Help:Child lists

(Initially copied from Watercooler.)

One of the problems we have with the mechanics of the wiki is the requirement to duplicate informaiton in vairous places---for example, when we create a person article we normally create an article for both the husband and the wife---and usually that means we need a child list in both articles---usually exactly the same child list, unless there are multiple marriages. That requires a duplication of effort; most genealogy programs handle that chore automatically---and I believe people expect that kind of facility in any genealogy site. As discussed before, we will eventually solve that problem with the development of extensions---but that's a comprehensive answer that's still a bit in the future before I will have the time to tackle it. In the meantime, for this particular child list problem, I've realized that there's a tool in the magic words kit that will do the job---though its more complicated than I'd like.

the tool is

This magic word inserts the entire contents of the named article into another article where the magic words appear. Thus, if I create a subpage on an article for a woman, that shows the child list, I can automatically insert that child list into both the husband's and wife's articles.

Here's and example child list from one of my ancestors, Nancy Ann Wannamaugher. If you click the links to Nancy Ann, or to her husband Benjamin Givens, you'll go to their pages and see exactly the same child list. Note that iin the example below the usual edit button on the right will not take you to a point where you can edit the child list---it will take you to the part of the page containing the magic words. To get to the child list to edit it you need another link that points to the actual child list. I've embedded this in the Child list table in the upper right where it says "Edit this List".

I suspect that this approach is going to be too cumbersome for most folks to make effective use of it (In theory its simple enough, in practice it requires a knowledge of HTML, and some semi complicated thinking to see how it works.) But perhaps we can figure out how to use the same trick with other components, and something that would make it simpler to use. Bill 13:57, 28 December 2006 (UTC)