It would be great if we had a pre-post routine we could run on new or updated profiles to catch template errors

Question

I've spent several hours fixing typos in the Find A Grave templates that could have been caught if there was a routine we could run that would check for those typos (wrong capitalizations, etc.). I've been updating profiles with FamilySearch and FindAGrave sources - trying to fill in the stories of cousins...

WT is good at catching errors in familial dates, but over the last few weeks, most of my "suggestions" have been involved with fixing typos in Templates,

I'd bet we all could generate a list of simple typos to check for before we post. (and yes I could try to run a Ctl-F on a long list of errors).

Maybe the enhanced editor could be tweaked to look for errors in Templates the way it flags missed inline reference tags?

Answer 1

If you always click on the 'Preview' button at the bottom of the bio box on the Edit tab, then typos in templates will make them come up red.

Comments

That is great - even if I've already changed most of mine.....

Thanks

FWIW - the preview does show typos in Templates in red, but only up to the pipe "|" - it does not run any kind of check on the rest of the data between the "{{}}"

I rarely screw up the main category, its the following data that gets me at times - I also do a lot of copy and paste between spouses (for children and residences) and fun foul of people not in the original genalogical books that I'm using.

rsl

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Message sent with this G2G included!!  He could have gotten sidetracked and he had Roots Tech, also.  I know when he looked he said there were a lot of them with capital letters.

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If you make a mistake in template name capitalisation, EditBOT corrects that every day.

On the other hand template parameters are not corrected automatically, since they are not reported by wikitree as an error.

We have a general rule that almost all named parameters are always in lowercase. That way you can always know.

After a quick look, there is over 500 mis capitalised sameas parameters. I will see if I can correct that automatically.

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Thanks Ales for everything you do!

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Thanks Ales - someof us work on multiple computers, and typos are always an option with different key boards.

rsl

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EditBOT corrected that change. I hope there will not be many new ones.

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Thanks Ales. I think people will probably continue to enter it wrong unfortunately.  Hopefully people will realize those changed in their Feed

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Thanks for your work Ales - making the Editbot do the QC will definitely help those of us who don't read the doc completely.

For the future, it would be great if the routine that makes an erroneous catagory looke beyond the first pipe "|" - the sameas error is not displayed as red, at least on my system, regardless of others claiming that it does.

making the editbot go through and do the change will make everything easier, even though I spend an afternoon fixing all of mine.

rsl

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The template possibilities are very limited and it can't be easily done. But people will learn in time what is correct.

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The complexities of the templates are why some of us don't use more than one or two - I still am not sure about the 2 "unit" fields in the military service template, and usually get one or two of them wrong a week. At least the military folks catch them and fix them.

But there are people out here that are used to upper and lower case being the same thing in search engines so they don't realize that the WT Templates are case sensitive.

Which further highlights the magnificent job you guys do to try to clean up the database so we "regular" folks can do our research, updates, and all.

Thanks for what you are doing for the community, we probably don't say that enough.

rsl