Familypedia:Familypedia Times/2009-07-01/Technology report

This is a random list of notes on technical matters which may make little sense to anyone except the good doctor.


 * A method was discovered for reliably allowing wikitext in a property. Prior schemes would lock up the page when particular templates were used.  This allows Description, Source and Notes properties to use standard wiki links and other markup.  Note that complex templates like Citation may become translated internally into a subst'd form.  I am not doing this- the Semantic Forms engine is doing it in order to protect SMW from potentially disruptive wikitext in properties.  However, the value in the form retains its original form and may be edited normally.  Use templates with caution and report any tricks or unusual problems to me.  Citation in particular is very valuable for serious genealogists and use of its various forms should be encouraged in the Familypedia Manual of Style.
 * The new page editor's interaction with typical Familypedia pages was investigated. The first huge problem is that we have large numbers of pages with embedded comments, and the new editor does not like them.  I describe a method of using dummy templates in place of embedded comments at wikia central, but the developers may have support for comments real soon now.  In the meantime, all our standard template articles can't be edited in the new editor and default to the old.  See other observations esp regarding their informal forms at wikia central.
 * Some demonstration work was done with drilldown filters. See Drilldown example for the trial articles.  I imagine our filtering will be more along the lines of the dynamically created gallery at The_Hague/1900-1919 or query tables either static on a page, or generated from the query page like this one that is linked to via Births nav link in The Hague article.  This is a showcase article for locations, similar to the showcase articles I use for persons- George Spencer Geer (1836) or Henry I, King of England (1068-1135) for stress tests and multilingual cases.  It is not as fully developed as the person articles have taken precedence.
 * PhloxBot did a run correcting a number of errors in the trial articles:
 * Non existent parameters were deleted. There is no "Day" parameter.  It is part of "date"
 * Date parameters did not use the proper format. Script, Bot and template contributors may paste the following pattern for accurate translation from a wide variety of input formats.  For instance, 12 May 1847 converts to the required "1847/05/12".
 * There is no "state" geographic unit anymore. The parameters now use the term "subdivision1" instead.
 * Other random transformations none of which are particularly interesting.