Extension talk:Genealogy

This board is for discussion the Genealogy extension or anything related to it.

Don't forget that you should lodge any bug reports or feature requests on Phabricator, rather than here! (Unless you can't be bothered, in which case here is fine.)

Hello @Samwilson, my apologies to bother you but I was just asking a question on the Support Desk about troubles installing Semantic MediaWiki, and I had mentioned that I wanted to install Genealogy and Semantic Genealogy. Johnathan3 had mentioned that an easier alternative might be using Cargo, and that I should check with you on whether you think using Cargo instead would work with both extensions, because he believes you yourself use it. Thanks

@Guillaume Taillefer: Yep! You can have a look at https://archives.org.au/Template:Person for an example of how I'm currently using Genealogy and Cargo; they work together very well. There are some out of date bits there, because I'm currently integrating Wikidata info for some people and so want to feed that in as well (via the UnlinkedWikibase extension).

Thank you so much! So essentially I can just download both Genealogy and Cargo and just start using Genealogy? Or is there some other step there? Also Do you know for sure if Cargo is usable with SemanticGenealogy? Thanks

@Guillaume Taillefer: Sorry about my slow response, I didn't see your reply for some reason! Did you figure it all out in the end? As for SemanticGenealogy I don't really know, I've not used it.

Hi, Guillaume, have you had any luck w/ Cargo? If so, would love to know how you're using it. Glad to share thoughts on my own use of the Genealogy extension.

- Michael

Is it possible to control the order in which siblings are listed? It seems that {{ #genealogy:siblings }} orders them by page creation date and time, as well as on family tree outputs (I'm using Mermaid).

If they can be ordered by genealogical number, I suppose I could list each person by number (i.e. "2045 John Lee Somebody", but that makes for awkward searching). So, is there a way to manually manage the order, or, perhaps, change the date/time stamp of page entries?

(Btw, your latest version is working great and prior issues w/ family tree output and odd "#if" behavior is resolved)

So, I've got things working on my main wiki... but all that family data is cluttering up everything else, as the focus of my pages isn't genealogy (but I'd like to display trees and family data when called upon). I'd like to put all the genealogy data in a Geanealogy:Namespace and either transclude it where applicable or put a "see more" link in the main articles. This potentially will break things, as they're looking for [[Person Name]] pages and not [[Genealogy:Person Name]].

Could this functionality be added in? Thanks!

@Celyn Kendrick: This can already be done now by using the full page name when defining relationships. For example:

{{#genealogy:parent|Genealogy:Bob}}
{{#genealogy:tree|ancestors=Genealogy:Bob}}

Will render the correct links, and not show the namespace name.

I'm not sure if this feature has been widely used, so do let me know if you run into any corners where it's assuming the main namespace.

I got it to work, but I managed to foul up my database in the process. Sorted now.

I'm trying to generate a tree from within a template... but apparently, I can't delimit an array using new lines (in a way that makes the tree work.)

i.e. something like this doesn't work:

{{#genealogy:tree|ancestors={{#arrayprint:parents|<br />|format=Mermaid}}

Help?

@Celyn Kendrick: I take it that #arrayprint is from the Arrays extension? The syntax you have above is not valid; I'm guessing you missed the closing braces, i.e. {{#genealogy:tree|ancestors={{#arrayprint:parents|<br />}}|format=Mermaid}}

But to answer your question: no, I'm afraid it doesn't work. The |ancestors= and |descendants= parameters are split on "\n", and I'm not sure if there's anyway to get #arrayprint to correctly output that. It sounds like what we need is to make the delimiter customizable, perhaps via a new |delimiter= parameter. Does that sound okay? Then you could do e.g. {{#genealogy:tree|ancestors={{#arrayprint:parents|;}}|delimiter=;|format=Mermaid}}

A delimiter parameter sounds awesome! Thanks!

Do you know if there's a way to make mermaid display vertically vs. horizontally?

@Celyn Kendrick: I've just released version 2.4.0 with the new delimiter feature.

As for laying out Mermaid, I'm not really sure. I guess it's possible? Should we add an option for switching? Although there's probably lots of diagram customization that could be done… the other day I was wondering about integrating this tree drawing system: https://github.com/PeWu/topola-viewer — it might be nice to have something that's genealogy-specific instead of generic graph layout software.

Honestly, I haven't given the layout too much thought since suggesting it (although it would be a nice option). A more important/priority feature I could use is using a namespace other than (Main). I've created a namespace called Genealogy: but I'm understandably running into some issues. I'd rather not mix all the genealogy info in with my main pages. My scenario: A book series with complicated families/timelines... so it's not really necessary to have a complete genealogy, just trees I can highlight key people, etc., and include on a couple of pages, but without cluttering up the main characters with background that doesn't (really) matter except for rendering.

Thanks for your work!

Using this command, I have the same error as the demo site on this page : Ian Patterson - Genealogy Demo "

Diagrams error (with dot command): /bin/bash: dot: command not found

Also, the commands per the extension page don't work either:

{{#genealogy:tree|ancestors=List|descendants=List|format=formatname}} << using mermaid or graphviz

Grateful for any suggestions.

I'm setting up a private wiki for family genealogy. Having trouble getting the #if to work.

My steps:

1. duplicate source code form the template:person on the demo site
2. installed all the parser extensions used on the demo site

My MW installation is

MediaWiki	1.38.2
PHP	7.4.30 (cgi-fcgi)
MySQL	8.0.30
ICU	69.1

Would be most grateful for your help.

- Michael

Update: the #if behavior is strange, but I have some workarounds, primarily exclusion of the close }} tag at the end of the command. Doesn't make sense to me, but it works. Duplicating the person template on the demo site still doesn't work.

When I generate a tree, I get some strange empty nodes (more details here).

Any suggestions why this might be the case?

The relevant part of the template looks like this (but in another language):

!style="vertical-align:top; text-align:right"| Parents:
|{{#if: {{{parent1|}}} | {{#genealogy:parent | {{{parent1}}} }} }}<!--
-->{{#if: {{{parent2|}}} | <br />{{#genealogy:parent | {{{parent2}}} }} }}<!--
-->{{#if: {{{parent3|}}} | <br />{{#genealogy:parent | {{{parent3}}} }} }}

In fact it seems that the problem is non-Latin alphabet. If all the names are in Cyrillic, some weird loops are created. More details here.

It's not showing up under my installed extensions.

It is, but the GraphViz extension is not; other fuctions still work correctly.

I replied to your question at User talk:Samwilson#Not working in Mediawiki 1.34.

Moving things to Mermaid, which is included in Mediawiki now and works (unlike Graphviz) would be a good. It would also offload rendering to the client, an important consideration for busy wikis.

Mermaid support is now available. Use the format=mermaid for the tree parser function.

Please give us a link to the wiki on which this extension is said to be working.

It's running on https://archives.org.au — I only haven't put it in this page yet because it's a bit of a shambles at the moment! I'm still investigating the best way to do things, and at the same time am importing info from WeRelate (where I used to add stuff).

But feel free to have a crack at it there! You can register with the dreadfully secret word 'preservation'. :)

OK, I found three, via Wikiapiary. One obviously genealogy in USA, the other two clearly linked to Sam in Australia but only one having much genealogy in it. https://freo.org.au/wiki/User:Samwilson is Sam's user page on the one seeming to have least genealogy, but it does have a 3-month-old "People" category with potential for genealogy probably related to Template:Person. Site is currently very short of "Help" pages. Onwards and upwards, Sam!

Oops, I started drafting the above before Sam's reply. I wonder whether the apparent lack of "preview" means one cannot see potential edit conflicts??? Good work, Sam.

Genealogists are interested in half-siblings (and who each one's parents were) as well as full siblings. That requires some way of indicating children by different partners. Familypedia, using semantic extensions, has http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Siblings.(which is a shortcut to a longer pagename). (It lists partners of the father by default; it needs a parameter added if only the mother's page lists the children; and it needs a repetition with different parameters if there were half-siblings from both parents.) Example article at http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Heather_Campbell_(1911-2004) ~~~~

This is a very good idea. At the moment it lists full and half siblings alongside each other and doesn't distinguish between them at all. However, with the addition of some more variables that can be used in Template:Person/list-item it should be reasonably easy to mention the parents (in parentheses, say) along with each sibling, if they differ.

I'll look in to adding this.