User talk:Phlox/Archive 3

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="#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)