Forum:Yewenyi article upgrade

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Yewenyi article upgrade

I propose the upgrade of Yewenyi-gedcom-generated articles that use an archaic article style no longer in use at familypedia. An example of the converted articles may be found at [1]. If I hear no complaints, I shall proceed with a fully automated a bot run to convert them. Up until now, these have been manually guided. A couple thousand articles may be involved. -~ Phlox 07:48, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan to me. My only caveat is that some of them have little snippets of extra info on them, with occasional ones with scads of extra info. So we should at least check size changes afterwards and look for the outliers. Thurstan 08:26, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I see from Catherine Stuart (Abt 1851-?) that you've got it covered. Thurstan 08:27, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

It's a pain in the neck to cover every single variation, but I got a lot of them, including the rarer case of notes being placed between Biography and birth:. However, some I just skip (for example those with births or deaths with "Bet date1, date2" and won't pick them up later unless it turns out there are a lot of them. I am not also not confident of the multiple marriage handling because I didn't have enough examples so I skip those too. I do some rationalization of place names but don't have the data on localities to verify them. I rename from Abt to c<date> in article names if the article does not yet exist. I rename link destination from county name to countyname, subdivision name if that article does exist. -~ Phlox 08:41, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Seems like an excellent project in principle, and well planned so far, but maybe premature.

1. I don't recall reading a progress report on SMW that said all of our properties, forms, and query systems etc are now fully in place ready for promoting to the world. Until that is done, I want Phlox to concentrate on getting us there. Then I want him to be working on our GEDCOM conversion and merge-on-the-spot process. If this little project is helping him with that, as he seemed to be suggesting to me a few days ago, good; but let's see that explained.
2. Also, I wonder whether the proposed upgrade may be partly a waste of time if properties etc get changed again in the final polishing, requiring the yewenyi upgrades to be further upgraded.
3. Small points about the Catherine example: some of the specific census info (e.g. "Location:at Wester Howmill, Turriff, Aberdeenshire, Scotland") seems to have been lost, her spouse should have a space between his "name" and his dates bracket, and the children box overlaps the person box.

— Robin Patterson (Talk) 09:31, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Does this constitute objection to the upgrade? If so I shall not proceed without consensus, but this will stall upgrade to SMW. Properties are stable and these articles (most of which have not been edited ever by a human since their creation in 2005 can be manipulated with the SMW form. It seems to me there is very little downside to this upgrade. -~ Phlox 19:56, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

We don't want stuff lost (consigned to the page history, where nobody is likely to look for it). I noticed you doing something with a page like Forms General Info an hour or three ago. If that or something else will ensure that all non-trivial matter gets kept up front, fine. And with stable properties (apart from any new ones that may arise) I'm happy to see the upgrade proceed as discussed if it takes very little Phlox time (which I expect; you convinced me, a few days ago, that 3,000 would be almost as easy as 12). — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:05, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Thurstan looked at my examples and saw that I was picking up the non trivial data. Can I guarantee 100%? Long ago I think I made it clear how skeptical I am of any claim that any converter of text with natural language in it can be 100%. My response is tat on the whole the data is in better condition than when it came in. Stuff like planet earth and entries with empty data are removed, redlinks to wrongly named counties are renamed to articles on them if they exist.

When do you jump. When is the converter good enough? First off, when we think of change, its quite different if the change is reversible. Unpleasant things like death, taxes, divorce, loss of job- generally not reversible. Things like upgrades? Reversible. A bot can be run to revert every single change.

At the end of the day it is still a gut call and realistic assessment of the downsides. As for changed parameters, or discovering data was possibly not converted properly somewhere down the line, do we have recourse? Sure- we do a bot run and rename the parameter or move it to another template. For missing data, we do a bot run to revert and rerun the conversion. Do we want to do that on articles that possibly had been edited after the upgrade? No. That's why you choose articles that have not been touched since 2005.

Phased transitions are tough. This is a precursor to large scale upgrade of info pages, later gedcom. We need to know how close we are. Without doing real conversions whose before/after can be eyeballed, we don't know how close we are.

I didn't see any objections about non trivial stuff not being converted. Unless that is the case, I think we should press on. We have bigger fish to fry than these few thousand archaic articles. -~ Phlox 15:44, 30 June 2009 (UTC)