Help:Articles/start

Introduction
The pages of this wiki have been created in various ways.

Articles about individual people are now mostly created in an automated fashion through use of the "" menu item near the top of most pages. See "Start a really new person page" below for a walk-through and for cautions about web browsers.

Pages that usually need manual creation will include:
 * "place" pages (see Model place page)
 * "surname" pages (simply " ... (surname) "; see Template:SurnameArticle/doc for the easy standard way to create such an article with proper links already in place

Check whether the article exists
If you want to start a page for an individual or a place, please save yourself and other researchers time by ensuring that there is not already a page for that person or place (possibly under a slightly different name). Type the name in the "Search" box, click the icon, and see what hits you get. Hits with your search term in their page names should be listed before hits that have it only in their text. Check out any that may be your person or place. (If it's under four letters long, the Search may not work; if so, try adding a word such as " surname" or a state name for a bigger search term.)

Use an individual's existing page if there is one
If you find a page that has the right name and you don't know if the dates are right but they could be, we suggest that you use that page as if it were the right one. (It will be easier to copy your additions to another page later, if a difference is found, than to merge two pages about the same individual.) Write notes about apparent differences somewhere in the article itself or on its talk page.

If you can't see an "Edit with form" link above a person article, the page probably uses an old template or no standard template. You will probably save us all time in the long run by upgrading it to the current system. See Forum:Converting a non-form page to an "Edit with form" page.

Create an individual's page from a link
''If your person turns up in the text of another page, start there. ''

If the name is not in the form of a link, please turn it into one (either by highlighting it and clicking the "Internal link" button above the edit box, or by putting double square brackets around the name and the dates). Edit the text if necessary, so that it is in this form: Firstname Middlenamesifany Lastname (year-year). Do not include a question-mark or a slash or square or curly brackets anywhere in the name; and quotation marks may be troublesome too. Estimate birth and death years if unknown, omitting the "year" if death year completely unknown - then Publish the page.

Click on that link, and you should reach one of two types of page:
 * 1) Edit with form: This is the highly recommended way of creating a new page about an individual. The form looks a bit formidable (!) but will save you and other users time in the medium term by linking and displaying relatives of the person in a semi-automatic manner. See "Start a really new person page" below.
 * 2) Ordinary wiki edit page: An ordinary editing screen with a big empty box for typing and a row of little bluish typing-aid buttons above it. You may just use it as it is, but we recommend that you instead copy the pagename and use it to create a page using the "" menu item above then following the procedure in the "Start a really new person page" paragraph just below this one.

Start a really new person page
So the name of your individual does not appear as the page name of, or anywhere else on, an existing page? ''If you use the Firefox browser, the following procedure is recommended. Until we fix some puzzling problems, other common browsers do not do it properly and may delete your work, so have a look at Forum:Data entry without using Form:Person.''

Click the "" menu item above and choose the standard form, entering the name, with birth and death years if known, in the panel provided. Do not include a question-mark or a slash or any square brackets or curly brackets anywhere in the name.

(The advanced or "verbose" form, which you can use on a subsequent edit, allows you to enter exhaustive information concerning fine details such as alternative names and causes of death, citing primary versus secondary sources, third and subsequent marriages, and so on. Eventually we should have such things as events and honors and migration and education semi-automated too.)

Person article and three standard subpages
If you clicked on an infobox link on a child's or spouse's page, two or more boxes may be already filled. Check that they are what you want; don't change the one you came from.

Fill in what you know about the person concerned, including at least the following:
 * "First name"
 * "Surname"
 * "Short name" (your choice, but best choice could be the name the individual was addressed by as a child, including the birth surname, because it heads the infobox and is used elsewhere; adding a woman's married surname is OK after the maiden name, and you can include titles such as "Sir")

Highly desirable additional entries for the first edit (because it gets useful links established sooner) are sex, parents, and spouse(s).

If there were two or more spouses or other partners with whom children were produced, put them in the Spouse box, in chronological order of children and/or association, joined by plus signs.

Fairly desirable at this stage are children of the first marriage (if any), also joined by plus signs. They would be more fiddly to add later. However, if the person's spouse already has a page with those children shown, leave or make that section blank because the system will display them automatically after a couple of saves and will update them without double typing.

For each parent, spouse, or child shown on an individual's form, the name should be the existing or future page name, including date(s). Remember: Do not include a question-mark or a slash or any square brackets or curly brackets anywhere in the name. Quote marks can cause problems too.

If you have any "source" websites open, paste their URLs into "Notes" and/or "Sources" boxes. Make a mental note to add other references at next edit.

Localities, counties, states, etc, usually show as links if you use the Familypedia name, which is nearly always the Wikipedia name. For the USA, add State name to locality and to borough, county, or parish (e.g Greene County, Ohio) to turn them into links. For Britain and Ireland, the county name is usually enough on its own (e.g. Cambridgeshire or County Down) but localities need something bigger added. In all cases, the full Wikipedia name is likely to work if anything does. "Autocomplete" will often save you much typing time for countries and some state names (and, if you expect to have many entries for a given county or locality, you are welcome to use the help desk to ask how to bring it into the autocomplete system).

Please add a brief edit "Summary" such as "New" or "Intro" then click "Publish". (You may start with "Preview", but it looks little like the final page and you may get a message about having not entered an edit summary - annoyingly untrue if you have entered one.)

The page may not show everything you entered yet, because "Semantic Forms" work in mysterious ways not quite like normal wiki pages. (Short explanation: templates display data from the page, which doesn't exist until the page is published.) Don't worry! To progress towards showing everything, '''your very next two steps could be:
 * 1) Click "Edit with form", or "Edit facts" in the infobox, then "Create tab: Ancestor tree" then "Publish". Tree probably won't show yet.
 * 2) Return to the article (using the link under the tree subpage heading); click "Edit facts" in the infobox and (subject to the temporary glitch noted in the paragraph below) click the "Update/Create Sensor page" button/link then "Publish", because problems may occur if the "sensor" page isn't created early. It ties a lot of things together. You may look at it.

TEMPORARY PROBLEMS with sensor page: since a version change to the underlying software in mid-March 2010, clicking "Update/Create Sensor page" may do nothing except return you to the same screen. Go up to the URL, which should include "Special:FormEdit/Person/". Change "Person" to "sensor page" and add "/sensor" (which you can copy and paste) to the end of the URL, then hit "Enter". It may take many seconds to appear and be ready for clicking "Publish".

After the sensor page is created, you can add a subpage for descendants if there were grandchildren. (Not worth the trouble if there weren't, because it shows less than the article shows.) It is created with a couple of clicks semi-automatically and will be updated fairly automatically. Its button appears on the sensor page; the tab should show on the article page after you republish the sensor page then the article.

After you "Publish" the article and the "sensor" page a couple more times, things should be coming right, appearing where you expect them to. If still no good, check the page History to see what was added or subtracted from one version to the next. If puzzled, post a query on the help desk or check its recent postings to see if anyone else has had similar problems.

Child from second or subsequent marriage
If you want to create a new page as above by clicking on a parent link in an infobox, and you know that that child was not the child of the parent's first marriage, you will need to do a little fiddling to switch spouses and/or children, probably needing a second edit. Editing without the form should show you the coding, where "g1" (meaning spouse-and-children group 1") will need to be changed.

Going straight to the "Advanced" form
Until we fix some of the recent software problems, you may get an error message if you hit "Advanced form": solution may be to go up to the URL and change "/person/" to "/person advanced/" then hit an "Enter" key.

Maybe don't "Edit with form" again after page creation
The forms software places and replaces some standard templates at the top and some at the bottom, leaving other templates and text in their original order in between. If you put something like "Living" or "Verify" at the top of the page, it may move down after another "Edit with form".

Instead of "Edit with form", to edit the whole page again you may use the "Edit facts" link in the infobox, which leaves alone everything that is not part of the standard templates. Child info has to be done separately anyway if you want to use a form, but it can be edited manually.

Start a really "new" place page
If you want to start a page for a place, and a page for it does not exist and you can't create one using a link on an existing page, create a link as described below then use the Model place page as your model or copy the outline of another nearby place so that some of the categories and other links will be the same. Wherever possible, use the article name that Wikipedia used for the same place.

Create link or tweak an URL
If you need a place to start a page that's not about an individual, a good place is your User page (because it is so easy for you, if logged in, to reach from anywhere on the site) or a subpage of it (e.g. User:yourusername/New pages), where you just add a link. Wherever you choose, just type the name of your article, surround it with double square brackets, preview, and publish. When the revised page appears, you should see a link with the title you just inserted. Another way to start a new page is to manipulate the URL of whatever page you are on; the standard format is "...wikia.com/wiki/Page name", with no need to use underlines or CamelCase.
 * If the link is in blue, then the article already exists; you can go to the article and add any information you feel it needs.
 * If the link is in red, the article doesn't exist yet; click the link and you will end up on a blank page, where you can insert whatever you want according to whatever format you want.

What if I want to change the layout of the article?
The most common article on this site is one describing the family history of a given person. Different genealogists have different needs when it comes to writing person articles. Some wish to include only the most basic information. Others need a more complex presentation. Some users have highly specific, and perhaps unique, requirements.

The input forms at Form:Person and Form:Person advanced utilize standard templates designed to meet a range of requirements while achieving all the linkages genealogists expect, including most of the fields that would be in a GEDCOM file. Boxes that you leave blank will generally show nothing (not even a heading) on the page. You may move these templates around on the page. You may even delete them if you wish, but that may make more work for you or a relative later, with little or no benefit. (The directly-edited page code appears in a box near the "Publish" button at the bottom. Don't mess with things inside curly brackets!) Also, if you have specialized requirements, you are welcome to create a template of your own to incorporate them. If you need help with that, place a message on Forum:Help desk, and there will probably be someone reading that who can help you.

People not mentioned on the wiki yet
If you want to start a new page for someone who does not link from any page here, it is recommended that you use Form:Person. Follow the procedure in the "Start a really new person page" section above.

If the person has a Wikipedia article, please use its name initially, then "Rename" it to add dates etc. Before finalizing it, please ensure that you have read Help:Copying from Wikipedia.

Naming conventions
Individuals' page names follow a standard (for ease of manipulation by templates and to minimize duplication), usually of the form:

Person's full name at birth (BirthYear-DeathYear)

Example:

John Isaac Smith (1900-1985)

Please use "c" right up against the year if it is approximate or estimated or even the best guess. Examples: (c1100-1165), (-c1876).

For further details on conventions for articles with non-Latin fonts or in other languages, see "Page names".

After-care
After creating a person article using one of the forms, you may at any time select the "Edit with form" menu item (subject to the above cautions about browsers until we fix those problems), to change details in the infoboxes in your new article, or you may use the "Edit this page" item to change details and/or fill out your article with a narrative on the individual. The two main infoboxes have "Edit facts" links for the easiest access to changing or adding details of the person's basic facts or the list of children.

You may use the rich text facility to add pictures, headings and tables to the article without using special codes. Try it - you will be surprised how easy it is to create an attractive and memorable article on your ancestor.