User talk:Phlox

Moved from Knife maker discussion page It would help some of us to know how you discovered this site.

Robin Patterson 01:18, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I was going to install a wikimedia engine on my family's site, but when investigating, it seemed to me that the scope would be too much for my site, due to the tree growth to other families. A general genealogy wiki would be ideal but I didn't want to fund/administer/arrange the ads to sustain it.  So when I discovered wikia was doing it, I was in with both feet. -Knife Maker 01:26, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

(I hope you transferred or memorised other places to find all the helpful links in the welcome message! - Robin)

Emigrants etc
I'm pleased to see some more bunches of migratory people being categorised. We had a flurry of them (in July, I think) when Bill was tinkering with the Mayflower and Jillaine was working in the same part of the U.S. I managed to keep a little way ahead, frantically copying Wikipedia categories (with a few from Commons where I thought they were more logical) and adding new articles or categories to them. Bill tends to add categories as an afterthought, and Jillaine was very new and willing to be guided. Mostly British and Swedish there. Now you give us some Swiss. Of course you know that immigrants are to somewhere, not from the named place, but you must have overlooked the precise terminology in the excitement of getting everybody categorised. Now that I've almost caught up, you'll notice a "category redirect". I think there's a bot that can redirect affected pages semi-automatically; but if we can't find one I may be persuaded to spend a few minutes correcting the pages manually - relatively simple to highlight "Im" and type "E". Please continue using category:Emigrants from Switzerland and consider creating subcategories of it, as is now suggested on a couple of relevant pages.

Robin Patterson 14:15, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah- Bots are perfect for this sort of thing, and it is a relief because it is trivial to do changes (even massive ones) for whatever reason- after novices have come in and made messes, or that it was decided that there was a better way of naming/ organizing.  After they are set up, it is no big deal.  If you can handle a wikitext table, you can do a bot.  Setting them up is a little bit of a hassle.
 * If you wish, I will dust off my bot scripts and install the latest and greatest pywikipedia bot code on my machine. I'd be happy to do whatever other cat rename tasks that have been piling up.  Perhaps you have a page listing maintenance tasks? Seems to me that Adjective placename pattern is a bad idea. EG:


 * swedish emigrants -> emigrants from Sweden
 * english emigrants -> emigrants from England
 * australian people -> people of Australia
 * dutch americans -> Ancestry from the Netherlands (?)
 * two problems here. Someone from Brazil is an american too, but imagine the edit wars when some folks accurately start Brazilians "portugese americans" cat too.  Second problem is that the cat says two things- where they came from and where there are now.  So really, the where they are now should be in some neutral non pov kind of name like Resident of [countryname].  Resident because if you use citizen then you alienate huge migrant populations in the US and Europe.  Sure you can combine them into a single cat, but it would get torturous.  So what do you do with Portuguese American?  Resident of USA with ancestors from Portugal?  Jeez.
 * Anyway- No big deal if you don't want to do anything on it. As a guy with swiss blood running in his veins, I like things to be tidy and uniform, but I see the opposite side of the argument. I don't care enough to engage in the endless debates over cat names but really there shouldn't be multiple ways of naming particular classes of category names.  A lot easier to establish the pattern now, and head off a lot of work downstream.
 * So look, Robin- if point me to a list of To Do maintenance tasks, I'll take a look at them and see which might be well suited to bots. My general practice was to put up a warning message with a pointer to a discussion page.  Leave the message for two weeks and if no raging debates, do the cat rename.  Later, run the bot to undo errors / exceptions for intrasigent/lowd complainers that inevitably crop up.
 * I guess we have a super small population now, so I could skip the warning message bit.
 * I'm not signing up for running such a bot on a regular basis, but I wouldn't mind knocking off some tasks on your list if they aren't super complicated
 * How does that sound? -Mak 17:34, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Category redirect
Thanks for all of that, Mak. You and I will get on like a house on fire.

I presume the bot runs without supervision on any task you set it to.

First task (after the Immigrants from Switzerland, which you may have done already) : please look at http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Category_talk:Lists_of_People_by_Surname#We_could_do_without_this_category and leave it a week or two (as you suggest above) then see what you can do. (Remind me to check those "templates" and fix any that still have that cat. There are some "decade" and other cats I want to add to them, so I'm not inviting you or AMK to do that.)

Robin Patterson 15:21, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Category:Wikia maintenance
Robin Patterson 15:25, 6 September 2007 (UTC)