Forum:Questions about forms

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Questions, observations and suggestions about the alpha release of the Showfacts person-ex suite of templates. If your question is of general interest, please post it here rather than my talk page. -Phlox

FAQs

Q: Should I use {{Showfacts person}} and Form:Person?

A: No. Please use {{Showfacts person-ex}} and Form:Person-ex. You may come across some articles that still use this early development version. It's usually obvious because they have red text syntax errors in them. When all are converted over, the current -ex version will become the standard templates. Until then, use the -ex (experimental version). Please do not use the incompatible "set general" "set death" etc. templates found on these pages. Form:Person-ex users will find templates inserted automatically for supported templates. Manual users may examine existing articles for the list, or might develop a help file to describe usage tips for direct editing.

Q: Preview is broken. (manual editing)

A: At the time of this writing, the default (WYSIWYG) editor works very slowly with templates that are complicated. Preview mode intentionally produces a schematized view of infoboxes in a showfacts article. Until this shortcoming of the default editor is addressed, preview will produce this schematized view. I could put in a switch for manual users to override this behavior but I can imagine many folks forgetting and leaving it on, which would mean that newcomers would be penalized when they went to edit articles with the default editor. So unless folks really can't get along with doing a save to preview, I'd rather not. As soon as the editor gets better with complicated templates, I will remove this behavior.

Q: I'd like to help polish this- how can I help?

A: There are many help pages that discuss page creation. These need to be updated to re-orient guidance towards article creation using the showfacts templates.

Q: I like my style of articles. Do I have to switch?

A: No. While you may miss out on new features, it is true that some of Familypedia's best articles do not use any of the infobox or showfacts templates. Dormant articles may in time be upgraded but if you are uncomfortable with the new templates, feel free to use whatever style suits you best. ("Info page" articles: Note that these will have their current makeshift SMW capability turned off after the transition is complete. They have severe incompatibilities with the showfacts scheme.) Whatever alternative style you choose, please take a second look after the showfacts templates mature so that you might see whether the shortcomings that concern you have been addressed.

Thanks for your insights, suggestions, questions and patience with the flaws of this early release. -~ Phlox 17:01, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

Bruce Kendall

I've created a couple of articles using the new forms (Stephen Jennings Kendall (1797-1832) and Selium McGary (1831-1910)). I have a few questions about usage:

1. In the infobox-style table with the person's facts, the parents don't have links. However the parents do have links in the detailed "facts about" table at the bottom of the page. Is this intentional?

   No. That was inadvertent. Will be fixed shortly.

2. A perhaps related observation is that, whereas autocomplete suggestions appear when I start typing a name in the "Joined with" field, there is no autocompletion associatted with the Father and Mother fields

   Thanks. Besides these omissions, Autocompletion will continue to evolve. You may notice that the suggestions are also populated with articles that are not persons. In time, the localities field will only suggest localities and so on. This is currently demoed with county boxes.

3. When I was filling in the surname field for Stephen Kendall, autocomplete suggested "Kendall (surname)". Is this the recommended format for this field?

   No. Please delete the (surname) portion of the string. Folks will have to tolerate it for a week or so- I have to generate a separate list for the autocompletion.

4. In Selium McGary's page, I had manually added some content (a "tabs" macro) to the top of the page, and it worked fine. However, I subsequently went back into the forms to add some new information, and the "Showfacts person-ex" block was moved to the top of the page, ruining the formatting. Can this be prevented?

   I'll take a look at it. I have learned some things since I ran into some of the limitations of forms regarding placement. I used to believe that there was no way to avoid it. However it may be possible to allow this sort of thing. I had a conversation with the author about the problem but recall there was a fly in the ointment about general usage of the trick I have in mind. Don't recall what it was as I jot out this note, but if I can manage it, I will make it so you can do what you were doing. It may be that the particular tabs you have in mind might be autoincluded with the showfacts person-ex. Nonetheless, people may want to insert other elements prior to the person template. ~ Phlox 17:01, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

Bruce Kendall 12:08, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

Rtol

Did my first page with a form: Ekbert Billung (935-994). Works fine.

It would help if the form places {{SMW templates}} at the bottom of the page.

Done. ok. That will happen at article creation. Regarding insertion after the person has created an article: Do you envisage any options/ parameters on your suite of templates? If so, a subform like the children one can create it. If you display an infobox, it is tough to automagically place it in the article after creation. If you are a "Set" type template and don't directly display anything at the template's location, then of course it doesn't matter.

{{SMW templates}} does not take any parameters. It does not display anything, so it just needs to be on the page. rtol 18:15, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

It would be good, on the children form, to say something like "Name of Child1 (DoB-DoD); Name of Child2 (Dob-DoD); etc" Or just "List of children, separated by semicolons (;)" rtol 12:34, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

Yes. All name fields requires some guidance on naming convention. I will place a "by example" message there.

I couldn't find where to put the Wikipedia pages: [1] rtol 12:38, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

I forgot about them but they are extremely simple. Do we want a separate infobox just like before? ~ Phlox 16:16, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

I like the current info box. Should be separate, or together with the other sources. rtol 18:15, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

okeydokey. So folks who want to include wp links in the notes section can do so like links to any other source offsite. For those who want the interwiki sidebar thing I did for info pages, it will behave just like the old one. ~ Phlox 00:53, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

Elrondlair

• 1) It looks like the biographical section has been deleted from the template, unless I am doing something wrong : Wynant Pietersen Van Eck (c1632-1691) & Annetie Aukes Van Nuyse (c1643-?). The only thing I changed was move the children section to the bottom and do an old fashioned contributor section. This reminds me of a question, will the new forms have an easy box for wikipedia biographies as the old Info pages had a space? Thanks - William Allen Shade 02:52, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

Each template does a different thing. I added showfacts biography and showfacts notes. It is one of the things from footer that I think you want. There might be some other stuff in {{footer}}, but I think that's the main one.

• 2) Not sure if this was addressed before, but the forms require a surname. What do we do for people that really didn't have one, such as the patronymic system in many places? Thanks - William Allen Shade 02:54, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

Full details are discussed here. The skinny is: the names surname, given and middle names are all a mirage for ease of use. The surname field is really a mask over it's real identity. It's real name would have been "person_primary_taxonomic_key", but I am sure this would have seemed overly pedantic for most users. So it is completely proper to put a patronym in there, because it would be the primary key for the person in a government administrative database. Anyway, familypedia supports a 3 part taxonomic key for person names, and that key affects sort and lookup classification. For most of our users and most of europe, this corresponds to the familiar surname (primary key), given name (secondary key), middle name (tertiary key) pattern. For ease of understanding, this is how they are named. Technically, a patronym of an individual from Iceland is not a surname, but it is still the primary taxonomic key. In Russia, the Patronym is least significant, so it would be assigned to the third taxonomic key- "middle name" field. Let's take another example with a mismatch.

Chinese names have surnames, but they are insignificant for identification since over half the population in china uses the same 20 surnames. For this reason, there is heavy pressure on the secondary and and tertiary keys. We have no direct support for generational indicators, nor western names, but just as with patronyms, we don't have to. We use the secondary and tertiary keys as government administrators would use them to keep individuals sorted. Typically, a given name is treated as a compound composed of a generation indicator and a first name. Example: wikipeida:Tony Tan Keng Yam Tan is the surname. Keng Yam is the generation- first name compound and goes into given name. Tony is the least significant key so goes into the middle name field.

It's less complicated if you ask yourself how a government administrator in a country would use three fields for names to sort the population. We could go abstract in the Tables and call it Name1 instead of surname, Name2 instead of given name, and name3 instead of middle names, but I think that while the affectionados would not be making condescending comments about patronyms, most people would be confused. ~ Phlox 07:16, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

• 3) None of the dates appear to be clickable as they would be with info pages. - William Allen Shade 03:13, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

Right. Also regarding dates, note that if you are logged in with prefered language en-gb or any other non en language that the order is Day first rather than month first.

Now to the linking. It's easy to link to lots of stuff, but because I have lots of choices now, I have no idea what people prefer. What's hard is determining where the user most often would like most to go. For example, click on birth year, go to the article for the article on that year as was the case before, or the category of births in that year? Click on month, go to the year-month in history article? Click on day, go to the "this day in history": month-day? Say what you like, we can try it one way for a few weeks then refine to something else if we don't like it. I don't have any opinion on what is best. ~ Phlox 07:16, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

Thurstan

Property "children-g1" doesn't seem to be set by {{showfacts children}}, so the "descendants" template doesn't work. What is happening? Thurstan 02:57, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

Fixed. you can stop using set children now. ~ Phlox 08:07, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Thurstan 23:20, September 28, 2009 (UTC)