de Vrome Carolingian 778-840    Pippijn met de bochel der Karolingers 770/777-810
 * 2) Hildegardis van Francië (Hildegard) der Karolingers ca 803-860    Bernhard der Karolingers ca 797-818
 * 3) Ranulf I van Aquitanië ca 820-866    Pippijn Ii der Karolingers 815/818-ca 840
 * 4) Ranulf Ii van Aquitanië, Poitiers 848/855-890    Heribert I of Vermandois ca 840-900/907
 * 5) Ebalus Ii van Aquitanië 870/872-930/934    Heribert Ii van Vermandois der Karolingers 880/890-943
 * 6) Willem I van Aquitanië 900/915-963    Liutgarde van Vermandois der Karolingers 915/920-978
 * 7) Willem Ii "Ijzeren Arm" van Aquitanië ca 937-993/995    Emma de Blois ca 939-1003/
 * 8) Willem Iii 'de Grote' van Aquitanië 969/992-1030
 * 9) Willem V van Aquitanië 1020/1023-1085/1087
 * 10) Clementia van Poitou 1048/1055-1142
 * 11) Gerard 2,3 van Gelre ca 1098-ca 1131
 * 12) Hendrik Ii de jongere van Gelre ca 1117-1182
 * 13) Otto I van Gelre 1145/1150-1207
 * 14) Gerard 3,4 van Zutphen en van Gelre ca 1185-1229
 * 15) Otto Ii de lamme van Gelre ca 1215-1271

Fred Bergman 08:13, 24 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Right. Clementia van Poitou is Clémence of Aquitaine (1060-1142).  The generation #'s seem a little off. - <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   08:21, 24 May 2009 (UTC)