[Question] How do you make separate editable sections?

Question

I'm looking to do this with a page I'm working on so that it doesn't become unruly to read through, since each section will have a very, very large table. What I'd like to do is something like The Italian Roots Project does with their page. I haven't seen anything written on how to do this, however.

Answer 1

I think that WikiTree doesn't enable that function in most namespaces. Sections can be edited on https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category pages and https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project pages, but not on profile pages or Free-space pages.

This functionality would be very helpful on Free-space pages.

Comments

I agree, it would be extremely helpful on free-space pages, especially since I'm trying to go through some Italian records and index each year's birth, marriage, and death...

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I seem to have the sections everywhere so I'm guessing that there is a permissions setting somewhere that needs to be changed to include Wiki Genealogists.

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I guess it's a Leader perk.  Leaders work on a different site in many ways.

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It would be very nice to open that feature to Genealogist members. I have the impression that WikiTree deliberately "dumbed down" MediaWiki for most members to avoid overwhelming us with technical arcana, but retained many of the MediaWiki bells and whistles for Leaders. Now that general members are being confronted with all manner of technical complexity in the form of WikiTree+, increasing use of templates, etc., this seems quaint. (And having arrived at WikiTree with more expertise in MediaWiki than I had in genealogy, I've often been frustrated by the limitations here.)

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I don't think it has been intentionally dumbed down, but it is running a 10 year old version of MediaWiki so it is missing a lot of features that newer wikis have.

The only MediaWiki feature differences between Leaders and regular users I've noticed are that Leaders can block users, see certain doc pages, and can create and edit help pages and templates. Well and use the edit sections on all pages.

Having the editable sections is super convenient on long pages, so I hope it gets changed!

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Jamie, early in my membership here, I asked about a standard Wikimedia feature that wasn't available here, and I was informed that it restricted to Leaders so as not to overwhelm the general membership.

I believe the feature I asked about was the standard page history that is found in Wikipedia. The page history available to regular members here is a simplified custom version that I think is unique to Wikitree. I understand that leaders have a link to go to the more powerful version; I can get it only by editing the page URL.

PS - I should acknowledge that part of the customization of the Change History here is the inclusion of change history for the data fields, which are not Wiki elements. The marrying of the Wiki elements to the interconnected genealogical data is a major innovative feature of this site -- and may be an important part of the reasoning in not enabling some standard Wiki features for non-Leaders.

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I'd like it if they added a "tech savvy" tag that allows you more access to the different Wikimedia features.

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History is hairy with profiles, because if you view an old version you get the old bio combined with the current data fields and links.

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The standard Wiki change history makes it easier to review changes in the text sections of a profile. I particularly like to compare two versions of a profile in order to see cumulative changes from a series of edits. For example, this often helps in figuring out the origin of odd unsourced info in a profile. (Was it sourced at one time? Did it come in as part of a bad merge, but didn't get  removed when the bad merge was cleaned up? Etc.).

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There is a link on category and project pages but that's it. For profile and freespace pages I have to go to "Edit" and then change the action parameter from "edit" to "history". And it is available to anyone who knows the correct url.

That being said it wouldn't be difficult to make a browser extension to add quick links to stuff that is hard to access.

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Aha, I see what you mean! You just add "&section=" followed by the number in order to get around it. Tricky tricky. But at least there's a way for me now. Thanks Jamie!

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Back when, when I asked about the History link I was interested in edit history for Category pages. Us mere members don't see any History link on Category pages or Project pages.

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There is an extra element for leaders at the bottom of most pages with helpful links (mostly to ranger feeds and help docs), including the history link. It would be super easy to mirror that for "tech-savvy" users if you are interested? Since G. figured out that the section edit links work I could add that too. Do you use firefox or chrome? There are a lot of Special: pages I wish were easier to find so I'll probably make this my fun project of the week.

Answer 2

I don't know that its available on anything except Project pages, but its not clear how to set it up

edit: thanks J Crook. that looks like that's how its done.

Comments

It looks as though they're just using headings and subheadings.  We all are familiar with headings--the ones that start with two ==, like Biography and Sources.  They added subheadings as well. See  https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Editing_Tips  If that isn't what you mean, let us know.

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I was referring to how it says "edit" and you can edit that section in particular.

 

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Thanks for the clarification.

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But in your example page, The Italian Roots Project, if you edit the whole page (instead of any one section), then you'll see that the sections are only made up of sub headings, as J Crook says.

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Doesn't work on freespace pages apparently. :(

Answer 3

Hi G,

You are probably on a Free Space page. They are special pages that have the message sections etc. which probably required that the command be used to disable the editable sections. So there is no way to activate that without causing some clash somewhere. The Project/Help  pages are the only ones I am aware of where it has not been disabled.