User talk:Phlox

 '''Feel free to Drop me a note. Due to my official duties I prefer that all communications be transparent, so please post here rather than emailing unless absolutely necessary.''' Archived talk: 1 | 2 | 3: ending 2009-Apr | 4: 2009-May | 5: 2009-Jun/Jul | 6

nesting getfact
Any idea why showfacts ahnentree does not work? Example at Herbert III of Meaux (c950-995)/ahnentafel. The sixth generation does not display in the tree, but they do display individually by. In fact, if I just copy the code of the template, it works!

There is no issue with size limits or parserfunctions or anything I could think of. rtol 19:37, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
 * On the face of it, it looks a little baffling. There is a limit to the complexity of a query (for example if you test for a property with 20 different values).  You may be running into something like that.  As I recall, showfact does a lot more than getfact.  I don't know how much I have implemented, but the intent is to display the fact relative to the user's language preferences.  Getfact just returns whatever value is stored in the property of the basepage for that person.  I will make a note to probe for capacity limits when I go back into the showfact code.   23:09, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Nesting concepts
works to find quadruple descendants. This cannot be done without concepts because 4 conditions with 3 nests each is too much.

However, does not work. The quadruple concept is needed to find octuple descendant (Leopold III).

Any suggestions?rtol 11:19, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 * It looks like an interesting inquiry, but I am not aware of any knowledge I might have regarding what would cause this phenomenon. Although I am very curious about it, I regret I cannot investigate.  Ireally should finish getting the first rev of the refactored facts templates and forms in place.  I did recall seeing that there are diagnostic flags that can be set to investigate what SQL operations are being performed.  I didn't look at your particular cases, but if your syntax is well formed, I would probably start getting very curious about what the engine is doing with these queries. Not sure where I saw this mention of sql troubleshooting in the docs though.   16:17, 8 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I rooted around. #concept has fewer functions and options than #ask, and debugging is not an option for #concept. You can use the word "concept" only once on a Concept: page, so I guess that's where it goes wrong.
 * I had hoped to use concepts to build nested queries, but there is only one nest allowed. rtol 20:05, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Q:
What I have to do for transfer all of that information to genealogy.wiki.com?
 * Интересный. An excellently executed site.  I particularly like the chart.  I am guessing that this is a php extension?


 * If I did the transfer, I personally would use pywikipedia. I do not recommend it to others because it is tedious to use.  However, it is also possible to export as XML from that wiki, then transform the xml via a scripting language or word processor macros into a format suitable for familypedia.


 * Thanks for the pointer. This is very interesting indeed.  I am confused by the article counts, I see there are 88K pages, but "За исключением них, есть 754 страниц, которые считаются полноценными статьями. "!  This seems strange.  Can you estimate the number of persons in the database?   20:26, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Проблема в том, что новые участники (получив статус администратора) стали хозяйничать и влазить в чужое родословное дерево искажая информацию. По этой причине мы решили перенести всю свою работу (по составлению родословного дерева рода) в другое место.
 * I see. Since your site is CC2.5, I might at some time create an importer from Rodovid if there is high quality material there.  However, I have a mountain of work already.


 * It appears that Rodovid has disabled export as well as the ability to directly view the contents of articles. This means that it will be more complicated to transfer material than I indicated earlier.  I am sorry I cannot be of greater assistance.   03:09, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Genealogy:Multilingual messages
I get a permission error when I want to translate Married? to Verheiratet?

BTW, I recall translating a lot of these terms before. Can't recall where they are saved though. rtol 12:12, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Here's one I did: Translations:fm-birth/nl rtol 12:14, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * The real messages are in the Mediawiki name space.  I set up the multilingual messages pages so that anyone could change them.  To do this, the messages would be stored temporarily in the Translations pseudo namespace and later copied via bot to the Mediawiki name space.  Since no one besides you and a few brief uses by others used this, I switched it temporarily to edit mediawiki namespace directly so that I could quickly establish new messages.


 * The bad news is that it is not a simple matter of setting it back to the translations namespace to add your names. The tables have a capacity problem.  You will note on the bottom of the first page that existing messages like fm-mother do not display.  That is because it has ran into processing limits.  So the whole scheme has to be refactored.  I do think we want to have everyone be able to add/correct the messages, so I want to stay with the translations: pseudo namespace scheme.  Anyway, if you want to add these, you could clone the current pages and set it to Translations rather than mediawiki prefix.  Or you could manually correct the url after getting the access error to the mediawiki page.   These names are beginning to stabilize, but a lot of them are obsolete and require no translation.


 * You are welcome to try and refactor the thing yourself, but I am pressing on with completion of the main templates so we can get this puppy to alpha release status.  16:22, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Copied message from Request for adminship
This is copied from an archived thread. Bold editors often offend, but it is our choice whether we are offended or whether we assume good faith (Ga uit van goede wil). In particular, I am concerned about the content of this edit.


 * It is my opinion, that if an user in a discussion removes a part of the arguments of the other user, then there is no good faith

---
 * Extract from: Request_for_Adminship:_DeGraffJE:

Fred, I understand that you have been trying to get things organized with the Babel templates. However it is true that we generally follow wikipedia rules and guidelines, and there were some toes that you may have inadvertently stepped on when editing User pages.


 * Every new contributor receives an automatic start of his user page, but that template is not actual en must be improved. I proposed a renewal. But nobody gave a reaction. So I changed that message then in the user page, this has nothing to do with changing an used userpage, these were unused userpages.

The WP guideline about Editing someone else's User page is not present in the Dutch version of Wikipedia, but roughly translated:

"Als een traditie, Wikipedia biedt ruime breedtegraad aan gebruikers om hun user space als zij dat nodig achten."


 * that translation is very bad and not to understand, just as the translation of my dutch text in the relevant article. I understand the english text good, the dutch text should be traditioneel geeft Wikipedia aan gebruikers alle ruimte om hun gebruikerspagina in te vullen zoals zij dat zelf willen. I see that the right to edit the userpage is not absolute exclusive, but it is tradition to intervene as little as possible. That makes the point: there are rules. There are interpretations of the rules. There are persons who are flexible with the rules and there are persons captured in the rules. I know you as a person who is very flexible with the rules, but also using the rules if that is necessary. I remember me that you thought there was a conflict between Richard Tol and me and you proposed to (inter)mediate. In fact there was no conflict but a discussion and we dutch don't be carefull in this matters and say what we have to say and find each other in a solution, we call that: we are straight through sea. In english is this perhaps not to understand, just as our: now comes the monkey out of the sleeve (doesn't exist in english I think, but Dutch is a richer language than english and has among others more variation in words).

There are other guidelines your most recent post here is in conflict with, for example wikipedia:nl:Wikipedia:Bijt de nieuwelingen niet,
 * I am sorry, but I am not aware of a fact that I was hostile to any newcomer!

and wikipedia:nl:Wikipedia:Geen persoonlijke aanvallen.


 * I am sorry again, but I did no personal attack, I did research and comment to content and behaviour, what was in my opinion not right for a future admin and then I didn't mention the fact that that person doesn't use person infopages, because it is my opinion that Familipedia is still under construction and not fully ready to have contributors for genealogic persons. There are still so much differency in personpages to be unified to a new standard that it will last sometime before there is a new definitive standard I think.

I personally have strong emotions on many issues and I understand it is difficult to adhere to wikipedia:nl:Wikipedia:Koel blijven.


 * I have to admit that I had a moment of weakness and I did not stay cool when I wrote Ik hoop niet dat we dit gezeik houden met DeGraffJE (I don't hope that DeGraffJE continue this shit discussion) but the content was further without emotion and straight based on facts, except the phrase re the LDS church.

I realize you may not be aware of these implicit guidelines because some of them have not been copied and adapted to Familypedia. However I cannot say this strongly enough. It is completely irrelevant whether a contributor has different religious views than we do, or whether they contribute to other sites.


 * I agree with you that the religion of a contributor is most times completely irrelevant. I had a conflict with a LDS admin, bureaucrat and sysop of WeRelate and I am blocked now 1 year for vandalism there. In the behaviour of DeGraffJE I thought to recognise the same pretentions and lack of neutrality. I asked;Is not that a coincidence? and I concluded the same background could not be coincidental. That was perhaps wrong done.

Really, what William Allen Shade (Elrondair) said earlier seems quite true. This looks like a personal conflict.


 * I don't see this as a personal conflict. I don't know DeGraffJE and never before this we had a communication which each other. It is just that I know that the attractivity of a site can completely disappear when the site has the wrong admin(s).

Perhaps it is best to wait a week before either of you posts anything more on this topic. Apart from the admin request process, perhaps the two of you can take this time to resolve these differences in an amicable fashion. How does that sound? 17:55, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes it sounds good, positive is that DeGraffJE withdrew his request -- Fred Bergman 07:30, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I am still with Elrondair. It looks personal and from what I saw on a quick scan of edits, there were breaches of behavior guidelines.  As you noted, the community here is very flexible with rules, but it is also true that DeGraffe had a prima facie case for what is called an administrator incident dispute on wikipedia.  Regardless of the apparent flexibility, anyone who has a legitimate case based on breach of guidelines can bring them to an administrator.  If the administrator agrees the behavior was in breach, then this can result in a warn, block and eventually a ban of the other contributor.  Administrators are to carry out the will of the community, and if someone subjected to administrative action feels that there was abuse of power, then they can bring it to a review by other administrators.  This is a time proven process.


 * As to your point about LDS affiliation. Specific instances of bias or deception are relevant, affiliations are not.  While we are flexible with guidelines at familypedia, we also are very serious about tolerance.  The basis of your point was that DeGraffJE was a member of the LDS church and that fact in itself had some bearing on his request for adminship.  Well, it doesn't.  Neither does it matter what the person's gender, race, nationality or sexual preference is.  DeGraffJE was open about his history on WP, and there should be plenty of edit history there to reveal whether your hypothesis about bias is correct or not.  Yet you did not base your case on demonstrating bias but on the basis of his membership in a group that holds views you do not share.  I know it is time consuming to make the case, but if you cannot then all you have is suspicions based on on your profile of who you think would be an offender in the future.  This does not assume good faith.


 * The point that DeGraffeJE was a relative newcomer also was irrelevant. There is no pecking order based on numbers of edits and simply because someone has made large numbers of edits or is an administrator does not entitled them to make newcomers feel unwelcome.  Newcomers are encouraged to be bold and make changes ad DeGraffe did, and they should not feel compelled to be deferential to others based on edit counts or administrator status.  That can be a hard pill to swallow sometimes as newcomers often are mistaken.  At the end of the day, Wikipedia has demonstrated that it benefits by bending significantly to make newcomers feel welcome.  We should do the same.


 * Thanks for your attention to the guidelines. I hope that no one brings a dispute with you to an ANI resolution process.


 * 16:53, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't aware of the wikipedia rules, I followed my intuition. If you are convinced that I acted the wrong way according the sphere at Familypedia and you are convinced that DeGraffJE could be a good admin, then I will public apologise and nominate DeGraffJE for admin, without opposition. I shall stop activating new users at their userpages, improving and actualising userpages Fred Bergman 05:56, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
 * If DeGraffJE is nominated again, I think you should make up your own mind about his qualifications as admin. He possibly would be a good admin, but I did not fully investigate his credentials and claims, so I hadn't yet decided.  If everything checked out, I probably would have supported.  I was not swayed by anything you wrote because there was not any factual evidence backing up your suspicions.


 * I didn't investigate all of the statements made by DeGraffe about the disputes with you, but if he requests it I shall. From the edits I did look at, I saw you did make personal attacks, and you did fail to assume good faith.  We can't have that here.  DeGraffe also erred when he accused you of vandalism in his edit summary, failing to recognize your good faith in trying to improve our tracking of contributor language abilities.


 * Please continue to be bold and make improvements to Familypedia. I admire your enthusiasm, but be aware that we do by and large follow wikipedia guidelines for behavior.  I recommend you familiarize yourself with them.  If you overstep those guidelines, then administrators are required to take action if complaints are made.


 * Thanks for your attention to this Fred. I hope things work out ok between you and DeGraffe.


 * Regards, 06:28, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

for your information
-- Fred Bergman 12:42, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Nominate for Adminship: DeGraffJE
'''I had a discussion with Phlox, concerning my opposition against the request of DeGraffJE for Adminship. That discussion made me aware of the fact that there are Wikipediarules, which also have to be followed at Familypedia. According that I acted the wrong way. For that reason I apologise to DeGraffJE and, I nominate him again for the Adminship, because he was so polite to withdrew based on my incorrect behaviour and then I will be so correct to repair the situation.-- Fred Bergman 06:14, 17 August 2009 (UTC)'''

Sjabloon:Persoon
Thanks ! -- Fred Bergman 20:12, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Chickamauga
Not sure what you're up to now, but I trust it will be something good.

A logical extension is to generate a list of people who were killed here. I noted that we have a number of people who met their end at Battles of Azincourt and the Somme. Would we create a property for this? Property:Died at battle of? rtol 09:43, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Good question. It perhaps is general interest, so I posted my thoughts on this at Forum:Events.   17:33, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Searching ancestors
I am searching for ancestors of the legendary Pier Gerlofs Donia... I know he was a noble man and a rich landowner in the early 16th century. He lived from 1480-1520. He had a son and a daughter, both of whom reached adulthood. I wonder what happened to their decendents, who they were and where they lived. I heard some of his decendents later on moved to the US, where as others stayed in Frisia or in the Netherlands and others went to Denmark. I made a page to ease my search.

I also wonder what happened to his nephew Wijerd Jelckama. Both are well known folk heroes and historical characters in Frisian history. I want to know who are there decendents and where their decendents live. I am of Frisian ancestry myself, so I could perhaps be a decendent.

I know for a fact that Donia had black hair, a light brown skin and fierce black eyes. He was described as a dark man: I wonder if he was an African man or a Morish man. He was very tall (standing at a height of 7 feet tall) and extremely strong. He was heavy built, broad shouldered and barrel chested. He had large hands and feet and a low voice. He was a frightening man who made quite an impression on his contempories.

He died at the age of 40, as a poor man, having lost all his possesions by that point. The fact that he was of gargantuan size and that he died young could indicate he has suffered from a growth disorder, something he may have passed on the next generations.

His nephew who went by the name of Wijerd Jelckama (1490-1523) was about the same size so it could have run in the family. Perhaps there are still people of Frisian ancestry (or any other) who have a similar appearance and may know more about the faith of these individuals and their decendents? I know Donia's mother belonged to the nobility and I know his ancestors had been knights. I hope someone will respond. Pierius Magnus 12:55, September 11, 2009 (UTC)


 * Very interesting question. Unfortunately, I am the primary engineer on some needed software for the site and so I have very little time to research this.  I have copied your inquiry to our forum and hope someone will take an interest.  BTW- I like the idea of having a 'Featured inquiries' on the home page.   16:11, September 11, 2009 (UTC)

Hope this will help you (whenever you find time): I can tell you my paternal grandmother's name is van Dam. I know she was born in Frisia (Friesland), in Warns 83 years ago (in 1926 I believe). Her father and mother came from the area, yet her grandfather worked in a milk factory in the East of Frisia, and so did his father, they were born in the 19th century. That's about as much as I know of my family from Frisia. Then my mother was born in Frisia, but only half-Frisian. Her mother (my maternal grandmother) was born in the 1940's and her maiden name was Dallinga, which is a Frisian name. One of her grandfathers was a miller (my great-great grandfather). He was born, I believe in the 1860's and his father and grandfather have been Frisian millers so the line is traceable all the way to the 18th or even the 17th century. No Donia's or Jelckama's in the family tree. But possible related in the female line. Pierius Magnus 16:43, September 11, 2009 (UTC)


 * I am more interested in the decendents of Donia and Jelckama then I am in my own link to them! Pierius Magnus 16:43, September 11, 2009 (UTC)

'''PS: Where is your forum located? Could you give me a direct link so I can see the inquiry and any reactions on there? Pierius Magnus 17:18, September 11, 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry- I placed a forum note at Forum:Pier Gerlofs Donia descendants?. I expect that User:Rtol is the most likely person to know something about this subject.   17:29, September 11, 2009 (UTC)

User:Bergsmit has helped me. However, his search has not given any valuable results. According to his search, Pier Gerlofs Donia had a son in 1454 - the son of Grutte Pier I was looking for, so he said. But that is impossible, because the Pier Gerlofs Donia I am talking about, the famous folk hero Grutte Pier, has been born in 1480 (or around that time) and died in 1480. So the search came up with the wrong people. The man he said was Pier Gerlofs Donia, is, in my opinion, more likely the father of the man I am looking for! I am not looking for someone born earlier then 1480, and someone who died in 1520. So the search still has no results. If Bergsmit's sources are correct (which cannot possibly be the case) that would mean the giant freedom fighter chopping of heads and fighting hundreds of enemies at once, was instead a frail old man well in his eighties... :)

All sources list Pier Gerlofs Donia (Grutte Pier) as born in 1480.

Pierius Magnus 21:39, September 11, 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes. What Fred posted seems to dispute the information in wikipedia.  Your information seems to conform to what is in WP.  Conflicting information like that is not unusual for legendary figures.  I made a response in the Forum concerning one of the sources I looked at from the Wikipedia article.  I provided a link so that you can read it from the dutch.  Translate.google.com is very useful for this sort of research.   It will take some work sorting out the fact from fiction.  Very interesting subject.   22:17, September 11, 2009 (UTC)

Challenged by Categories
Can you take a look at my page for William Newton Burke. I'm trying to establish some sub categories for the civil war. I had noticed that the Civil War category took me directly to units so I tried to create a sub category under Civil War USA for the Confederate States Army with a link to the wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Army below that I wanted to place the unit name. This seemed to me to be a more logical way to approach this. Does this make sense? Did I do it correctly? My goal would be that anyone else with a person in the same unit could easily make the connection.

Thanks for any assistance. --Razinni 12:12, September 12, 2009 (UTC)
 * Let me say that's a nice bit of research you have completed. I have a dozen known relatives on both sides of the Civil war (either from Ohio or Georgia).  Nearly all were left in unmarked graves near the battlefields.
 * First off, concerning the names of things and the categories- observe Wikipedia naming and category structure. There is some variations in conventions, but I would suggest you follow whatever naming is recommended by the Wikipedia Military History project.  That is the best bet for subject matter experts and people who care about the logic of categorization.  My uninformed first opinion is that this list at Alabama Civil War Confederate units seems logical and uniform- appearing to follow the historical names.  Since there is no article yet on Wikipedia for the 60th, I personally would create a wikipedia article named 60th Regiment Tennessee Infantry
 * As for content of the article I see there is an article on the 60th Tennessee at . Do you know if that material public domain/ ok to copy under licenses like GFDL or Creative commons?  If so, wikipedia should have content like that.  The other regimental histories are more sparse.  You will see that many of them follow the same style because they are simple copies from public domain source listed in their bibliographies.  Anyway, if you do decide to create that article, we will have a copy here.  (We will be mirroring all military unit articles here.)
 * Once we have the name, we make the category follow it. The Category for William Newton Burke (1839-1906) would then be Category:60th Regiment Tennessee Infantry.  The category structure would follow wikipedia's structure.  Again, there are variations in standards, but following Wikipedia's lead this would be a subcategory of Category:Tennessee Civil War regiments.
 * Note that much material at a detail level is not sufficiently notable to be included in Wikipedia. For example, the detail of the 17th Ohio Infantry actions at the Battle of Chickamauga is recorded here, but not at Wikipedia.  Perhaps your will find details about the particular actions of William Burke's unit at Vicksburg and can document it here.  It is tougher to come by Confederate unit information, but it has been done.
 * We are working on a more comprehensive solution to organizing this sort of information, but in the meantime if you stick to wikipedia names and category structure, you will not go far wrong.
 * Thanks for contributing to Familypedia's civil war period articles. I think it is a great shame that the histories of so many ancestors are being ignored and worse, lost to time.   17:52, September 12, 2009 (UTC)

Thanks again for all of your help. Can you please delete the page I created for the 60th Tennesse Mounted Infantry regiment it is now all included in the 60th Infantry Regiment page. I also added in the discussion section that I am available to do 'look ups' for anyone thinks they have a relative in the 60th but that actually should include any civil war unit from Tennessee. Lastly, I'm learning as much as possible about Wikis and I really appreciate you taking the time to support me. The key here is the content of course but presenting it needs to be done so others can access it easily.

The family I'm working on is fairly large with a common last name Burke and the variations are everywhere. For each individual listed do they require an INFO page? My original idea was to only build Info pages for the direct Ancestors and not their siblings.

Again, thanks for all your help, I have a good deal of information about William as he was captured at Vicksburg and held in Fort Deleware where he was shot and wounded.

--Razinni 13:19, September 15, 2009 (UTC)
 * Currently, all individuals do require an info page. Within a few months this will no longer be required, and all work you entered into info pages will be moved over to the new easier to use format.  For now, you need to create them.


 * You are correct that ease of referencing information is key. Wikis tend to be informal, but when it comes to what we name things in articles, we all have to be on the same page.  That is why we  rigidly adhere to Wikipedia names for things.  For example names of places should use the wikipedia article name if it exists.  Example: setting birth town to St. Petersburg would be either Birth town= St. Petersburg, Florida  or St. Petersburg, Pennsylvania, or Saint Petersburg.  These names are automatically suggested in a form in the new system, but now must be manually looked up.


 * To give you a glimpse of how our searching will work, I have included a working prototype at User:Razinni/query. It currently only supports advanced search with a highly complicated form, but you can get an idea of the volume of details what we will be able to search on.  Basically every item on the info  page (plus a lot more that info pages never supported) can be queried on.


 * Anyway, just continue along as you are encoding things as info pages. It's a little tricky using the new system so I don't want to get people relying on it just yet.  Hope this helps.

19:49, September 15, 2009 (UTC)

Please advise
Can you please look at this page and tell me what I've done wrong? I believe I followed instructions for creating a surname article but as you will be able to tell it isn't correct. *sigh*

http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Burke_(surname)

--Razinni 19:19, September 15, 2009 (UTC)


 * I assume you pasted some text into the editor from a page that instructed you how to create a surname article.  What is the name of that instruction page?  There is a extra step you must do now.  If you are using the new fancy editor, you have to click an extra button before pasting.  It is the little black square on the far right of the toolbar.  After clicking that, then you do the paste.   19:28, September 15, 2009 (UTC)

sup!
hi do i have to make a user?--118.90.13.168 00:26, September 18, 2009 (UTC)
 * No, but if you do, there will be fewer advertisements, and you will benefit from quite a few of other features. Also, you will be able to set your language preference if it is not english- Various aspects of the user interface are multilingual.   00:57, September 18, 2009 (UTC)

Please advise, photo credit
Hello there! I wanted to add an image to William the Conqueror's page. I've retouched a photo from Wikipedia to make the details more visible. But I'd like to give credit to the photographer but I'm not seeing how to link them. Should I have uploaded it as a version of the original on Wikipedia, and then used that link for Familypedia?

Original: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/Conquerant_détail.jpg/450px-Conquerant_détail.jpg

my retouched version: http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/genealogy/images/8/83/Conquerant_détai_lighter.jpg

Thanks, yahna

Yahna 02:25, September 20, 2009 (UTC)

Thank You
Thank you for your help with the photo credits. Good people make my heart warm. English and Genealogy are the only languages I speak. Let me know if you need any photo retouching.

Take care, yahna

Yahna 22:42, September 20, 2009 (UTC)

Thank You
Thank you for your help with the photo credits. Good people make my heart warm. English and Genealogy are the only languages I speak. Let me know if you need any photo retouching.

Take care, yahna

Yahna 22:42, September 20, 2009 (UTC)

Ancestors and descendants
The lists of ancestors and descendants have disappeared. Any hint? set ahn and set dsc have not been changed, and they do not (?) use proporties that had their names changed. rtol 06:01, September 21, 2009 (UTC)
 * I hadn't seen you around for a while so I turned them off temporarily while I was doing some upgrades to articles. Feel free to undo my last edits.    Does this destroy the properties?   06:09, September 21, 2009 (UTC)

This issue of fragility must be dealt with. You have a feature that is interesting to visitors so we need to find a way to store these values persistently. Also, I remain concerned about the inherant N^2 computational complexity of this operation, and suspect that it may well substantially slow down the site. I know you dispute that. I can tell you that the site has been very fast since it was turned off. Anyway- we will work this out. If you don't come up with something, I'll take a look at it before we go around promoting the site as the next best thing since the invention of sliced bread. ;-) 18:55, September 21, 2009 (UTC)
 * Undone. Turning them off does destroy the properties, and rather rapidly so. It also takes the derived properties, like Married: Cousin and the Coefficient of Inbreeding. rtol 17:13, September 21, 2009 (UTC)
 * I was not aware that they are constantly refreshing pages. Last I checked they had a huge backlog on our job queue.  Sorry.
 * All properties are constantly refreshed. When you changed "birth date-y" to "birth year", you wiped out all "age mother at birth" and "age father at birth". They are now being rebuild. The lists of ancestors and descendants are big and complicated properties, but as far as I can tell they behave like all other properties: here today, gone tomorrow. rtol 19:38, September 21, 2009 (UTC)


 * Here's a test. ahn convert has "< 2025". 2025 = 2^10 + 1. If that is changed to 65 = 2^5 + 1, only a first five generations will be displayed. Similarly desc convert has "<11". If that is "<6", only the first five generations will be displayed. rtol 19:49, September 21, 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry for the multiple changes. It's getting late here. The inbreeding test works on the first five generations of the descendants list (too many nested ifs to test if you married your fourth cousin), so nothing breaks with five generations only. rtol 19:55, September 21, 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't know how to do an objective test for site speed. rtol 19:55, September 21, 2009 (UTC)

Well I must have made realy clobbered your data then. I haven't looked- do you know how many had the ancestor /descendant properties wiped out? I'm sorry for causing the damage.

I understand that what is displayed is limited, but as I recall, wasn't the thing cascading this massive list that has N^2 dimensions? I suppose we would have to do a code review to satisfy my questions, but perhaps that would be beside the point due to a possibly better approach to this sort of exercise of the database. More on that below.

Regarding the fragility issue: The way the code stores results must be fundamentally the same as how it was in June then. Obviously the facts properties aren't loaded with such a "house of cards" approach. Even if I didn't use forms, I would still have a template that loaded up all properties from values stored persistently in parameters. That makes them far less fragile. If anyone damages any of the showfacts templates or there are other conditions such as a database reload, all data is not lost since the facts data is also stored in parameters. I know this seems beyond the realm of possibility due to the way wikitext works but I think there is a solution. If we fail to solve it we are just going to keep having this kind of crash except on a much larger scale.


 * The wipe-out of "age parent at birth" was 90%. The wipe-out of ancestor and descendant lists was less dramatic, as this was done later and the servers seemed busy with something else.
 * If you could show me how to store properties as parameters -- either by pointing to an existing template or by writing a template for a simple one like "age at death" -- I'll replicate this for the others. rtol 05:26, September 22, 2009 (UTC)

Anyway, my thinking on it is only an idea for an idea at this point, but perhaps you have time to explore it it:

It seems to me the way to do these sorts of post processing tasks on the familypedia knowlegebase is not through templates but via javascript gadgets. This direction would also have the advantage of giving you a real programming language and the ability to complex database queries of the knowlegebase. I am messing with SMW phase 1 stuff now, but this is where phase two will go. If interested in exploring this, take a look at the gadgets extension and how I installed the File page ImageAnnotator code. Actually, it is not all that scary- just install FireBug and set some breakpoints and play around. You basically would submit Ajax calls to fetch data from properties for you, then you can do all sorts of intermediate calculations. Beats the crap out of trying to jury rig your stuff in Wikitext templates. Anyhow, in the same way that image annotator saves data, the javascript can write your results to wikitext parameters on the page. 20:20, September 21, 2009 (UTC)


 * I'll be busy with other things the coming months. rtol 05:26, September 22, 2009 (UTC)
 * For age of parents, there is no laborious iteration like what is needed for your ancestors tree, so I'm not sure what advantage there would be to setting it persistently since it will be recalculated rapidly. If 90% was nuked in a day, then 90% should be restored in the same time period. The ancestor tree I can see the motivation to cache it in parameters.


 * Like I said, I think that javascript is the better way to go at this but if you don't have time to figure out the optimal solution, then you could probably fudge it using autowikibrowser.  For the ancestors data, you would have autowikibrowser insert a line at the end of the page:
 * Something like that would set them permanently. If myAncestorsProp exists, then perhaps the set anc template can display parameter data rather than do its normal more computationally intensive process.    06:48, September 22, 2009 (UTC)
 * Something like that would set them permanently. If myAncestorsProp exists, then perhaps the set anc template can display parameter data rather than do its normal more computationally intensive process.    06:48, September 22, 2009 (UTC)

Switched set ahn and set dsc back on, but for five generations only (in ahn convert and desc convert.

Also found your guidance on apostrophe (if you recall that discussion): It is in the documentation of set ahn! rtol 06:14, September 27, 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't know how to test performance. There are many factors, including a less-then-perfect internet provider here in Dublin. Limiting the ancestors and descendants lists to 5 generations should take away much of the pain. For the ancestors, up to 64+128+256+1024+2048/2+4+8+16+32+64+128+256+1024+2048=98% rtol 07:36, September 27, 2009 (UTC)
 * It doesn't have to be complicated. Once, I bought stopwatches for all the engineers in my group.  If it were my routine, I'd use one on an autowikipedia run refreshing 20 pages with it on versus when the templates are off.  If they are roughly the same for the same time of day, then it is a good first sniff test on whether you are introducing a huge performance penalty.  It's only a sniff test though because it does not prove the negative.     07:54, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

Facebook
The secret to getting a Facebook page for a dead person is to have a "fan" page. Here is the secret link to create one, book mark it: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. You can create a fan page, or you can create a group. I have groups for my surnames, and fan pages for the individuals. The only problem is you cant change the name, so don't make a mistake or you will have to delete and start again. I have been tending towards "David Emanuel Wahlberg (1882-1949)" instead of just "David Emanuel Wahlberg (1882-1949)" and "Tillie Olson (1885-1918) Wintrone" for married women. Have you been adding to Knol too? --Richard Arthur Norton I 03:04, September 22, 2009 (UTC)

template issues
Thanks for checking on it. I'm seeing the following errors at this page: http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Genealogy_talk:Info_pages/person_article_template Biography: was born,  and is now Expression error: Missing operand for - years of age. Children: Warning- Page "Info pages/info" does not exist. Also it seems to have added a category of "Urancestors" to the template although I've never done anything with that category. Thanks for pointing me to the Form:Person-ex. I'll try converting the pages over and let you know if I get stuck. My concern was I had messed up the template for everyone. Thanks!

Jschulte 20:02, September 24, 2009 (UTC)

I want my name remove from this page. My name is Jo Ellen Tomerlin and I have never given my permission for it to be used with this publication. I am a private citizen and do not want to be associated with these criminals. Remove my name at once. The use of my name is only at the cost of $100,000.00 One hundred thousand dollars per day. Again remove my name from the Henry M Tomerlin web page now.
 * Response on your talk page. user talk:70.190.225.112 06:26, September 25, 2009 (UTC)

Info page creation
I think the showfacts stuff is ready for your use now and there is no need for you to create info pages. Please phase in use of the template scheme used by the articles using template:showfacts person-ex. These for the most part require no double flushing and employ a comprehensive solution to the multilingual problem.

Probably the set ancestor/ descendant stuff need -ex versions to access the new field names. Once everything including the info pages are upgraded, we all be using the same property names. I probably won't be ready to upgrade info pages until late next week.

Okay? ~ Phlox 15:32, September 26, 2009 (UTC)


 * I'll give it a go. I'll probably copy and edit templates, as I suffer from form-aversion.
 * I've used Thurstan's way of working, and this poses no problems for "my" templates. As long as SMW templates is called, things work fine. rtol 07:45, September 27, 2009 (UTC)
 * I edit directly on occasion. Note that Property:Sex Must be set, as it is used as a general test for existence of a showfacts compatible article.  Also, you may trip over some details about legal values that forms automatically enforce.  In some cases you can detect these errors by looking for Yellow warnings in the facts box.  The full list of parameters is maintained at Help:Properties for persons (showfacts).  Yeah-there are quite a few.  I used common repeating patterns for events so hopefully it will be usable enough for manual editors.  Feel free to expand on notes that you think useful.   17:43, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

Forms
((Rtol- I moved your post to Forum:Questions about forms as they are of wider interest) 17:32, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

Peter Stanley 1539-1583
Hi,

I hope that Peter is a descendant of Thomas 2nd Earl of Stanley but the link is tenous at best I have looked at Tudor Place and I can find his sources have you been able to ascertain the Source for Peter.

I have read and reread Burkes peerage and can not find his father Thomas 1515 nor Peter himself if you can provide a source I would be indebited to you.

Regards Linda Challinor 17:53, September 27, 2009 (UTC)Linda
 * (moved to Forum:Peter Stanley 1539-1583) 18:43, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

minor error
I'm using the new format, but copy the page of the parent to the kids and then edit (as this is faster). At first save, I get "error-smwbasepage="" This does not seem to cause any problems, and disappears at the second save. rtol 05:23, September 29, 2009 (UTC)


 * You get that on first form save too. I'm going to heavily revamp the smwpage stuff and it's pretty broken now anyway.  I should probably just hack it to shut off that noise.   06:38, September 29, 2009 (UTC)
 * Green check.svg Fixed. 05:45, September 30, 2009 (UTC)

books and apostrophes
I see you met the apostrophe again. Your notes on how to get around that are on set ahn.
 * It is a pain. Either we tell contributors to use something weird like ~ tildes instead of semicolons to separate items in a list, or we require the renaming of countless pages on multiple wikipedia's that may have an html entity in the pagename.   21:16, September 30, 2009 (UTC)

I've copied all the book templates from Wikipedia. Seems pretty straightforward, but there needs to be a Special page Genealogy:Books. Can you as a Bureaucrat make that or do I need to ask Wikia staff? rtol 20:51, September 30, 2009 (UTC)
 * I would have done this myself earlier but we can't do the books until we have the required extension approved by wikia and then installed.  Until then, the templates will be non functional.  No worries though- I made this request to wikia staff, so it should be in the pipeline.   21:12, September 30, 2009 (UTC)
 * oops. Wrong place for fix note.  Anyway, on the books thing, the deal with that is that they are working on something similar and it will be out shortly.   If we stick to the CSS conventions and the not print version templates we won't go far wrong.  However it might not depend on the wikipedia type templates....  05:24, October 1, 2009 (UTC)

A plus (+) instead of a semicolon is by far the best choice, as it is easy to spot on the screen and on the keyboard, and as it somewhat logical wife1+wife2 v wife1;wife2 v wife1~wife2

Wikipedia
I'll start using Showfacts interwikis soon. Thanks for that.

On uploading Wikipedia, it's easy to copy text, much harder to get the genealogical data into our format. I would do this in stages:
 * 1) Copy bios from WP to FP for those that have a page on both, and for whom there is a link from here to there. Note also the "Familypedia" template on WP.
 * 2) Copy bios from WP to FP for those that do not have a page on FP or any relation, and get this into FP shape. Examples include the Imperial Family of Japan, Roman Emperors, and the families of Djenghis Khan and Mohammed. Pretty serious omissions on our part.
 * 3) Copy bios from WP to FP for those with weak links on FP. Examples include the Romanovs, Celtic nobility, and Byzantine Emperors.
 * 4) Copy bios from WP to FP with strong links of FP. Examples include British, German, French and Spanish nobility.

At all times, put a marker on these pages for manual checking later. rtol 07:36, October 5, 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the tips on how to operate WP transfers. Having done over 80,000 xfers for this and the psych wiki, and written data mining software for the last 20 years, it's still true I may have missed a trick or two.   Not receiving a specific mention of which area you are most interested in, I shall proceed whereever is convenient.   07:43, October 5, 2009 (UTC)


 * I have a lot of faith in your abilities.
 * The three areas of most active development are the descendants of Charlemagne, the ancestors of Prince Charles, and the ancestors of Will Shade. These are the same family, actually. You're welcome to join in, but I would think you want to test this first with something easy. There no emperors of Japans on Familypedia, so you do not need to worry about merging records. There are a few Russian czars on Familypedia, but a number of daughters and wifes, so that is a grade more difficult. Uploading the Kings of Portugal is a harder still, as they should be connected on all sides. rtol 08:58, October 5, 2009 (UTC)
 * If you get the Kings of Portugal right, you can safely assume that everything can be uploaded. rtol 09:01, October 5, 2009 (UTC)

Naming conventions
Wikipedia is not particularly consistent in its naming, so I do not feel bound by it. I should, of course, follow the conventions on this site. That said, a genealogy site should refer to people by their family name, not by their job. My name is Richard Tol. It is not Richard, Professor of Economics. But Adalbero I fudged. His family was in flux in this generation. I'll give him the same name as his brother. rtol 07:27, October 13, 2009 (UTC)

Trees
Good stuff.

Will cleverly puts in a link to the next tree. See Ancestors of William Allen Shade (1968) : Pedigree Chart 20-3. rtol 07:25, October 14, 2009 (UTC)
 * Here is what another contributor was doing in October 2007 about a little known Senator from Illinois. . The structure is not optimal for navigation.  Not that continuations would be done that way in the next version.  Anyway, I will enhance the scheme after getting the basics in, and verify it is fast enough.  We should be able to generate these automagically for everyone's article (probably inserted via bot).  I am not settled on the subpage structure yet, but I can get a substantial speed increase on the main pages by putting the time consuming stuff on a "sensor" page.  For example, Henry I takes 50 to 70 seconds old style, now takes about 20 seconds new style.   10:20, October 14, 2009 (UTC)
 * You're ahead of the curve as usual. rtol 11:54, October 14, 2009 (UTC)

Problem?
I notice that Caroline Polyxene von Nassau-Usingen (1762-1823) is reproting "string too long" for Property:Children-list1, and I am sure there are much longer out there (eg Wilhelm Heinrich von Nassau-Usingen (1684-1718)). Thurstan 01:52, October 15, 2009 (UTC)

Showfacts person-ex
I did not pay attention to Showfacts person v -ex.

Showfacts person-ex is the template I get when I click on a red link from an info page. I fill out the form for the first person, and then copy it down the generations. rtol 17:16, October 16, 2009 (UTC)

Ahn

 * In, I had a check to verify there are not duplicates between the motherside and the father side ancestors. Currently, it just outputs "duplicate". I recall some talk about inbreeding tests. Was this the purpose of the duplicate check? If so, I vaguely recall you doing inbreeding some other way, so it would seem that this portion of the logic can be tossed. True?

The duplicate check is there to reduce the amount of output. Robin complained about it, as it leaves information out.

inbreeding test, couple ancestors and Coefficient of Inbreeding use the descendants list.
 * Ok. Set ahn and set dsc don't rely on the same templates.  For example, Descendants uses a separate Convert dsc.  I am not dealing with set dsc at this point.  Perhaps the dsc code is where the duplicate checking that you are recalling occurs because all ahn convert does if the duplicate conditional is true is display "duplicate", and nothing else.


 * Secondly, the 5 generation limit you have in there can be relaxed since the calculation will be on a separate /sensor subpage.

Good. 10 generation is enough I'd say.
 * If we run into any further performance problems, I can look at doing the cached common ancestors idea. Basically there is no reason to constantly recalc the same trees over and over that are shared.  With that sort of optimization, the generation trees would be enormous- we could handle those unusual ones that go back to Egyptian times.  But.... for some other day after version 1 is out.


 * What are the templates that interrogate the Ahnentafel property? AFAIK, only set ahn and the showfacts tree thing uses it.

show descendants, common descendants and lineage use Ahnentafel.
 * Thanks, I will have to look at those.


 * Thurstan prefers "pedigree" as the tab name for where ((t|showfacts tree02}} and possibly ((t|showfacts tree01}} are used. While "pedigree" has a precise meaning for genealogists and is preferable in that context to the ambiguous term "tree", the term "pedigree" is off putting for family history neophytes- what with the "purity"/"class"/dog breeding associations of the non genealogical sense of the term. If we are shooting for a general audience, it seems to me we should not use specialized language in our interface. ~ Phlox 21:45, October 18, 2009 (UTC)

If "tree" is ambiguous, why not use "ancestor tree". While we're on this, "Ahnentafel" is worse jargon than "pedigree"; "ancestor table" is much preferred. rtol 05:21, October 19, 2009 (UTC)
 * Ancestor tree is fine with me.


 * The reason why I am fiddling with the ahn structure is that it is very difficult for novices to extract data from it- not to say how inefficient it is using rpos's and sub's to extract stuff.  06:52, October 19, 2009 (UTC)


 * Very difficult to manipulate indeed. Descendants mirror ancestors, so I may try to copy & invert the new structure for ancestors to descendants.
 * By the way, descendant templates use the ancestors property, and ancestor templates use the descendants property. This is because "common ancestors of you and me" is the set of all those people who have both you and me as their descendants. The intersection of your ancestors and mine is faster, but the old property was a string rather than a set. rtol 07:25, October 19, 2009 (UTC)

The ahnentafel property has been an N-ary array since I created it in May. I have fluctuated the article name from a a page to a string occasionally, but the queries on pages use synonyms via the #REDIRECT pages, so it is worth the bother of manipulating them. (By the way, that is why the new simple parsing uses #explode:s with brackets and bars in them.) Anyway, I shall plow on ahead doing converting set ahn to Showfacts set ancestors. The transition will use the old ahn data and convert it to use for the new format Property:ancestors. I am not sure that all of the applications you have in mind can be achieved in templates with current SMW features, but I believe as I have remarked before that Javascript and Ajax will open up new vistas in capabilities since the processing can be done on our own machines, then saving the results back to the server. This has the advantage of offloading the Wikia servers, and allowing contributors to invent algorithms as time consuming as the processing power of their local machines permit. The advantages will be clearer when I create a few hello world type gadgets using the showfacts properties. Development probably won't be as sluggish after first release because with a larger audience we may have more contributors with the inclination and skillset necessary for the mountain of interesting applets that could be created.

We'll see. 17:08, October 19, 2009 (UTC)

Hi Phlox, Thanks for the message. I just started here at Wikia, and am super excited to meet more community members. I just learned about Familypedia, and am really looking forward to digging in more. I was just thinking over this past weekend how I should really try and learn/record more information about my family history. Feel free to contact me with comments/questions! Cheers, Sarah (talk 18:35, October 19, 2009 (UTC)

Descendants
I understand the properties ancestors and descendants are now static. This makes sense for stability. How do I force an update? Sancha de Navarre (c885-?) had the wrong children. Now corrected. Need to update descendants to get the right tree and the right inbreeding. Thanks! rtol 07:32, October 20, 2009 (UTC)
 * The new properties and their related templates are not complete. After they are tested with the templates you mentioned that depend on them, I shall begin the transition.  Until then, continue to use set ahn on the main page as before.  The new stuff (ancestors property and the code related to the /sensor page should not be interfering with how ahnentafels were generated in the past from an smw template call from the main page.  If that is not the case, let me know.  It is true that I created a few test articles that do not have smw template on the main page, and if any of those are needed, feel free to revert them back to their original status.


 * You will be able to force updates as before. SMW appears to require an edit- save to actually generate the property, so running autowikiabrowser from oldest to youngest would probably be the best way to go about it.  When this is sorted out we will need a comprehensive script to run on the site to update everyone's sensor page periodically.   16:41, October 20, 2009 (UTC)


 * I've saved Sancha about 10 times now. She's still stuck with the son of her husband's first wife. rtol 17:17, October 20, 2009 (UTC)

Oh. I have an idea about what is happening. Must drive the girls to school though so I will have to look at it when I get back. 17:25, October 20, 2009 (UTC)
 * hmmm. It appeared the problem was because it was encoded using info page templates?  Because it seems to be ok now that she is encoded using showfacts children.  Or am I mistaken.  Endregoto d'Aragon (c910-972) + Velasquita d'Aragon (?-?) are now displayed as children of Galindo II d'Aragon (c875-c922), which is correct, right?   18:19, October 20, 2009 (UTC)
 * Children are correct. Descendants has Sanche II Garcès Abarca de Navarre (c940-994) (son of her second husband by his first wife) but not Endregoto and Velasquita. rtol 18:37, October 20, 2009 (UTC)

I never was clear about how descendants was intended to work. I'm not sure you want to do descendant analysis that way anyway, but I haven't looked at it. My main concern at this point is to isolate the processor intensive stuff off the main page, and make sure that it could be practically done that way. Ancestor structure generation seems to show that. All info and facts pages are having the sensor and tree pages generated now. Once the ancestor data checks out, the plan is to retire the SMW templates templates from the main page. 09:37, October 22, 2009 (UTC)

Similar issue with Ramon I Donat de Bigorre (c910-?). I changed his mother's name from Lupa of Navarra to Lupa of Pamplona (as Navarra did not yet exist at that time). As Ramon/sensor, his mother's name is and remains Navarra, no matter how often I save. rtol 12:25, October 25, 2009 (UTC)
 * False alarm. This is an info page, so I also needed to save the main page a couple of times. rtol 12:47, October 25, 2009 (UTC)
 * There may be some further optimizations to the way we detect these trees. We almost melted the servers during a bot run on Friday and I had to talk them out of disabling SMW completely for the weekend.  I know how to deal with what caused the Friday problem, but in the future I would like to be able to predict better how much load we are putting on the servers. 18:44, October 25, 2009 (UTC)

Temporarily disabling Semantic MediaWiki
Hi Phlox,

For some reason, the way that Semantic MediaWiki is implemented on the Genealogy Wiki is causing our database servers to overload. Our engineers are currently investigating why that is happening and will either try to resolve the issue or work with you to modify the implementation here so that it doesn't impact the performance of the site. Unfortunately, for the time being, we need to temporarily disable Semantic MediaWiki. We believe that we can resolve the issue by Monday and re-enable Semantic MediaWiki then, so it will only be down for the weekend. I apologize for the trouble, and I will let you know if there is anything that you can do to help get it back up and running sooner. Please let me know if you have any questions. --KyleH (talk) 18:01, October 23, 2009 (UTC)
 * This matter resulted from confusion about the cause of a server slowdown. It was created due to a Bot run that was generated large numbers of SMW template calls.  The bots were shut down for the weekend and SMW was turned back on a half hour later after the situation was explained to the wikia technical staff.  IRC, Contact staff, and Direct email to KyleH was used to resolve this, in case anyone wonders how to resolve this sort of thing in the future.... 06:57, October 24, 2009 (UTC)

Suggestion
Upon looking at some articles that were created using the form system, I noticed that it groups the general references together without providing any inline citations in the body of the article to indicate what information is attributable to which source(s). Of course, it's better to have some sources than none, but I thought you may want to keep the citation guidelines in mind as you continue to develop the forms.

Also, is there a reason for including a Contributors field on the form? All contributors can be viewed in the page's history, and advertising contributions seems to promote ownership, which policy frowns upon. Regards —DeGraffJE talk 04:26, October 24, 2009 (UTC)


 * The form is not for creating the body of text for the article, so it cannot possibly create refs for it.


 * Perhaps you are unaware that the tag does not work with parameters inside of templates. They cannot therefore be used for citing any material found in infoboxes or retrieved from properties.  Besides recording sources for each discrete event, the form has fields for primary versus secondary versus tertiary sources.  Further, the forms autosuggest legal values for person and place names.


 * Anyway, the body of the article should use refs as in standard wp articles.


 * The rationale for contributors subsection is that some contributors insist on placing these on articles as is common practice on Genealogy sites. It is sometimes regarded as a marker that "this person 'owns' this article"/ has some kind of special status or authority over the article.  I don't want that interpretation to take root here for reasons pretty much identical to WP:OWN, so the idea is to co-opt it.   The contributors list is stated to be anyone who has made any substantive edit to the article, and I intend to put in a helper javascript applet to autofill this for anyone that edits using the form.


 * Hope this helps - 06:49, October 24, 2009 (UTC)


 * I am unaware of any such limitations regarding tags inside templates, as I see it done frequently on Wikipedia (see Barack Obama and the tags used inside Infobox President).


 * Regarding the ownership issue, I don't think co-opting a policy is good practice. Template:Maintained might be a good compromise, where contributors aren't listed on the article (since that's already on the History) but people can list themselves on the talk page as an expert or point of contact for the article. —DeGraffJE talk 13:01, October 24, 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, that's one response. Possibly you are unaware of the limitations I described because I don't know what I am talking about.  On the other hand, it's easy enough to learn something new and test and see if what I say is true.  As a factual matter,  ref's are processed prior to expansion so you will find that you cannot for example place a parameter inside them.


 * Regarding the Contributors section, beginning at the beginning, I am at a loss as to why you find it objectionable since you did not say why you didn't like contributors section other than the idea that it was redundant to article history. Encouraging use of template Maintained is just fine, but you have not addressed the issue of people who want to place "Contributors" on their page and list their name on it as a quiet way of putting redlines around "their" articles.  What are you proposing- that "Contributors" section be banned from articles?  You will get significant pushback on that.  So, your objection is noted, but I don't see that it can be administered in a practical fashion.  If you can come up with any way to head off the mountain of WP:OWN issues that will inevitably occur, then I'd love to hear it.    15:41, October 24, 2009 (UTC)

Reflexivity
works fine on the page, but not on the sensor page. I guess we want diagnostic tests like this on the sensor page. Any hint? rtol 12:44, October 31, 2009 (UTC)


 * As usual, asking for help was enough to solve the problem.

works fine on the sensor page. Silly me. rtol 12:46, October 31, 2009 (UTC)
 * I notice this phenomenon too. I'm not sure if it is the formulation of the question in concrete terms that does it, or the externalization of the problem so that one is now viewing it from outside.  I sense it is the latter, but I have no idea why it is so.  Hominids are odd creatures.   15:50, October 31, 2009 (UTC)
 * Third alternative explanation: Calling for help exposes vulnerability; the resulting fear stimulates the brain.
 * Anyway, problem is solved. I added reflexivity test to SMW templates-ex. Results at Familypedia:Diagnostics, but no positives yet. rtol 16:39, October 31, 2009 (UTC)
 * That's better than mine. Rapid modeling of alternative scenarios is essential for risk assessment in a survival situation, so having fear tightly wired to problem solving would be a significant advantage for species that possessed it.  In Brilliant Mind, John Nash found a tight link between fear and imagination.  But as the story was related, at first his ability to see hidden mathematical patterns had nothing to do with strong perceptions of fear.   17:00, October 31, 2009 (UTC)

Please see Familypedia:Diagnostics. Loads of pages fail the reflexivity tests. I think the reason is that the sensor pages show children-g2 to -g9, but not children-g1. I would not know how to fix that. rtol 18:54, October 31, 2009 (UTC) For partners, the ++++++ seem to cause the problem. rtol 19:04, October 31, 2009 (UTC)
 * Those values generated by the lines following reflexivity test in SMW templates are for info page translation only. You should be refering to their true values on the basepage, not the sensor page, since among other things they are not properly formatted as you have noted.  There are much more serious flaws, but I am attending to that.  The scaffolding code Facts from info pages never brought all info page material over.  Fortunately, I am perfecting the info page converter Bot code, so we shall be able to move these over shortly and you will have proper descendants values on the main pages.  Until then, you might be able to cobble something together with the children values on the sensor page, but it would be throwaway code.   20:08, October 31, 2009 (UTC)


 * It is more basic. is a test whether the name of the father is known, rather than whether the father has a page. rtol 21:13, October 31, 2009 (UTC)


 * works as it should with #ifexist instead of #if rtol 22:14, October 31, 2009 (UTC)
 * Try #ifeq:getfact father| |.... It might be returning a blank.
 * Secondly, whether the article exists or not is an unrelated idea. A frequent case is that there is not article, but there is a string in the children articles that indicates the name of the father.  They should all be the same string.  #ifexist has absolutely no bearing on that determination.
 * Reflexivity has more than an error check role. If the user does not explicitly state a value in the form, it can be automatically derived from its reflexive property through the sensor page.  If you did this sort of checking on the main page, it would be slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter.  With the sensor page, we can do the check once every month or so, and cache the result so that it can be quickly retrieved for every main page refresh.   00:56, November 1, 2009 (UTC)


 * We're talking past each other here. The reflexivity test is on the sensor page. It checks whether the page of the man that I list as my father lists me as a son. Ditto for mother and spouse. That's all. It seems to work. It has not generated any more false negatives, and did already uncover some errors (e.g., between my grandmother and her mother).
 * Re. siblings: We have no way of checking sibling-ness without a page for the parents. We should be able, however, to create a list of "Pages that should be created" with a query on people that list Adam Smith (1774) as their father while there is no page for Dr Smith. rtol 11:46, November 1, 2009 (UTC)

I understood you were working on the sensor page- my closing remark had to do why I had not incorporated automatic suggestion of reflexive property values prior to getting sensor page infrastructure in place.

My misunderstanding had to do with a wrong assumption about the extent of the reflexivity checks being done. I see this is not referring to the declared Property:siblings. Yes of course you cannot check parent child agreement without the existence of both, but you can do sibling sibling as I assumed you were doing. This does not require an existence check on the parents. Anyway, in my haste I went off in the weeds on that score and I should have just looked at your code before commenting. It probably will not surprise you that I regard this sibling property as an odd beast because it adds redundant declaration- inviting further database inconsistencies. As a practical matter though, it is a simple matter for researcher to include a notation in the siblings field if they have the data on siblings sitting in front of them. Requiring them to do it "right" poses a significant barrier, since they must stop work on that article, create a parent article with the children list.

By the way, doing a #show:FooPage|default=|?Modification date= achieves the equivalent ifexist check without racking up the NewPP expensive parser call count. My engineering guess is that the #show would cost the same as an ifexist, but not knowing the implementation of either SMW or mediawiki, there is a lot of room for me to be guessing wrong. Nonetheless, I am not convinced that there is any real benefit to it in performance. But the metric and instructions I have says that ifexist should be avoided where possible so I started incorporating the show check above in place of ifexist.

Yes, there will always be inconsistent data entered, so a check like this will always be necessary somewhere in the code. It would be a neat trick if we can prevent many of the inconsistencies being entered in the first place. I would think that the check and the automatic inheritance would happen in the same mechanism, but the sensor page has to be in place first. Regarding the Bot gone amuck- This seems to be the final portion of info page run, because that is where the ?-? dates are. This means we are close to eliminating the SMW checks from the main page.

16:25, November 1, 2009 (UTC)

Bot gone wild?
PhloxBot just created a sensor page for "~Adriaen Breen (?-?)" rather than for Adriaen Breen (?-?) rtol 11:26, November 1, 2009 (UTC)
 * I haven't looked at the damage yet, but it is a simple matter to delete masses of pages via bot. You can't do it in AWB, but it is simple in pywikipedia.  Thanks for the report.   16:27, November 1, 2009 (UTC)

multi AFN
I notice that notwithstanding my hint here, Property:familysearch afn is not being treated as multivalued. Can Showfacts person create multiple links when multiple values are given for AFN? Thurstan 22:23, November 1, 2009 (UTC)

I haven't seen any with a "+": they seem to be 3 or 4 alphanums, a dash, and then 3 or 2 alphanums. The examples that I created with /info pages (see Mary Stewart, Queen of Scotland (1542-1586) for example) I coded as "Familysearch afn2" etc, with Get references supporting up to 6 values. Thurstan 22:43, November 1, 2009 (UTC)

Personal Ancestral File claims to describe the syntax of AFNs. Thurstan 22:49, November 1, 2009 (UTC)

SMW templates
SMW templates can be removed from the main pages, now that the sensor pages are complete.

There is something very strange going on with ({t|set dsc}}, though. I noticed this on the sensor pages, but I am not sure that this is the cause. I have not been able to figure it out. The main problem is that Property:Descendants is sometimes updated, and sometimes not. A minor problem is that it does not display links.

The main consequences are that Inbreeding test, Coefficient of Inbreeding and Couple ancestors do not work properly.

Should Couple ancestors be on the sensor or the main page? It gives the common ancestors of husband and wife. I would put that on the main page.

The results of Inbreeding test and Coefficient of Inbreeding can be put into the biography and table, respectively. rtol 19:09, November 2, 2009 (UTC)


 * Where we do calculations is fully decoupled from where we do display, so I am not sure what rationale there would be for putting Couple ancestors on the main page. After doing the calculations on the sensor page, we use a single #show to retrieve stuff from the sensor page, and present it to the user on the main page as a value in a table, in a biography passage or as a category.  That is what get globals is for.


 * I am willing to look at specific examples but I don't support set dsc, nor have I been satisfied that it has ever worked properly. As for the move to the sensor page, the only difference in running on the sensor page is the occaisional PAGENAME needs to reference BASEPAGENAME.  If you have some concrete example of something not updating, I can take a look at it, but I really have a lot of other stuff I should be doing with the converting info pages to facts pages.  As for any substantial investment of time on these analysis tools, it seems to me that if resources are to be spent on it, it should be spent rewriting this stuff in Javascript so that far more substantial computing resources on the client computers can be used, and because that way the tree can be walked virtually without limit.  Doing it server side is continually be getting us in trouble due to the limitations of the wikitext programming language and limited server side computation.  So fundamentally it looks like sending good money after bad.  I don't mind helping patch something to get you by, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on it until after relaunch.  22:40, November 2, 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't think this response is quite satisfactory. Property:Descendants is the driver behind key genealogical variables such as the degree of inbreeding and relationships between parents. Furthermore, it was fully tested and used to work fine until you optimized it for speed, without documenting what you changed and why. rtol 05:49, November 3, 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok, I went through the set dsc modules and don't see any edits of mine since long before this optimization. Let's get specific. Which modules did I edit, and what specific examples of breakage are you seeing?   06:16, November 3, 2009 (UTC)


 * I have yet to put my finger on the main problem. There is one problem that should be simple for you: Why does it display the name but not the link?
 * The main problem is that Property:Descendants is sometimes updated, and sometimes not. It should append the children's descendants to the parents', and it does on some pages but not on others. Just have a look at a couple of recently added pages and work back through time. My current hypothesis is that SMW templates on the main page interferes with SMW templates-ex on the sensor page. Your testing that hypothesis. rtol 18:41, November 3, 2009 (UTC)

Edit conflict- My response to the above notes:
 * The Property:Descendants will now output Page. I don't recall the exact rationale for changing it to the string, but it involves complexity in parsing the field properly since the commas that SMW engine provides are not reliable as a separator due to their possible use within the name of an article.  I should have left it alone for descendants because at the time my recollection was that they used the same convert submodule.  That sharing was dropped long ago.  Anyway,  Ancestors does use the Page type, but it also now has 5 fields, compared to descendants that has the original 3 fields.  A list of some of the factors on whether to declare names as type string or page as well as others may be found on the Property:Ancestors page.  The ancestors scheme is stable enough for now, but I have some performance concerns about how the slow the #sets are to create them.  If I do the field as a text field, I can assemble them in a single write- However they are then opaque to the SMW engine.
 * I think the plain text Property:ancestors list and Property:Descendants list on the main page is obsolete. I doubt you are using them, but if you are, let me know.

As an aside, I noted one of the modules was accessing the old property name for parents "coparents". I may have put a synonym check in getfact, so it may not matter. 19:10, November 3, 2009 (UTC)

Examples of set dsc anomalies
For example:
 * 1) Louis Philippe of Orléans (1773-1850)/sensor is fine
 * 2) his father Louis Philippe II of Orléans (1747-1793)/sensor
 * 3) descendants: son is missing
 * 4) re-saved sensor, did not help
 * 5) re-saved main page, did not help
 * 6) re-saved sensor, still not there
 * 7) re-saved main page, put in "SHOWFACTBOX", property:descendants is on the main page but incomplete, children-g1 is correct, ancestors are not on main page
 * 8) re-saved sensor, descendants still not as they should
 * 9) had another look at the son. Father is correctly listed as father.
 * 10) back to father, added SMW templates-ex; we now have property:descendants and property:descendants list; both wrong
 * 11) re-saved sensor; did not help
 * 12) back to son, added SMW templates-ex;we now have property:descendants and property:descendants list; both fine
 * 13) back to father, resaved main page; descendants is now fine; descendants list is not
 * 14) checked sensor, now fine

So I guess the problem is that the template works on the main page but not on the sensor page. rtol 19:01, November 3, 2009 (UTC)
 * First off, the father article was never updated after creation. Purge is not the same as resaving the article.  Regardless what the facts box tells you, you will notice that properties returned from a show will not be what they should be unless the article is re saved.  But there are much larger questions I have.


 * Regarding set dsc, I never understood what the purpose of keeping ahn numbers was, or even larger, why use the set dsc parallel structure at all. After all, you can derive descendants from ancestors, so it appears at first glance to be redundant.  Example:
 * Says: give me all the articles where this person is the ancestor of someone (not the first generation). Is set dsc really giving you a lot more than that?  Ancestor Ahn numbers can be used for all sorts of things, like fetching all the great great grandchildren.   19:35, November 3, 2009 (UTC)
 * Says: give me all the articles where this person is the ancestor of someone (not the first generation). Is set dsc really giving you a lot more than that?  Ancestor Ahn numbers can be used for all sorts of things, like fetching all the great great grandchildren.   19:35, November 3, 2009 (UTC)


 * Fair enough. Inbreeding and stuff can be redone with ancestors too. The only exception is lineage. That said, as set dsc seems to work on the main page but not on the sensor page, fixing it should be less work than rewriting the template that use property:descendants. rtol 06:57, November 4, 2009 (UTC)

You state the son is missing on Louis Philippe II of Orléans (1747-1793)/sensor. The son is not missing. Look at the history of Louis Philippe II of Orléans (1747-1793)/sensor. You state in point two that you resaved. There are only two saves. Initial creation and my edit (which found the son). Reread what I said about purges. They don't work on properties. Also, if you save with a trivial change (trailing space), the wikimedia engine will not resave. This may be what happened if you are positive you weren't using purge. 07:31, November 4, 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the tip about saving.
 * I've removed SMW templates-ex from the main pages, and property:descendants is wrong again on the sensor page of dad. rtol 08:18, November 4, 2009 (UTC)
 * If I were to debug it, I would step through verifying that it got children-g1 correctly from the basepage, that secondly it passed it to aux1 correctly, then if it passed it to aux2 correctly. It isn't complicated.  Personally, the thing has severe flaws due to the lack of other delimiters, so it would be a lot of work to fix this redundant code correctly.   08:46, November 4, 2009 (UTC)
 * It's much easier to run set dsc on the main page. rtol 08:59, November 4, 2009 (UTC)

It sounds like you just said that you would rather that everyone view the main page significantly slower because you do not wish to debug code that you have been championing. Yes, it is hard, sometimes very hard for engineers to make things easy for others. It is exceptionally easy for an engineer to make things hard for others. Robin, Elrondlair and Bergsmit have complained about how slow the new system has been. They were right. You and I know why. It is because tons of computation was repetitiously happening on the main page for no good reason other than it was easier to code that way. Fundamentally, ancestors present a combinatorial explosion of computation demands the deeper you go in the tree. Set dsc is worse, because the tree branches each generation not by 2's but by as many children as there were. There are many ways to optimize our approach and I think that after I profile the SMW activity on a local machine I will isolate what types of implementation approaches we must avoid. Doing nothing is not an option. Already wikia staff have noticed the load and in fact turned it off and wanted to leave it off for the weekend because of the load on the system. The load caused by what? By the burden of set ahn and set dsc. They may not understand what exactly is causing the drain but they aren't fools- they have 60K wikis and will not let one that is generating low traffic to consume a disproportionate share of server resources. Ultimately it is their server and they can pull the plug at any time. So even if you ignore the complaints of other contributors and they do not block your changes, at the end of the day the approach of ignoring performance problems is a doomed formula. Perhaps that is an end game that you are not considering.

So you couldn't be more wrong when you claim that it is easier to put set dsc on the main page. 16:50, November 4, 2009 (UTC)


 * Let's get the facts straight.
 * The overload was caused by PhloxBot.
 * set desc was working well.
 * You replaced it with set dsc. The programming is more streamlined, but I do not completely understand it.
 * set dsc was working well, until you introduced sensor pages.
 * There is probably a simple fix, because the problem is a page referral.
 * As you wrote that part of the code, and as you changed the page setup, perhaps you should spend less time arguing that I messed up thing, and more time helping fix this problem. rtol 06:48, November 5, 2009 (UTC)
 * Any time that pages requires 60 seconds to update, there is a serious problem. 1000 users hammering on a wiki with 500K pages would generate the same loading problems as PhloxBot did with its puny updates of 500 pages every 6 hours.  Blaming Phloxbot is little more than the response of shooting the messenger.


 * My goal is not to mess up your tools, but to create an environment where folks can create such tools without penalizing the activities of other contributors. I simply do not have the time to debug set dsc or set desc, and I shall not support either.


 * It's not tough to debug this stuff- it is just time consuming and requires patience and careful logic to deduce the source of bugs. Put a *"" or any other paramater you want to sniff at the start of the template modules.  I'll bet one of these queries is returning something like /sensor on the tail, and all you have to do is strip it with a #replace.  07:23, November 5, 2009 (UTC)

Charlemagne
One unanticipated consequence of removing SMW templates from the main pages is that the descendants of Charlemagne are now longer recognised. I'll run AWB to restore this. This requires saving all sensor pages several times, as this is done generation by generation. Should I use the opportunity to replace SMW templates-ex with SMW templates-ex?

Thanks for the hint on set dsc/aux1, by the way. rtol 06:10, November 6, 2009 (UTC)
 * oops. Didn't send this last night.  Too many windows open.
 * re dsc- I don't know if that is all of the difficulty in set dsc, but it occurred to me when I was looking at some set ahn code.
 * re rename- your call when you want to do it, rename and move code over. I nuked some of the obsolete checks that I put in there.
 * Remember reset your awb site name to familypedia. I made a post to the general community about this.  Otherwise you will get a log error message about an interwiki redirect.   18:58, November 6, 2009 (UTC)
 * No error messages. AWB just ignored all pages. rtol 20:53, November 6, 2009 (UTC)
 * On the lower right pane, you will see tabs above the "edit" window. Click Logs. You wil see the error message I mentioned on the articles that were skipped (which would have been all of them).  By the way, you can select and right click these back into the list pane so that you can have another go at the ones that were saved/ were skipped depending on what you are doing in your workflow.   20:57, November 6, 2009 (UTC)

Half-Siblings
Do what you need to do to get the fact pages rolling. We can drop the half-siblings until you have time to create that part. Bill Hunsicker 22:23, November 6, 2009 (UTC)

Korvers
The conversion of the Korvers is fine. Any errors are errors copied from the info pages. I'll tidy up after you. rtol 06:40, November 7, 2009 (UTC)

Hiding large runs
We used to have "recent changes", with the option to hide minor edits (incl. my AWB runs) and bots. Now we have an "activity feed" without those options. rtol 06:46, November 7, 2009 (UTC)


 * No big deal. Just create RtolBot account, and I will give it a bot flag.   06:50, November 7, 2009 (UTC)


 * It's easy to create a new account. Getting AWB permission will take some time. I see your point. Run stopped. rtol 07:23, November 7, 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome. Computer does most of the work.

Thanks for the hints.

The run did not crash. I stopped it (and again) because I had not fully tested the templates ... rtol 17:43, November 8, 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, what I have seen is not really a crash- it just gets out of automatic mode somehow. Never happens with pywikipedia, but does with AWB.   17:56, November 8, 2009 (UTC)

Tol conversion
The Tol pages that you converted are fine. You have skipped some. My edits after 1600 will catch the rest. rtol 06:09, November 10, 2009 (UTC)


 * I believe did all the ones in Tol (surname) category that had an info page- that is, all those that had info pages when I did the add tree run last week. 06:25, November 10, 2009 (UTC)


 * I must have looked at cached pages then. One of the pages you seemed to have skipped was my dad's, but that one is fine now. rtol 12:53, November 12, 2009 (UTC)

Little formatting problem
I have created Ottilie von Nassau-Dillenburg (1437-1493), with no days in the dates of birth and death (following my source), and when her father Heinrich II. von Nassau-Dillenburg (1414-1451) does a showfacts children we get an error message. Thurstan 05:07, November 12, 2009 (UTC)

Percolation
A quick look at Project Charlemagne/count shows that Property:Order of Charlemagne is now properly assigned to most descendants. This is surely not a result of the run that I did updating all sensor pages, as I got the order wrong with all the unknown and uncertain birth dates. So, the system must renew properties without saving. rtol 12:50, November 12, 2009 (UTC)
 * It is a mystery to me how updating is done. Normally when changes that affect a page are made, the cached version of the page is marked as invalidated and requiring an automated refresh by the server.  The count of these is what Special:Statistics refers to as the Job Queue.  Normally this is zero- but on during times of high load on wikipedia it can be behind by thousands of pages.  You will notice that ours is hardly ever cleared out.  I theorized this was partly because we were bad boys and the info templates took too much cpu to be constantly updating them.  So my thought was well- we'll just refresh them via bot, and do that in a conscientious way  so no one would come and pull our plug.


 * Now it appears that SMW or something' is running a process that does'' update at least the property pages. I suppose if I weren't so lazy I would take a look at the SMW code.  It is open source as far as I know, so many of the mysteries would be solved.  However I'd probably see a few messes that I'd want to fix and that would divide my attention.  Kind of like how I never have picked up a golf club because I have seen many of my reasonably intelligent colleagues go that direction and then they seem to allow it to suck up all their free time.  So- golf, heroin and SMW code.  Just say no.   15:35, November 12, 2009 (UTC)