We used to have to add to get templates to list according to "pagename" rather than all under "T" for "Template...". (Even subcategories had to be similarly "piped" many years ago too, I think.) Now we don't. See, for example, Category:People and person templates, where "Cite AWT" is in the right place despite having no extras added - though now I see that there's a subcategory where it would be more appropriate. (I don't know about "Davis..." under "R" and I can't be bothered checking it.) I guess Mediawiki software, or at least the Wikia version, has caught up with what most users want.

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Is "Category:Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie Screen Actors Guild Award winners‎" our longest category name so far?

Well - who has changed his mind about the value of listing famous people?

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With our forms now so darned easy to use for adding pages, expect a flood of new person-articles.

But it will be easier to handle if we have more agreement on page names; otherwise there will be more duplication than is desirable.

So please all put Forum:Page names for individuals on your watch lists and keep an eye on it and offer your tuppence-worth whenever you feel inclined.

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:38, December 30, 2012 (UTC)

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Thanks to my wonderful son.

It's great to see the site progressing. Someone should update the Big Wikis page on "Central".

Don't expect contributions from me very soon. (How many thousand emails do you get in 5 months?)

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:58, December 24, 2012 (UTC)

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Wikia is rolling out a fun new initiative for the holiday season called “Time to Play” where we ask our wikis what page they’re most proud of. We want to know which page you would want to have represent .

There will be an official blog going out on Nov. 1 but we wanted to reach out to you early and see if you were interested in participating now.

If you wanted to participate, a “Time to Play” badge would go up on the right rail of the mainpage that links users to the page that you choose, while the footer will live on that same page that links to hub pages eg. http://www.wikia.com/Entertainment for Time to Play goodies. You can see how the badge looks by clicking here and how the footer will appear by clicking here.

We will feature on http:/…

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I joined this site in hopes of finding ancestors. Last name is Meddaugh. I have been able to determine that my fathers’ family lived in Detroit about two generations back. I believe that my paternal great-grandfather moved into Chicago sometime during the first past of the 20^th Century. I have not been able to trace my family tree back to my paternal great-grandfather. I was told that paternal great-grandfather had brothers who migrated west across Canada and eventually moved into Oregon and Northern California.

I hope that this site will work as a repository/ clearing house for information and details regarding family ancestors.

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I am putting this up for educational purposes right now, but I invite Martin and descendants of Martins that came to Mississippi in the 1800's (especially) to let me know what is going on in your lives.

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Seven years ago I joined what was then the Genealogy Wiki. I think it has a good future under its current name. So did the world-renowned Dick Eastman.

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Wow. After all these years I finally made the connection that wikia is a Jimbo endeavor. Small I am.

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Jay Mahadev

Under Construction

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During the first two weeks of July 2012 those who departed Valle San Giovanni for faraway lands, as well as their descendants and families, are encouraged to return to Abruzzo for a series of festivities and entertainment. To make this happen 20 newly restored private apartments in Valle are being made available for a nominal fee. If sufficient demand exists, a second Discover Your Roots can be repeated during the last two weeks of July 2012.

Three types of apartments are available: One bedroom - up to 2 people, 1 double bed, bathroom, combo kitchen/living room. Cost EUR 500 (approx. 685 dollars) Two bedroom - up to 3 people, 2 double beds, bathroom, combo kitchen/living room. Cost EUR 600 (approx. 822 dollars) Three bedroom - up to 5 people, 3 dou…

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• 1 Summary
  • 1.1 Genlias
  • 1.2 Digitale Stamboom Portaal
  • 1.3 Online-Familieberichten
  • 1.4 Graftcombe

If anyone is researching their Dutch ancestry, as I have just started to, they may find some of these websites useful in their search.

• http://www.genlias.nl/en/page0.jsp

Genlias is the first step in researching Dutch ancestry. It has transcripts of original documents spanning over a century, with almost complete data for many regions between 1820's and 1940's.

• Genlias itself gives this account on it's webpage: "Genlias is a national Dutch database containing essential information for genealogical research. It is a joint initiative by a number of public archives in the Netherlands and overseas. You can use Genlias to find information recorded in official Dutch …

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Hello everyone!

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Hi Dennis,

I am a filmmaker making a documentary about Sycamore, IL, and found your blog. In the film, Pete Johnson tells the story of working at Doty's Dairy when he was a boy. I've been searching for photos of the dairy, the milk trucks, anything! Do you know if photos exist? Would be so grateful for any help.

Thank you so much, Dennis.

Warm wishes,

Susan Hope Engel

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Inspired by one of my second cousins, with whom (along with astrophysicist Stephen Hawking) I share MacGregor ancestors, I've dredged up the part of my file (mostly supplied by the late Rod Drummond of Auckland) that listd Rob Roy and some of his descendants. Note the John Drummond in generation 5, who married May MacGregor and ended up in the Tasman Region (part of Nelson Province) of New Zealand; descendants included Rhys Drummond, who married a daughter of my sister-in-law.

Descendants of Robert (Rob Roy) McGregor        

0  Robert (Rob Roy) MCGREGOR b: 1671  d: 1734 

-  +Mary MCGREGOR b: c 1671 m: 1693     

-- 1  James Roy MCGREGOR b: 1695  d: 1754 

-- ---  +Annabel MCNICCOL b: c 1695      

-- 1  Colin Campbell MCGREGOR b: 1698 …

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Now that even the latest upgrade of Firefox won't handle our standard forms, and a recent software "upgrade" stripped most of the box labels, I expect I may be the only person using them. They are great time-savers, and I won't stop until Firefox 3 becomes dangerous or I become incapable. I hope we can fix the problem first.

Please all reply with a yes or no, and any comment you feel like adding.

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I wasn't the founder, but I was lucky to find the site fairly soon after it started. Now nearly 28,000 edits, though some of the "newbies" put me to shame in the numbers game.

Despite its problems, this is a great site. I expect to be with it until after a rather personal sensor page gets non-null entries in more than one death property and a name change. I regret that we have (perhaps temporarily) lost some stalwarts, particularly the man who developed the SMW then took on two extra children. Families, huh!!?

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Hi my computer was having a problem. Now it's fixed.

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It never meant "Save this as a draft". It meant "Preserve this as the new published version of this page". Now Wikia has changed its labels to make that more obvious. The button says "Publish".

Some of our instruction pages have been changed accordingly. Others will as soon as someone with the power to change them can be bothered.

At the same time, Wikia changed "Move" to "Rename", which is what it meant all along. Instruction pages will probably all catch up eventually. Not all of Wikia's own documentation has caught up yet. See Help:Move", for example.

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I have just responded to a staff blog post with the following:

... most of the two billion people online could have their parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors listed on Familypedia, which would make it a world leader. Sites such as Geni.com are working towards having a network of relationships linking every person whose vital statistics have ever been recorded. Wikia should be up there with them, but its software is currently unable to do it properly for even 30,000 individuals. There's a challenge for Wikia staff.

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Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter describes itself as "the most popular online genealogy magazine in the world, as measured by Alexa".

Its seventeen-paragraph review of Familypedia in November 2010 (symbolically on Remembrance Day) helped to bring over fifty new registrations in 24 hours (the same number as in the previous 30 days), resulting in a 3-hour cut-off of Semantic MediaWiki because Wikia's Apache and MySQL servers could not handle what they were being asked to process.

Clearly the rising popularity of Familypedia, with our aim to make it at least fifty thousand times bigger than it is, requires more thought to be given to how a website can properly use Semantic MediaWiki for cleverly connecting many hundreds of millions of indiv…

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Since returning to my favourite website after breakfast, I've seen no properly displayed "facts" articles. Looked at several and seen what looks like a jumble of templates etc.

Even a "/tree" page is garbled. Here's what I see for Byrd Webb (1802-1889)/tree:

and goes on for screens and screens.

I've checked the wiki "recent changes" since I was last active here last night. No changes to templates. It must be a Wikia software problem affecting our key templates.

I've sent the following to "Contact Wikia" under the heading "Bad problem with display of most Familypedia articles":

Wikia software appears to have changed something that has a disastrous effect on the majority of Familypedia's articles - those that use the standard templates and can be…

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Familypedia, a genealogy wiki, has been using Semantic MediaWiki, Semantic Forms, and Semantic Drilldown since mid-2009. Currently 180,000 total pages and growing at several hundred per week with only half a dozen really active volunteers and dozens of casuals adding ancestors.

When a user adds or edits a page about an individual, the data is in form fields, with the software creating or editing "facts" (a fact being a combination of a "property" and a value). A later query gets selected facts displayed in a chosen arrangement.

http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Semantic_MediaWiki/demo_query-range shows an example of the result. It lists all articles of people born in the 1500s that have images, tabulated with columns for image name, bir…

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Descendants of :

Eliza Boardman

Generation 1

1. Eliza Boardman was born 17 Mar 1868 and died 05 Mar 1919. She married Henry Metcalf. He was born 1845 in Camden NSW Australia and died 20 May 1922. Read more >

• 1 - Enter myself and ancestors I know.
• 2 - Find census materials thought [HeritageQuest] and FamilySearch
• 3 - Verify information though other official documents.

• Minnesota Historical Society is a great Minnesota reference for birth and death certificates.

• 4 - Find images to support what I have. Gravestones, portraits, etc.
• 5 - Read newspapers and other periodicals to learn about the places and times my ancestors lived in.

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Slovakia 1: New Zealand 1

Yes, Lanica, that counts as a win in the NZ psyche.

Hmmmm - we don't have much else about South Africa here.

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1. Alice Mary BUGDEN. Born on Sep 14 1853 in Mount Hunter. Alice died on Apr 13 1925 in Balmain; she was 71.

Parents

2. Thomas BUGDEN. Born on Sep 18 1811 in Donhead, St. Mary`s Wiltshire England. Thomas died on May 25 1898 in Camden NSW Australia; he was 86.

On Aug 08 1835, when Thomas was 23, he married Elizabeth READ.

They had the following children ...

i. Agnes BUGDEN (1835 - 1912)

ii. Austin BUGDEN (1837 - 1909)

iii. Alfred Clement BUGDEN (1839 - 1923)

iv. Lewis BUGDEN (1841 - 1918)

v. Angelina BUGDEN (1843 - 1926)

vi. Henry BUGDEN (1845 - 1909)

vii. Thomas BUGDEN, b.1846 (1846 - 1857)
1 viii. Alice Mary BUGDEN (1853 - 1925)

ix. George Benedict BUGDEN (1855 - 1856)

x. John Bede BUGDEN (1857 - 1937)

xi. Albert Stephen BUGDEN (1859 - 1906)

3. Elizabeth R…

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1. Catherine Ellen CAMPBELL. Born in 1868 in Bungaree Victoria Australia. Catherine died in 1922 in Carlton Victoria Australia; she was 54.

Parents

2. Gavin CAMPBELL. Born in 1824 in Girvan Scotland UK. Gavin died in 1916 in Collingwood Victoria Australia; he was 92.

Gavin married Elizabeth MCCALLUM.

They had one child ...
1 i. Catherine Ellen CAMPBELL (1868 - 1922)

3. Elizabeth MCCALLUM. Born on Jul 05 1830 in Barony Lanarkshire Scotland UK. Elizabeth died in 1910 in Bungaree Victoria Australia; she was 79.

Grandparents

4. Gilbert CAMPBELL. Born on Mar 13 1800 in Girvan Ayr Scotland Uk.

Gilbert married Jean HALBERT.

They had the following children ...

i. Thomas CAMPBELL (b.1822)
2 ii. Gavin CAMPBELL (1824 - 1916)

5. Jean HALBERT. Born in Girvan Scotland U…

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1. Adelaide Alice MASON. Born on Jan 05 1914 in Balmain NSW Australia. Adelaide died on Jun 16 2004 in Woy Woy NSW; she was 90.

Parents

2. John William MASON. Born on Jan 01 1892 in Leichhardt NSW Australia. John died on Nov 10 1928 in Alice Street Lakemba NSW Australia; he was 36.

On Feb 04 1911, when John was 19, he married Eleanor May BISHOP.

They had the following children ...

i. Robert MASON ()

ii. Edward Bishop MASON (1912 - 1953)
1 iii. Adelaide Alice MASON (1914 - 2004)

iv. Alfred James MASON (1919 - 1980)

3. Eleanor May BISHOP. Born on Jun 27 1891 in Balmain NSW Australia. Eleanor died on Jun 17 1969 in Lakemba NSW Australia; she was 77.

Grandparents

4. Albert Edward MASON. Born in 1864 in Dublin Ireland.

On Dec 18 1866, when Albert was 2, he mar…

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Descendants of :

104948 Mason

Generation 1

1. 104948 Mason. He married Catherine Ellen Campbell. She was born 1868 in Bungaree Victoria Australia and died 1922 in Carlton Victoria Australia, daughter of Gavin Campbell and Elizabeth MCCallum. Read more >

Finally completed page for each individual in a line from U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron up to Edward III of England. Lots of people named Herbert. Not checked all its Order of Charlemagne numbers yet, but they were roughly calculated a few weeks ago and seen to be not threatening the stability of his current number derived from the link to a much later king.

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And I have the info to give his parents three other lines down to Kerry by way of the Governor's much-married niece Elizabeth Fones, "The Winthrop Woman".

Then I can branch off the Kerry-Winthrop ascent (foreshadowed in last night's addition to Anthony Browne), so as to give Kerry one of many possible lines to Charlemagne.

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We have many pages wholly or partly copied from Wikipedia, mostly from the English language version. We obviously aim (as part of our "genealogy of the world" goal) to have a page for every single individual who has a page on any Wikipedia. We have rudimentary procedures for deciding what languages shall be used, all around the idea that we have just one set of basic data for each individual, even if some of it is in different languages.

Because copying is relatively easy, those individuals should be high on the priorities for those of us who do more than record our own ancestry (without ever encountering anyone who's notable enough to be on Wikipedia). User:Phlox has been talking about bulk imports of people-pages from Wikipedia, but has b…

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It's so long since we set it by consensus that I'm not sure I restored it properly. Any comments?

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á

 

hipótesis

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CARRI HESSIMAN IS MY GREAT GRANDMA . SHE MARRIED JIM HALL HE WAS IN THE REVALATIONARY WAR, THERE SONS WERE LUCK, DEW, IRA, DAUGHTER ZOLA MY GRANDMA. JIM DIED AND SHE REMARRIED A GENTLEMAN BY THE NAME OF MORGAN. MY MOM SAID, THEY MOVED FROM OHIO TO OKLAHOMA. I'VE BEEN TRYING TO FIND OUT INFORMATION ABOUT HER AND THE REST OF MY FAMILY.  MY FATHERS  NAME WAS WILLIAM HARRIS HE WAS THE SON OF ZOLA HALL AND JOHN HARRIS.PLEASE HELP TKS DAWN WYMAN

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My husband, Marc Roddin, entered the information about James Gray born 1804 in Scotland,  immigrated approximately 1829, died 1868 buried in Yuba City, California. Today is the  anniversary of his death date which was October 3, 1868.

I learned about Familypedia  a few weeks ago at our monthly meeting  of the Silicon Valley Computer Genealogy Group.  The great thing about Familypedia is that you can change it or add to it just like in Wikipedia.  Later we will add a page for his wife, Mary Ann Carr, and his son, James Carr Gray. It would be great to see pages for William Jackson Gray and George Washington Gray since  a few of us descendants have had contact with each other.

It would also be wonderful to find other descendants of James Gray. …

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Technical SMW forms note:

It is possible to use forms to store an identical parameter value in more than one template. This is useful for when two template want to access the same value and want to get the most recent value without double flushing. For example, both a person infobox and a child infobox needs to access the name of the parent. By refering to both templates on the form, and using the field in both for template areas, the value will be recorded in both templates.

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Dates in familypedia can easily be displayed conforming to the users language preference. With the exception of the United States and Canada, the world specifies dates in day first order. Even the US military does it this way. All registered users with a preferred language setting that is not english will see dates displayed in day first order. English speakers preferring day first will see this if they set their language setting to en-gb (great britain). While my personal preference is day first, the user populations about about 50 50, and since there is no en-us, the default formatting for familypedia will be month, day, year.

For logged out users, all pages with the Property:Page language set to anything other than en will have the …

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The goal of a well engineered infobox is to avoid double flushing if at all possible. This means accessing parameters rather than swm queries. Refs will work with smw queries but not parameters due to the evaluation sequence of the wikimedia engine. Parts of the syntax are evaluated before others such as with the <ref> tag (as well as any other wikitext tags enclosed in <> symbols). So what does this have to do with footnotes? Say a user goes to the form and corrected a source for the birth facts. When the form is saved, wikitext for the ref is expanded first prior to expanding the parameters. It means that parameters in a function can be never used inside of ref tags.

So we have to do something different. I looked at the old code f…

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I have been converting over all templates to remove double flushing, but have run into a case where this apparently is unavoidable. For any event for which there are multiple participants, eg: residences as given in Census, or Migration or travel events involving a family. The father article may record one event, the cousin article may list another. The military comrade in arms may list yet another. In an individual's article what we want is to list all known residences or all journeys regardless which article recorded the information.

Say our particular article defines 2 residences and all others are defined in other articles. We can avoid double flush only if we use the parameters. But to get the info from the other articles, we ne…

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Visually, it makes sense to distribute information about an individual in multiple boxes

1. The main person infobox
2. A table indicating the children
3. Siblings table
4. Descendants and ahnentafel ancestor trees
5. Notes
6. Migrations, Military service and religious events
7. Residences

Currently we have examples of and tables. The others are variants and will follow when the fundamentals are solid, but what is clear is that we need to be able to sprinkle these freely throughout the article interspersed with text.

Problem" It's that "interspersed with text" bit that is the crux of the problem this post examines. What semantic forms do is rewrite an article. Most of this is confined to the templates they recognize (via the for template statement). Free text will …

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It seems we need a generalized table handler for events that occur over a span of time.

• Start date- End date: Migrations, Residences, Military service, and Occupations are 4 examples that have Start and End dates.

• Aggregate vs. Consitutent events: Migrations, Occupations and Military could have multiple locations, but each Migration waypoint/ business relocation / military deployment- stationing can be considered separately with one umbrella event aggregating the constituent events.

At this point I am not sure that we need to go much further than the coarse level of providing the start and end dates. Other than this minor difference these events are exactly the same as any other event. Obviously this does not provide ideal coverage but we …

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At first there was simply a date format field.

• Problem: it was not possible to indicate dates for which the exact month and day was unknown. It would just fill in a day and month- usually the day and month of the edit.

An approximate year and approximate month was added.

• Problem: sorting a report on a field requires that the field have some non blank value (see demo by resaving this edit and refreshing). Reports would not display records that had a null dates or years.

The year and month field was thereafter derived from the date field, and guaranteed to exist.

• Some contributors set the year and month parameters or form fields not understanding the parameters would be ignored if date was present.
• A form entry for a date has a bewildering numbe…

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"I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."
-Dorothy Parker

I wonder how many ancestors felt that way, with the willing complicity of worshipful descendants. Of course epistemologicaly speaking we are all stumbling along like Alice in our wonderland of myths, so I'm not advocating some singular interpretation of individuals. I just wonder how we will accomodate the competing myths. There are very different biographies of historical individuals portrayed alternately as saints or sociopaths, all based on strong primary evidence. There is no reason that we will fare better at getting to a unitary view of an ancestor especially given that family histories are usually composed of much more flimsy evidence. 17:05, 23 Ju…

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“Among well-bred people a mutual deference is affected, contempt for others is disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness.” - David Hume

The odd thing about civility is that it can stand in the way of passionate and dramatic drives towards improving things. The "Japanese problem with innovation" is mostly nonsense, but for cultures that want to nurture the accelerated development found in so called more innovative cultures, the wellspring of change can have a lot to do with encouraging the "rudeness" of pointing out and taking personal action to deal with egregious shortcomings- those SNAFus "Situations normal-…

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To extrapolate from Gertrude Stein then, A London is a London is a London? Well, not quite.

Maybe Bill had it right- A rose by any other name smells just as sweet.

Alternatives to WP as an authority on Place Names looks like a dead end. Some might be better in terms of uniformity, but worse in terms of quality of data. Consider the Getty Online Thesaurus of Geographic Names. One would think that this would handle the 1700 year old town of Zhujiajiao properly. It is surprizing it doesn't. It claims to have vernacular display, but no chinese is available. WP has it, along with a proper containment hierarchy unlike Getty. Getty's type for this town is the unhelpful catch all "inhabited place", and it omits the fact that it is in the dis…

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Reports are expected to organize data consistently, but genealogical location data is not consistently encoded. The familiar approach to be sure that like locations appear grouped together is to provide a column for city, county, state and so on. Familypedia's location hierarchy is currently

• country
  • subdivision1
    • county
      • locality
        • street address (repeated)

Such classifications are deliberately simplified to make encoding by naive users easy and quickly comprehensible. However because they are simplified such classifications often break even for common examples. For example, up to now "locality" is a synonym for hamlet, settlements, towns, cities and megalopolises. For the large percentage of individuals in the global population living in large …

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A central goal is to make inputting information as easy as possible for first time contributors. I am not completely satisfied with the scheme I currently have implemented with SMW templates and forms. I saw knowledgeable persons making errors, so some adjustments seem reasonable. Problem areas:

• exceptions such as cases where we need a subdiv2 (for instance Regions of England
• the unnecessary requirement that users understand how a location is technically classified. Why should we require that users understand that Greater London is a "county", or that England is not a "country" in the sense that Familypedia uses the term (sovereign nation with a seat at the U.N., able to negotiate treaties independently of the U.K., and so on)? Similar …

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