Talk:Proposed Guidelines for use of Wikipedia

Excellent job putting together this "primer" on incorporating Wikipedia articles into WeRelate pages. It was very helpful to me. I've made some changes to your article -- hopefully making the guidelines easier to read, flow more naturally, and appear more uniform throughout the article. Hope the recommended modifications meet your approval. Also included some additional Wikipedia examples in support of some of the added text. This is your initiative, so feel free to accept or revert as you feel necessary.

I notice you made some additional remarks in the "Merging and Downloading" talk page regarding what seems to be your initial thoughts about this Wikipedia policy that you may or may not want to add. That's up to you. I think it's good the way it is.

--BobC 5 February 2009

No complaints here, I like the improvements. Also, thanks for your kind words. The more people that look it over, concur or criticize, etc., the more we move in the direction of a community backed guideline (which I think would help consistency and newbies, as well as oldbies...).
With respect to merging - this did arise as a core element of my merge strategy, but it isn't strictly merge related. It just sort of works out that way because so much genealogy is focused on how people are related to various historical notables.
--Jrm03063 6 February 2009

Topics


Did I do it right? [10 February 2009]

I have found these guidelines really helpful. Thanks for drafting them.

I followed the instructions when I created a Winthrop's Fleet page. Please check it; did I do it correctly?

Winthrop_Fleet (named as the WP page)

Thanks!

-- jillaine 19:33, 7 February 2009 (EST)


Almost - the "<>" brackets aren't needed, you only want the absolute name of the wikipedia page between the pipe character and the closing bracket. I would think this would work the same way on article pages as person pages, but Dallan would have to confirm that.

Still, I'm wondering if this is quite what you want. What you'll get is a secondary template page that contains only the first section of the specified wikipedia article. Your original page will wind up containing that template reference and a template reference for a wikipedia inclusion notice. If you have articles where you want to reference the Winthrop Fleet, I suppose it yields a cleaner in-line appearance than an external wikipedia reference....--Jrm03063 00:18, 8 February 2009 (EST)


Thanks. What I'm looking for is the way to pull in the complete text of the wikipedia page into the werelate version. I thought I was using the right choice from your guidelines. Please advise. Thanks jillaine 10:09, 8 February 2009 (EST)

I understand. There was some discussion about what the right "default" thing to do would be, when including content from a wikipedia person page. There were those who came down for the whole thing, and others who came down for only the initial section. I didn't sustain the discussion because I was more focused on the critical issue (to my mind anyway) of getting werelate and wikipedia pages roughly associated where appropriate.

If you look at the "mixing and matching" section of this doc, you'll see how to get other sections, but that method is a little unsatisfying, as it makes you request each section by name and separately. I don't know if there could be a way to just get everything - we'll have to seek guidance from Dallan on that.--Jrm03063 18:52, 8 February 2009 (EST)


AH... Now I see. So there isn't an option for pulling in the whole thing. I misunderstood. Okay. JRM, do you mind if I edit your help/guideline text to make that a bit clearer? jillaine 18:34, 9 February 2009 (EST)


By all means!--Jrm03063 20:50, 9 February 2009 (EST)

GEDCOM download [10 February 2009]

This is a great document - thank-you! When you're ready, could you please create a Help page out of it and link to the Help page from Help:Contents?

The statement

Placement as a source entry in a WeRelate page will also allow it to appear in a more useful form when the GEDCOM download feature is eventually supported at WeRelate.

asks an interesting question: What should we do with wikipedia content in exported GEDCOM pages?

The simplest thing is to include a link to the wikipedia article in place of the template.

Alternatively, we could include the current text of the template, although this will get get out of date, and we'll have to figure out how to ignore differences in the wikipedia text during GEDCOM re-upload. it's not a big deal, but including just a link to the wikipedia page would be less work.

Also, if we include the text of the wikipedia article we'll need to address a license issue: The GFDL (license), which is what Wikipedia uses, requires that we include the text of the license itself in downloaded GEDCOM files. If we just include a link to the Wikipedia article, then the pages can be downloaded under the Creative-Commons license, which only requires that we include a link to the license in the GEDCOM file, not the full text.--Dallan 17:17, 9 February 2009 (EST)


I can see a need for both ultimately, but I'm for starting simple.--Jrm03063 21:11, 9 February 2009 (EST)

Including Wikipedia content [9 February 2009]

In addition to the two options mentioned: only Wikipedia content in the body, and Wikipedia content only in the source, a third option is to combine Wikipedia and WeRelate content in the body. That is, you could include a source-wikipedia or copy-wikipedia template at the top of the body, followed by a section header (say == Genealogical information not relevant to Wikipedia ==), followed by WeRelate-specific content.

Regarding including the entire wikipedia page, we don't have a way to do that right now. I'll add it to the todo list (it will be awhile though). --Dallan 17:17, 9 February 2009 (EST)


Sections [16 March 2009]

I have been trying to include early life pages, but it appears not to be working. Can someone correct my syntax?

See the Agent's change here -- [1] --Amelia 00:35, 16 March 2009 (EDT)


Sorry - the agent isn't smart enough to properly handle source templates for sections. If you want sections you have to create the wikipedia template pages for the sections by hand. I've edited Person:Joseph Comegys (2) and Template:Wp-Joseph P. Comegys-Early life and family to show how it could be done. The template will get filled in with text from Wikipedia the next time we run the full wikipedia refresh.

I just checked, and Wikipedia just posted an updated version of their database last Friday. The last one, which is the one we're using, was posted last October. So I plan to run a full wikipedia refresh sometime next week.

It looks like Person:Cornelius Comegys (28) and Person:John Bell (46) and Person:William Seward (6) are in the same situation.--Dallan 15:49, 16 March 2009 (EDT)