Collaboration of the month/Genealogy/Blurb

Wikia - creating communities

Collaboration of the month is a initiative to encourage edits to help new or quiet Wikia to make improvements. 

The Genealogy Wikia is designed for everyone to enter their ancestry and great-aunts, etc, and eventually link everybody. It has over 4,000 articles and a few thousand categories. It is attracting several enthusiasts with quite a range of pedigree lengths(!) and of computer skills.

What we really need help with is the development of features needed to improve functionality: features "critically" needed that require expertise with the development of extensions to the underlying program.

If you have knowledge of PHP and developing extensions, please read on...

Of particular importance is developing a simpified system for entering basic data about an individual. Individual articles vary in organization, but all "person" articles include certain basic data such as Date of Birth, Date of Death, Spouse, Children, etc. Because of the nature of genealogy the same data often has to be entered on several different articles. For example, a typical article includes a list of the person's children (a child list). That list usually includes basic information about the child, such as their date and place of birth and maybe spouse, etc. Eventually each child on the list may get a separate article as well. That article will include the same information as given in each parent's "child" list. Currently, that information has to be manually duplicated; what's needed is a system that automatically creates the child page, and then transfers the needed information from the parental page - as stand-alone genealogy programs have been doing for years. It can probably be done with text boxes, etc., but currently that doesn't seem to be a capability of the wiki programming. An extension is needed to add that capability.

One of our HTML-proficient contributors believes that we particularly want to hear from Wikians with a working knowledge of PHP and developing extensions.

The coordinator for this project is Robin Patterson - http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/User:Robin_Patterson - until about 20 December then resuming on 8 January (possibly available for part of holiday if home Web restored!); Alternate/Deputy Coordinator is Bill Willis - http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/User:WMWillis - who has less wiki experience but more HTML knowledge.