User talk:Tim

Hi, Great pages! Thanks so much for participating. We need some help clarifying the help and tutorial pages. If you have any comments or suggestion please email me. You can edit these pages by just selecting the edit button. Thanks again--sq 00:37, 2 July 2006 (MDT)

Licensing

Hi, WeRelate will feature ancestor pages in a few weeks and GEDCOM uploads about December, 2006. Ancestor pages will make posting biographies very simple. This has brought up some licensing issues. Please read Licensing issues discussion page and give us your opinion. Thanks --sq 16:08, 14 August 2006 (MDT)

Person pages

Hi, thanks for testing out the person and family pages. Nice job. We'd really like to get some feed back so we can make it better. You could leave comments on my talk page or just email me at Solveig@WeRelate.org. Thanks again.--sq 22:45, 15 November 2006 (MST)

Including "Canada" on Canadian place-names?

Hi Tim, Thank-you for your comments on WeRelate:Place page titles. Unless I get some feedback to the contrary, based upon your comment (and a couple of others that have been sent by email), I'm planning to have places include county/district. I just added a question to that page about whether or not to include "Canada" as the last level for Canadian place-names. Since you have some familiarity with Canadian place-names, I'm hoping you could give your opinion. Thanks.--Dallan 20:56, 16 November 2006 (MST)

Catching the spammer

Good work, Tim! Robin Patterson 11:54, 27 November 2006 (MST)

Thanks

Hi Tim,

I took off a couple of days from recent changes. It was sure gratifying to see that you had taken care of the vandalism in the meantime. Thank you!--Dallan 20:54, 27 November 2006 (MST)

Thanks again!--Dallan 00:48, 6 January 2007 (MST)

Thank-you again Tim. I really appreciate your continuing help in removing spam.--sq 00:32, 13 February 2007 (MST)

What shows up in the place drop-down list

Hi Tim,

An discussion is developing at the bottom of Place Talk:Scotland that I thought you might want to lend your thoughts on.--Dallan 11:39, 23 December 2006 (MST)

Same name in multiple families bug

I think I may have figured this out. Please let me know if the following seems like a correct sequence of events:

• Dec 8: I change "John Mclean (1)" to "John McLean (1)" in Alexander and Rachel's family, and I change "John Mclean (3)" to "John McLean (3)" in Lachlan and Christena's family. (That is, I capitalize the L in McLean.) Unfortunately, I neglect to update the index-number queue, so the system believes that there haven't been any pages reserved for "John McLean". So the next time you enter "John McLean" into a person field, it will assign it an index number of 1.

• Dec 26: You create the page for John McLean (1). When you create the page, he is shown as a child of both Neil and Flora, and also Alexander and Rachel. You remove him from Alexander and Rachel before saving the page, but because of the bug I fixed last week, he is still listed on Alexander and Rachel's family page.

• Dec 31: You update Alexander and Rachel's family page, and remove the (1) after John McLean's name. By this point, the system has reserved index numbers for John McLean (1) and John McLean (2), but doesn't know about John McLean (3) because I didn't update the index-number queue on Dec 8, so it assigns (3) as the index number for John McLean under Alexander and Rachel. John McLean (3) is now listed under Alexander and Rachel, and also under Lachlan and Christena.

• Dec 31: A few minutes later, you create a page for John McLean (3), and remove him from Lachlan and Christena. The bug has now been fixed so John McLean (3) is removed from Lachlan and Christena's family page. But now Lachlan and Christena don't have any child named John. A new John McLean needs to be added as a child of Lachlan and Christena.

If this accurately describes the sequence of events, then I believe everything is working now; the problem is that I didn't update the index-number queue when I changed the names from Mclean to McLean back on Dec 8th. So when you enter a name like "John McLean" that was previously assigned an index number under the "Mclean" name before December 8, the new people are being assigned the same index numbers as the previous people. One way to fix this, if it's not too much trouble, is for you to create person pages for each of the McLean's (and others with mixed-case surname capitalization) in your tree that you haven't already created person pages for. When the system assigns a unique index number, it first checks that a page with that number does not already exist. If a page does exist, the system assigns the next index number that doesn't exist. So if you create pages for everyone in your tree, you'll be ensured that their index numbers won't be re-assigned later because they're not in the index-number queue.

Another way to fix it is to write a program to make sure that the index-number queues are all up to date, and to make sure that all links between person and family pages are two-way (that is, if a person points to a family page then the family page should point to the person, and vice-versa). I have been planning to do this, but not until next month. Once I run this (I plan to run it periodically), I will fix any problems that I find. So if you don't want to create person pages for everyone right now and you don't mind waiting a month or so, I'll have this taken care of.

By the way, not creating pages for people right away shouldn't be a problem going forward. Normally the index number gets reserved in the queue when the number is assigned, before the page is created. It just didn't get reserved when I manually changed the names.

I'm sorry for the trouble. I do appreciate your pointing out the problems to me and your patience.--Dallan 12:47, 3 January 2007 (MST)

The sequence you described sounds close to what was happening. I didn't think about the changes you had made previously to correct the capitalization on the surname, but it makes sense that this is what created the problem. If that's the case, it's no big deal - I can work around it whenever I see a problem pop up. As I didn't make the connection between this and the previous changes, I thought this was a general bug that would impact everyone, and therefore cause a lot of trouble with families becoming tangled. Strange that it was three weeks between the time you made the change and when it happened to me about five times in a couple days, but maybe I hadn't been making any updates to these families in that time. Thanks for your work on this. --Tim 16:02, 3 January 2007 (MST)

One benefit of a wiki that I never would have anticipated is the ability to track down bugs like this after the fact. Without the history on each page, tracking this down would have been very difficult. Hopefully we won't have too many problems like this going forward. And once we have the checking program in February, we should be able to identify problems like this sooner.--Dallan 22:32, 3 January 2007 (MST)

Family Tree Explorer

Hi,

We just launched a early release of the Family Tree Explorer. In case you'd like to try it out, I've taken the pages that you've created and added them to a tree called "mytree". So when you launch Family Tree Explorer, you should be able to click on File then Open to view your tree. I'd be interested to get any feedback you have. We're going to be working on it intensely over the next several weeks, so this is a great time to have some input into how it will turn out.--Dallan 23:36, 20 January 2007 (MST)

Wow. Never expected such a defensive response about GENi. Please, lets be friends.

Thanks for deleting spam

Hey Tim, my name is Christian, and I am a part-time writer for WeRelate.org. I am working on updating/connecting/editing the help pages. I noticed that you took care of some annoying spam on one of the help pages, and I just wanted to say thanks for keeping your eyes open. Any suggestions you have for the help pages would be appreciated.

Thanks again! Christian --Wrhelp 16:30, 22 February 2007 (MST)

North Uist [22 June 2008]

Tim

   I have records on every person born North Uist before 1910 who is mentioned in every surviving North Uist public record. Also, on more than 25 visits to North Uist over the past 30 years I have collected what I believe to be all sources of pre-1841 "oral history" relating to North Uist still available there. I will be pleased to assist you with any pre-1910 North Uist lines that you are researching.

Blair MacAulay, Oakville, ON blair@jbmaca.com--JBMACAULAY 10:55, 22 June 2008 (EDT)

Beger Shinn [5 May 2012]

I would like to find living family to learn more and share what i have about my Beger Phillimore family. I do have Shinn pictures, listed as my grandpa's cousins. The young man definitely looks like a Shinn and has what looks like a B. On his sweater. My email is Norris.diana8@gmail.com--Diana from my IPad 21:11, 4 May 2012 (EDT)