Forums: Index > Watercooler > Upgrading old-style pages
Some recent contributors have failed to use Form:Person in creating articles about individuals, despite being urged, on several pages, to use the form. The form is usually faster, involving less typing for the same result (e.g. you don't have to type "was born on ... at ... son of ... married ... on ... at ... and died on ... at ..." and so on), and the result is hugely better because of automatic linking.
The Help forum has a section linking to a page about how to fix such a non-standard article if it has been created. Procedure is at Help:Upgrading old-style person articles. Please upgrade as many non-conforming articles as you can.
--- Robin Patterson (Talk) 23:34, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
- I think many of the recent ones are not worth the effort, since they contain no genealogy (i.e. no parents at all). Thurstan (talk) 01:13, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
- I agree in principle. However:
- fixing them will be worthwhile if the contributors or others later add good info
- any that have anything non-standard with their page names are very easy to fix:
- MOVE to the talk namespace, standardising the name, leaving redirect.
- COPY the new PAGENAME and open a new (or another used) Familypedia window.
- Enter the new name in Form:Person (found on the "CREATE OR EDIT ARTICLE" menu, for those of you not sure!).
- COPY whatever fields you want to from the talk page (for "Long name", paste the page name and delete the dates part; copy and paste the result to the "Short name"; if there are middle names, move them from the short name to their field)
- (Optionally, show "Info on talk page" as source and your name as contributor.)
- Type short edit summary, e.g. "New SMW article"
- Publish
- Hit "Edit with form"
- Publish again
- I agree in principle. However:
- I think many of the recent ones are not worth the effort, since they contain no genealogy (i.e. no parents at all). Thurstan (talk) 01:13, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
- If the original pagename is OK, however, vary the above a little: copy pagename; move to talk namespace but DE-standardise name and don't leave redirect; copy correct pagename to Form:Person; then after publishing the article retrieve that wrong-pagename talk page and move it to the correct name leaving (double) redirect
- --- Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:32, 18 May 2024 (UTC)