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Forums: Index > Watercooler > Tabs templates



(Chad's contribution copied to here from Zeph's talk page in June 2007)

Check out the tabs template here: Thomas (Lt.) Putnam (1615-1686)

Template:Tabs is a really useful way to expand the infrastructure of the site. Chadlupkes 23:02, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Template:tabs person is an upgrade of the Tabs template making it more suitable for Genealogy articles. Unlike the Tabs template, it may be used entirely without parameters. If default tab names exist as subpages, then the template will automatically display tabs for them. For power users, more parameters have been added so that in addition to overriding the standard tab names, the user can specify color scheme. Any comments, see the talk page. ~ Phlox 01:29, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
Thank you, Phlox (I hope). Are there any possible incompatibilities with other Wikia sites from which we may wish to copy? Robin Patterson 14:08, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
Well, here's to hoping. Incompatibilities? Nope. I didn't touch the old tabs template, so anything imported using that template will work just as on the other sites. No one else has the violently revamped, super cool, automatic and multilingual "tabs person". There might be an export issue though- folks from other wikia wishing to use our template will find that the defaults are set specifically for genealogy, (eg Family tree tab is a default). The first thing they'd do is change those defaults and then tabs person would be incompatible with other wikias. The proper thing to do might be to call this thing tabs genealogy, and follow the template infobox convention- Infobox English monarchs, Infobox Actors; Infobox Things I made in my shed.....
What do you think- rename it to reflect its specialization? ~ Phlox 15:34, 3 October 2007 (UTC)


Then came info pages!


Tabs and info for people pages[]

(First two comments by Thurstan are the bulk of a section on my talk page, slightly edited. Robin Patterson 01:27, 6 November 2008 (UTC))

...If we look at the code for Template:Tabs person (or even just the documentation), we see that you can have "/Biography", "/Ancestors" and "/Pictures" subpages. This seems to be totally independent of the use of the "/info" subpage. I have certainly used the "Ancestors" subpage several times (eg Constance Gertrude Partridge (1887-1970)). These various US presidents that I have been fiddling with this evening all seem to use the /info + /biography form (another is Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)). ... Thurstan 10:31, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

The way I understand subpages: you can create any subpage you like, called anything you like. But the "standard" names are determined by which subpages the "standard" templates use. The two templates I have used are:

  1. Template:Tabs person: as noted above, it shows (as default) tabs for "/Biography", "/Ancestors" and "/Pictures", though parameters can be used to show other tabs.
  2. Template:Showinfo person: which reads data from the "/info" subpage. However it also shows links for "/Ahnentafel" and "/Descendants" subpages, if they exist.

This seems something of a mixed bag, which could be made more consistent (that word again!): eg why tabs for "/Ancestors" but not "/Descendants"? Given your comment on Michelle Obama, do you favour "/Family Tree" over "/Ahnentafel" or "/Ancestors" (I realize that the first two terms are more specific than the last)? Thurstan 22:46, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, pal. That clarifies things I have been asking for months, off and on. I agree that more consistency might be valuable. Am I right thinking that there can be eight tabs without straining the software? If so, could we combine the current two tabs templates into a Template:Tabs genea? That would still leave one or two unnamed slots for folks to create their own specially-named subpage. "/Family Tree" would be ambiguous; it would cover "/Ahnentafel"&"/Ancestors" and "/Descendants", not necessarily a good thing: anyone who has a big version of each would want a separate page for each, and a page called "/Ancestors" could presumably be quite satisfactory for an Ahnentafel (or does one have a handy numbered preload?). People who want an hourglass family tree as well as ancestor and descendant trees/tables could put it on the main page or some other. Robin Patterson 01:27, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
So where to from here? It is not really a matter of combining the two templates (the primary function of Showinfo person has nothing to do with tabs). The problem is that Showinfo person is trying to do (as a side function) a similar job to Tabs person. For an example of what happens when you try to use them both, see Henrietta M Blackman (1807-1851) (not neccessarily bad or ugly, but at least redundant). If we made "/Descendants" another default value for Tabs person, and removed it from Showinfo person, it would fix most of my objection. The totally consistent solution is to do the same thing with "/Ahnentafel" (assuming that we actually need that one: if not, just remove it from Showinfo person). We don't need Tabs genea as Tabs person is already our own custom version.
The least change I would like to see is to add "/Descendants" to the defaults for Tabs person.
(The history show that this functionality was added to Showinfo person by AMK152 1 June 2008, so I'd like to see his opinion here).
My reading of the code and testing suggests that Tabs person does not work as nicely as you seem to think (or should that read: "as one of my sentences implied"?): I think one has two choices in using it: if you specify no parameters, you get the default tabs (well, only the ones that actually exist). If you supply parameters, you get tabs for the specified parameters (so if you also want some of the "default" tabs, you have to specify them as well). [I could easily be wrong about this]. IMO it is no great problem for it to behave like this. Thurstan 03:08, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
I believe that the tabs person template, when many subpages exist, make it look too cluttered and messy. I think having the link on the infobox is more visually appealing. I do agree that we need to standardized the names. The basic charts we use are for listing ancestors and descendants. The descendancy list is basically the only decendancy chart we use, thus I propose using "/descendants" - notice I keep the entire name lower case. As for ancestors, we have two charts: Ahnentafel and pedigree. I have created various templates that automatically generate a pedigree (example) which I adjusted from the ahnentafel template that Phlox created (example). I propose we user "/pedigree" and "/ahnentafel" - again, notice they are all lower case. -AMK152(talkcontribs) 04:13, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
Typing is fractionally easier if we use lowercase. I support it, even though "Ahnentafel" always has a capital in its native language. And I think I could warm to the idea of having the tab links in the infobox. Also, I support the option of separate pages for Ahnentafel and pedigree, but that comes back to the question I have asked at least twice: what, if any, is the maximum number of tabs the software can support? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 09:37, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Use for generational charts[]

I sometimes want a chart of (for example) several lines of descent from a particular ancestor, which is neither Ahnentafel nor pedigree (and can't be generated automagically), which I put on "ancestors". Thurstan 04:32, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Wouldn't that be descendancy? -AMK152(talkcontribs) 05:13, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
No (I am talking about "ancestors", not "descendants"). You have above used the words "decendancy chart" as a synonym for "descendants". Thurstan 05:19, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Diverting slightly from the subject of this forum, I was thinking today that we should be able to produce descendancy charts (maybe including something like Thurstan's multi-linear "terrestrial longitude" or "hammock" chart) from info pages quite soon. We already have automagic production of a table of children; instead of "getting" their birth data for the second column, couldn't we "get" their children? Maybe some parameter option that lets us choose to show only particular children; Thurstan could then select so as to have each line ending with the same target descendant. Coding with similar structure could go the other way, i.e. a parameter-selected pedigree chart where each line ends with selected ancestor. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 09:37, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Language subpages[]

I've been looking at how non-English pages are going to be handled. Our man from the Cayman Islands has decided (possibly without even looking at our current policies) that it was too difficult for French speakers to use this site. A pity, I think. Then I looked at GeneaWiki and realised that we might not actually want to compete with some other-language genealogy wikis.

Which brings me back to the subject of this forum. What problems will there be when an individual's article with an info subpage and half a dozen other subpages (as discussed above) is to be translated into half a dozen languages?

(Unsigned 2008-12-17T06:02:52 (UTC) Robin Patterson)

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