Forum:Can't see a page I created

Forums: Index > Help desk > Can't see a page I created

I created this page for my father: http://www.wikia.com/wiki/William_Brian_Cox#Vital_statistics

And if I do a search for "William Brian Cox" it gives zero results. What gives?

KellyAndrewCox

Depends where you do the search. That page is on Central Wikia - http://www.wikia.com.... whereas this site is http://genealogy.wikia.com....

I have found it and copied it to William Brian Cox (1931-) here. Carry on!!

Robin Patterson 04:55, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

OK, thanks. I think. This is just far far too difficult. I have no idea whatsoever why the page I created ended up on the wikia site, rather than the genealogy site. I followed the instructions on the genealogy site. And it is difficult to figure out even how to begin. I think I'll stick with the wikitree.org site, even though they have no discussion forum. At least they have a dead-easy guide to creating new pages.

Thanks anyway for the help.

76.201.149.70

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Would any of our experts be able to offer an opinion on how KellyAndrewCox managed to create a page on Central Wikia by following the same instructions as others have successfully used? Robin Patterson 13:45, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Not sure how the page ended up on the Wikia main site, but what I always do is type in the name of the person in the search here at the Genealogy Wikia, click the red link to the non existant page (Under Search reults it says "You searched for ..." Click on whatever the ... says, which should be the name of the person you want to write an article on and you will be editing the page. just copy and paste one of the layouts used to start a page or make one of your own. -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 14:07, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

• KellyAndrewCox - Perhaps you could tell us the steps you took to creating the article? -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 14:10, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Fix?

Hopefully, the restructured "Create a page" link in the navigation bar will make this somewhat an an easier process. There's still some cleanup to do on that, but I think the current presentation works well. This, however, only addresses the "page creation problem". There's still an ease of use "problem", though I no longer consider this really a problem.

In this regard, my views on ease of use have changed substantially over the last year or so. Once upon a time I thought it would be a good idea to create an "input box" kind of mechanism of adding the specific detailed data (DOB's etc) to multiple pages at the same time.---Something where you only had to put in a child's data once, and it appeared on the pages of both parents as well as on their own page, and perhaps their spouses pages as well. That would probably have given a data input form that would simplify adding data, as people wouldn't have to figure out how to actually edit a page, but could go with a series of input boxes that would solve the problem for them.

I've since mellowed on that---though perhaps that's not really the right way to express my current views on the subject. After considerable thought I don't think I WANT to make this task too easy. I'd rather have people thinking about the data they input, rather than favoring snatch and grab artists. One of the problems with web based genealogy is the massive amounts of genealogical information that's become available. Its entirely too easy to create a lineage without thinking once about whether what you have is accurate or not. Just grab a dozen GEDCOMS from ancestry (or wherever) and Viola, you have a family tree that extends all the way back to Charlegmane, Julius Cesar, Adam and Eve, or whoever. I wouldn't be surprized to find that there are people who have incorporated the noble "Greystroke" lineage, without ever realizing that they had unwittingly attached their line to a fictious lineage dreamed up by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The problem in genealogy is not that its too hard to create a lineage, its that its too easy. If you actually have to input the data yourself, including the format you'll use, you're probably going to get better product. I'm sure there are other sites that are going the traditional route, and replicating the problems at Ancestry, GenCircles, etc. I'd rather not go there, shooting for better quality over quantity. I'd like to make some components, such as basic page creation, easier, but maybe not too easy. Bill 15:15, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Have you noticed the fairly new special page http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Special:DynamicPageListSP - it may be the sort of thing you have been looking for; but it may take someone like Phlox to tell us how it works. Maybe it deserves a new page Forum:Dynamic Page List? Robin Patterson 11:36, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I will review Bill 14:03, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

After a quick look, I can see how that could be made to do our bidding. But the description of how to use this is still in computer programmer speak, and would need humanifcation for most of our users to make any sense of it. And while I can see a pathway to using it, its still going to be a very techy kind of thing. When people have a hard time figuring out how to format a page, asking them to create and insert a report generator to make their lives easier, is going to be a hard sell. Still, I can see how this could be done in a "user-friendly" context. Just would take a lot of work to make the underpinnings transparent.

Here's sort of the way I think this could be made to work for us: Basically, this uses categories and article titles to collect articles that have certain things in common (like all of the children of John Walker and Ann Houston), and create a report for them that shows the articles for the children, their DOB's their DOD's their spouses, etc. Perhaps that report generator could be inserted on the parents page, so when it opened up, the most current data from the children's pages would be extracted and displayed. You could probably set something up to go the otherway---all of the parents of John Walker IV, with a report generator that would give you the vita for John III and Ann Houston.

Given the description of the beast (see Overview, I think it would take a lot of work to make this work. And I'm not sure it would really get you something that was that easy for most people to insert. I'd guess they'd find it simpler to just add the data themselves. But perhaps if this was embedded the right way in a template, it could be done automatically. An achilles heel is that you would need fairly decent categorization on the articles from which data was to be extracted. Missing categories would probably exclude a lot of data. Bill 14:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)