Forum:Famous people

From Familypedia

I've noticed that pages such as William I, King of England (1027-1087) provides his vital statistics, children, marriages, etc. Then, on Charlemagne, a lot of his biographical information is from Wikipedia. I suggest, that for famous people, such as Monarchs, Presidents, and other people who have their own Wikipedia articles should only have their vital statistics, marriages, children, etc. Those who edit such articles on Wikipedia, such as adding new information etc. to the biography would be very difficult to update here. This way, here at the Genealogy Wikia all we have to do as list their vitals, marriages, children, etc. and a link to the Wikipedia biography. This way, updating their biographical information won't be so difficult, since those at Wikipedia are already adding the latest updates. The use of these people's articles here can be for a quick reference of their vitals, marriages, children, link to Wikipedia biography, and to link them to those who are not notable enough for Wikipedia. Any thoughts? -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 02:37, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Good subject for discussion! - here are my first thoughts:

If we take anything substantial from the WP article, it's easiest to take the lot. Has several advantages, including categories that we want and categories we hadn't thought of but can probably make good use of, and probably family trees for some (which we can now display since we are copying the WP templates too).

Once the page is copied, then we can (and I think I've done this occasionally) trim off the material that's of no genealogical interest - but who's to say what a direct descendant finds to be of no interest?

Wikia Management doesn't mind how much good textual material we have here - it helps bring people here via the search engines.

On your point about "updating their biographical information won't be so difficult" - because we link to the WP article, any of our readers who want to see the latest WP updates can go straight to the article (irrespective of how much or little info our article has); I don't think you meant "updating" unless you think the "vitals" etc are likely to change.

Anyone's welcome to add pages for people we don't have, with just "their vitals, marriages, children, link to Wikipedia" - but some of us may want more and may add it.

Robin Patterson 15:05, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

In general, I'd rather see articles from the Wikipedia that are of real use, copied to this site, and modified to fit genealogical purposes. Usually, that's met with the Wikipedia article, but not always. There are usually certain points of emphasis that are of importance to genealogists that the rest of the world would be understandably bored by. For example, documenting certain bits of information. ---Perhaps most genealogists are bored by that as well, but its critical to good work to do so---and citing the Wikipedia as the source of information doesn't count for much. That's sort of the equivalent of "I got this from looking at court records in various counties, as well as other information I found". Very helpful that. The Wikipedia is usually quite good, and I rely on it a fair bit, but its purposes are not our purposes, and our needs are not its needs. So there's a justification for a separate article here.

Such local articles probably won't be updated quite as regularly as they might, but as Robin says, if someone doesn't think its been properly updated, then they can have at it themselves. Bill 20:50, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, Bill, a distinctly different article eventually, but it need not start its "separate" life different. No matter how much or how little we copy from WP, the original could be updated seconds later. I believe in copying the whole article now, with the links to the original page and its history sitting there in the acknowledgment template for any interested reader to follow. (Then we genealogize it.) Robin Patterson 12:00, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tabs

Consider an alternative. You really don't need to take folks out of the context of the wiki site, the main motivation appears to be that there is so much biographical information that it can swamp the genealogical info. I strongly buy the proposition that WP articles are a great starting point for telling the story of a particular figure- that genealogy is not just about the statistics of who begat whom, when they were born, married and died.

Other sites use tabbing interfaces to keep the information density, but prevent it from overwhelming the user. There have been a total of two uses of the Template:Tabs on person articles since it appeared last april. My intention is to include it as part of a standard artice template- eg. it would be great for gedcom imported trees so that I could stick the generated ancestry tree on a separate tab and not have the info clutter up the body of the article.

I have revamped the William I, King of England (1027-1087) article as an illustration of what I am talking about. If anyone has any input, let me know. Instructions to the Template:tabs person template may be found on that page. This template is revamped for automatic operation (it has defaults, skinable colours and is low bother- you don't have to fiddle with declaring what page you are on as with the old tabs template.) ~ Phlox 00:57, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

my main point was to not disclude the biographies, but the fact that Wikipedia's updates on famous people are so instant, and here there are not as many contributors to update them here at this Wikia. The tabs are helpful for when there is a large amount of information on a particular individule, such as William the Conqueor. But for people such as my great great grandmother, as there is less information, tabs are not needed. That's my opinion. Charlemagne needs tabs, I am going to do that now. -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 20:21, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Right. But even for sparsely written person articles, I could see tabs getting common if folks have any typical number of family photos/ scans of important documents for members of the family. Considering a hypothetical individual withtypical items- a picture of a gravestone, wedding certificate, baby shoes, maybe a picture of the person in uniform, you already can't fit it all in the main article, so you need a gallery tabbed page for it. ~ Phlox 22:15, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah. -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 22:59, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Phlox is onto something good there. Now that he has kindly bludgeoned me into installing some css and js thingies, our displays apparently work much better. Since then I have had the idea that I should try to do tabs for my relatives (fewer than 30 so far) on this site. (Am I right in thinking that the advantage of tabs is that you make subpages that link easily directly to one another without going through the parent page?) Robin Patterson 12:00, 17 October 2007 (UTC)