User talk:Thurstan/Archive9


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Autogrow
Lovely. I didn't think it could be so easy. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:32, January 7, 2017 (UTC)


 * Neither did I: it pays to read the documentation! Thurstan (talk) 19:18, January 7, 2017 (UTC)

Surname
Was it really worth the trouble of precise sorting? I can muck it up with one new person-article. Maybe your sorting system is smarter than mine! -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:27, January 8, 2017 (UTC)
 * I believe I added surnames "Bradford", "Crowninshield", "Evans", "Greene", "Hinckley", "Savage" and "Sherman". To compensate, I removed "Payne". Thurstan (talk) 19:22, January 8, 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, you're the only one who has added names to that page. I might add some occasionally if I knew of an easy way to search for names that had crossed the threshold. (I hope you agree that the splitting has made editing easier.) Thank you for the Evans; now mucked up your sorting (with one of my wife's sister-in-law's relatives). -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:29, January 9, 2017 (UTC)

#invoke
Seems we can't use "#invoke" imported from WP. You have probably mentioned it earlier. See Template:Userbox-2. Can you fix it or should I seek an alternative "English ancestry" template? -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 23:40, January 24, 2017 (UTC)


 * We have had support for "#invoke" for a while. However, the script implementation is missing some functions that the Wikipedia version has, so the modules often have to be fiddled with. I haven't worked out how to debug them easily, to see what exactly the error is. In the first instance, we could go back to the 23 January 2012 version of Template:Userbox-2 on Wikipedia. I will see what I can see. Thurstan (talk) 00:49, January 25, 2017 (UTC)
 * Fixed: I've copied the module across. I am intrigued that you didn't use User English ancestry which I copied across this morning. Thurstan (talk) 00:57, January 25, 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I've used that one now; it wasn't in enough categories for me to find it earlier! WP categorization of such templates is inconsistent too, and I had to create an Irish and a Welsh one separately because WP doesn't seem to have any equivalent (unless they are concealed in new-style multi-option templates with somewhat unhelpful names). Userbox seems to work OK, so maybe we don't need Userbox-2? And on the subject of multi-option templates, see my latest blog post. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 03:30, January 25, 2017 (UTC)


 * I have deleted the page called Template:User_in_New_Castle_County%26action%3Dedit too Thurstan (talk) 03:41, January 25, 2017 (UTC)

Autogrow and field size limits
I see that it is now even easier to add lots of sources to events. That's probably good.

However, I'm aware that a "property" field in a form, as distinct from the free text area, has a size limit. Did we get it raised to 5,000 once? Might it have reverted to the standard (1,000?) - which used to cause a problem for properties such as children notes - under one of the "upgrades"? Could that be a problem with the apparent "invitation" that autogrow offers? (I recall more than once filling less than half of a big input field on another website with half of what I wanted to say and being suddenly told that I had reached the limit. Not all sites are as good as Twitter or WikiTree in telling you how much space you have left.)

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:11, February 5, 2017 (UTC)


 * No, there is currently no limit to the length of properties of type "text". We had a problem with the buffer length in the string function for replacing text, which was used to display the notes and sources, but I removed that long since. There is still a buffer somewhere ("explode" prehaps?) but I don't think we have a problem at present. Some of these functions could probably be re-coded in LUA if we did have a problem. Thurstan (talk) 02:34, February 5, 2017 (UTC)

WP person infobox problems
Please have a look at Davina Elizabeth Alice Benedikte Windsor (1977) below the siblings. Maybe you can educate me on what is needed to fix it. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:12, February 10, 2017 (UTC)


 * I don't know why you want a redundant infobox that duplicates the information we already display. Thurstan (talk) 20:53, February 10, 2017 (UTC)


 * OK this time. We don't display age but we could. I've removed the box. (I feel for you folks with another heatwave; I hope you and all the lovely wildlife survive.) -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 23:35, February 10, 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you. This problem is typically caused by missing HTML closing tags, with the formatting ones like "small", "bold" and "center" being the usual suspects. This causes the software to scan for the closing tag, while ignoring the closing tags for the enclosing elements. In this particular case, the table has swallowed a heap of the following text. The first closing tag which is ignored is the "/span" at the end of the "spouse" line, so the problem is probably inside marriage. Thurstan (talk) 00:03, February 11, 2017 (UTC)
 * I looked at Marriage. The only tags are includeonly and noinclude - all proper. Gazillions of curly brackets though. I twice lost count when trying to see if they balanced. Last effort got me to line 4 before a "|date=" and it seemed that there was only one in credit at that stage so I gave up. Am I right in thinking that WP can get away with the occasional unclosure but FP can't? -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:42, February 11, 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, Wikipedia runs all output through, which fixes various errors. Maybe your marriage problem is in event? Thurstan (talk) 19:12, February 11, 2017 (UTC)


 * I've just noticed (and recategorised) Help:Htmlbug fix. You may be able to improve it. Robin Patterson (Talk) 04:56, February 22, 2017 (UTC)

The long and short of it?
.....
 * short_name=George Henry Wellington Loftus, 7th Marquess of Ely
 * long_name=George Henry Wellington Loftus

Any chance of adding a field for long name to the simple form? There seems to be room for it and it's the sort of thing I sometimes want to add. But maybe not if the definitions defy logic as above?

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:43, March 2, 2017 (UTC)


 * It ought to be easy to add. The "long name" is used by the showfacts biography, followed by the "titles", while the "short name" is used as the heading on the infobox. I like the version with the titles to be the heading on the infobox, and the version without the titles in the minibio (so that it can be followed by the titles without repetition), so to restore the logic of the names of the properties, perhaps the usages should be swapped. What do you think? Thurstan (talk) 07:52, March 2, 2017 (UTC)


 * Not easy to add for someone who does not understand all the intricacies of how the form filters code that's to be invoked only for the advanced form. I have looked at it but decided that it would be too easy for me to muck up.
 * The usages seemed OK to me when I thought about them a long time ago. A matter of taste, which goes where. You can make someone's short name longer than his long name but I don't. Maybe worth posting a proposed change as a Watercooler item or blogpost? (The short one also appears in the child table heading, I think, so that some non-standard "ultra-short" names (e.g. "John") leave a fairly uninformative heading, especially in a half-sibling table where the other parent's full name is nowhere on the page.)
 * -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:28, March 5, 2017 (UTC)

"What links here"
I'm sorry "Conde Tony" has caused you a lot of work. But his pages have shown me what I might never have suspected: that you are not perfect! http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Talk:Tony_Piazzi_(1961-2015) may not matter in this case unless one of the correspondents tries to use that link on my talk page, but my sympathies are not with them. Keep up the great endeavours, pal! -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 03:16, March 31, 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you, I think, though I must protested that as a certified perfectionist, nothing even seems perfect to me, including my own work. Thurstan (talk) 03:19, March 31, 2017 (UTC)


 * Well, now, on the subject of redirects (inspired by the above), I've just created a link to Joan of Scotland, Countess of Morton (c1428-1486) and she seems OK. Check? -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 03:45, March 31, 2017 (UTC)


 * Not okay to me: I see "Joan of Scotland, Countess of Morton (c1428-1486) was born on an unknown date ." as the minibio. Her mother's page reports no facts about her. Thurstan (talk) 03:59, March 31, 2017 (UTC)

Phlox
Some of the revered and much missed Phlox's early work includes a child list coding which I found while browsing Category:Pages ancillary to articles about individuals.

Please skim http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Wilson_Blackstock_(c1847)/children_list?action=edit and tell me whether it has anything of residual value. It uses Child, which was created by User:AMK152 (recently inactive), last edited in 2008, and may similarly be of little value.

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 03:03, April 29, 2017 (UTC)


 * I don't think so: I think it a pre-info_page version of sharing child lists between parents, which was replaced by info_pages and then by SMW properties. Thurstan (talk) 03:07, April 29, 2017 (UTC)

Pages that become targets of new redirects
Recently you pointed out problems with this. Something gets duplicated? Anyway, I've just created another such redirect. Nothing obviously wrong with the target (but I carelsssly said that about the last one!!). However, editing the target saw it treat itself as a new page with child fields. Joan Trelake (1497-1573), with detail mentioned in my 2nd-last edit summary. Does it warrant your expert attention? -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:13, May 6, 2017 (UTC)


 * It is another example of what I said above: all the SMW properties get wiped, so when the form makes an SMW query to see if the page already exists (coded that way because of the mistaken assumption that SMW queries were cheaper than #ifexists queries), the query fails, so the form acts as if the page doesn't exist. I recommend the "null edit save" before the formedit. (If you do a "purge" on the page, rather than just looking at the cached copy, you see that the properties have gone). Thurstan (talk) 06:19, May 6, 2017 (UTC)

13th-century births
Your edit summary for http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Thomas_Beke_(-1293)?diff=1306252 looks like a generic shortcut. You have deleted a couple of rare stub templates, which is fine by me, and deleted just one category, as far as I can see. Do we have no categories for 13th-century or other century births? -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 08:19, June 2, 2017 (UTC)


 * The first thing I learned when I joined this Wiki was that we didn't use some of the Wikipedia category names: "1920 births" became "Born in 1920", "13th-century births" became "Born in the 13th century", etc. I have always thought that you were one of the champions for this difference, which seems to have caused us all much grief over the years. Of course, with Afil's change, we no longer use the birth date and death date categories explicitly. Thurstan (talk) 08:40, June 2, 2017 (UTC)


 * I did support those changes and still do. But:
 * You didn't replace the births one with the corresponding "Born" one. I'll do it now.
 * We should add centuries to the list on Help:Copying from Wikipedia.
 * Same with decades?
 * -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:15, June 3, 2017 (UTC)


 * I did so last night, with a general note (don't forget millenia too): if you want to duplicate the "Born in" etc and the "Established in" for these time units, feel free. Thurstan (talk) 02:54, June 3, 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you. (I really should check my email backlog from earliest to latest instead of starting with the latest and acting on something without seeing what went before.) -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:28, June 4, 2017 (UTC)
 * That's okay, I am sure we all get caught by that! Thurstan (talk) 02:58, June 4, 2017 (UTC)