Help:Properties for persons (showfacts)

From Historical Hastings

Introduction

Familypedia's standard way of setting and viewing person properties uses the showfacts suite of templates, the main ones being {{showfacts person}} and {{showfacts children}}. While it is possible to set other Semantic properties directly or via other templates, this page only describes those created by the showfacts suite of templates.

Repetition

For brevity, repeating data for events was omitted. See properties beginning at "birth_street". All these properties also exist for other events: baptism, death, remains, wedding1, wedding2…., journey1, journey2…, residence1, residence2 and so on. Simply substitute the event name in place of "birth". For example, the death property corresponding to Property:birth_locality would be Property:death_locality.

Some unique properties

Some events have unique properties and follow this standard list.

Timespan events

Some events have beginning and end dates and times. These so called timespan events have properties for ending time and ending place. An example is listed for Residence. (Note that a number of event types have not been fully developed by early 2018.)

General guidelines

  • A fast way to ignore this page and learn by example is to create an article with a form, and then mimic what it does.
  • Unless noted otherwise, parameters do not use wikitext. This means that names of people (father, siblings, spouse and so on) or image files do not use square brackets. Wikitext is, however, encouraged in notation (mainly Notes and Sources) parameters.
  • Parameter names: strictly observe capitalization and underscores. For example:, the template will recognize both "Death_year" and "death year" as equivalent to "death_year". However, at the time of this writing, the forms appear to have problems recognizing them as identical and so the value will be dropped if a subsequent contributor uses a form.
  • All names - person, events, and places - should conform to guidelines for Familypedia:Page names.
    • Wikipedia standardized naming. All place and event names Must use name of article used by the English Wikipedia if one exists. (Non-English articles- refer to the correct wp for the page language)
  • All fields that allow multiple values (see column with m's in it) are delimited by plus signs since commas are common in page names and semicolons have other specialized uses. (This means that semicolons and plus signs are on the list of characters banned from page names.)
    • Exception: Properties of type "Notation" (see column below): These Sources and Notations fields allow use of semicolons in free text, so all of these fields are delimited by <new note>
  • Full Date properties (birth_date, death_date and so on) do not have a direct parameter equivalent. Instead, these are composed by their components. If the date is unknown, it is given the value 9999, which is masked from display in showfacts templates. [1]
  • Parameters generally do not include namespace prefixes when referring to pages. (Examples::Contributors, or Image). Note that the property will have the namespace automatically included, but the parameter has it stripped. [2]

Table of examples

Property Type s/m Notes
sex general Must be set. Values: M, F. Defaults to M without giving warning.
father general
mother general
joined_with general m Wife, Husband, or other companion or partner in a relationship. Second and third individuals listed should correspond to the children and wedding family group numbers. E.g., the wedding to the first person in the list would be wedding-g1. Use "unknown" or, preferably, a blank as a place keeper if person unknown. This field Generates joined_with-g1… etc.
description general Seldom used. Was much used for info pages. Could be reinstated as an option.
events general m
titles general m
siblings general m Notational use only, useful when beginning research on a subject. In a mature article, this field should be deleted when both parents have their own articles and the sibling lists may therefore be automatically derived. See {{siblings}}.
honors general m Should correspond to article names describing the honors so that {{showfacts honors}} may display the honor in a graphic infobox.
contributors general m Do not prefix with User: Should list any contributor who has made any level of changes to the article. Does not connote ownership. See FP:OWN.
General notes and reference info
notes notation m To allow use of semicolons in free text, new notes are delimited by <new note>
sources notation m As for notes. see Category:Specific-source templates et al. Separation with list syntax or carriage returns will display fairly wel but has the disadvantage that the sources will merge.
sources_primary notation m
sources_secondary notation m
tags notation m allows keyword searching and related features. Full text search is available from Wikia's search box but is unreliable.
familysearch_afn notation m Ancestral File Number (usually) unique identifiers used by LDS FamilySearch systems. There is a proposal to add several other databases to this system.
Media
image media m Do not use File: or the old Image: prefix.
signature media m Do not use File: prefix.
pictures media m Do not use File: prefix.
uploaded_documents media m Do not use File: prefix.
other files media m Do not use File: prefix.
Family group
ifmarried-g1 family true if married. If true, then {{showfacts biography}} displays the fact(s).
joined_with-g1 family derived. See joined_with
children-g1 family m set by Template:showfacts children

Events: birth, baptism, remains, wedding1*…., journey1*…, residence1*… (* star= has own form)
Place
birth_street event m Later shown as "Street address".
birth_locality event Anything from a hamlet to a conurbation as long as it is not a "county" as noted below
birth_county event Should be 2nd-level division of nation, not always called "county"
birth_nation-subdiv1 event Should be 1st-level division of nation, occasionally called "county" (e.g. in Liberia and Lithuania); examples are Northern Ireland, Washington (state), Australian Capital Territory.
birth_nation event Current names for this and the above three or four, as on Wikipedia.
birth_places-other event m Examples: building, cemetery, sea, or former name of place such as Prussia or Sussex
birth_address event m
birth_coord event
Time
birth_date event Not a parameter. The template generates date/time from components below. Value 9999= unknown date.
birth_year event Numeric only. No BC. See If-BCE
birth_month event Numeric only. Values: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 (or 01, 02, etc)
birth_day event
birth_hour event Hour/Minutes assume time local to the event on the day of the event. Rarely used.
birth_minute event Extremely rarely used.
birth_if-bce event true if Before Common Era (B.C.) If this parameter has any value (e.g. "False"!), the condition is true.
birth_date-approx event
birth_calendar event If not set, all dates assume the Proleptic Gregorian calendar.
Notes and reference info (similar to "General")
birth_notes event m
birth_sources event m
birth_sources_primary event m
birth_sources_secondary event m
birth_tags event m
birth_event event
birth_involved_people event m
birth_pictures event m
birth_documents event m
birth_other_files event m

Event specific values. The following only exist for particular events
death_causes event
"Timespan" events requiring end time and space add "_end" to certain properties. Events: ResidenceN, JourneyN, MilitaryN,
residence1_street_end event m
residence1_locality_end event
residence1_county_end event
residence1_nation-subdiv1_end event
residence1_nation_end event
residence1_places-other_end event m
residence1_address_end event m
residence1_coord_end event
Time
residence1_date_end event Derived date/time from components below. Value 9999= unknown date
residence1_year_end event Meaning "end year", not "year-end", of course.
residence1_month_end event
residence1_day_end event
residence1_hour_end event
residence1_minute_end event
residence1_if-bce_end event
residence1_date-approx_end event

Note that a few of the above have been varied since User:Phlox wrote the bulk of this page.

Rationale and technical elaboration

  1. If a query is made returning a set of results, when "sort by date" is used, then all hits that do not have a date value will be excluded. This is not acceptable, and so the standard technique of introducing high_values was employed. This means that these results will all sort to the end of the result set. Infoboxes and any other template relying on {{showfact}} for the date fields will display a null in place of the 9999. Templates employing {{Getfact}} will return the 9999 value.
  2. Rationale for namespaces being stripped from parameters: Both autocompletion and upload file features return a name stripped of namespace. However, if the namespace is not included, the file will not display in search results. For this reason, the template re-inserts the namespace from the parameter.