Updating multiple templates
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.
Date formatting
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 …
Citations for SMW information
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…
Double flushing- Unavoidable cases?
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…
Dancing with Semantic Forms- Unbunching the templates
Visually, it makes sense to distribute information about an individual in multiple boxes
- The main person infobox
- A table indicating the children
- Siblings table
- Descendants and ahnentafel ancestor trees
- Notes
- Migrations, Military service and religious events
- 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 …