Template:Showfacts biography/doc

Description

Intended to be a multilingual mini-biography narrative, similar to {{Biography}}, which should be used with "facts" data entered via "edit with form". In November 2010 the software was drastically changed and we cut out the "multilingual" aspects of many templates so that most pages would work again, but we hope to restore that and make this fully multilingual.

When to use it

It is a standard part of what arises from Form:Person but it can be deleted manually from any article. It can be suitable as an introductory paragraph for most person-articles. When no biography narrative is provided, please use it if the alternative is nothing. You can possibly do much better, in which case please replace it with original text, maybe using a "copy and paste" of the generated text as a starting point. If you have "showfacts" templates on your page, you should be using this template. If not, your page may have enough of the right sort of structure to use {{biography}}.

Usage example

{{showfacts biography}}<!-- brief bio paragraph; if you can do much better, delete and do so -->

Known bugs

• 2009-09-21 Dates are probably wonky- needs to be updated with date approx and max date screening (year=9999 means unknown). Some of that has been done since.
• None of the elaborate information available in journeys, residences, etc. has been added.

Technical notes

• Language versions do not use internationalized string tables (eg:strings:en) at this point because of the anticipated complexities of variant grammars. A generic structure using strings might be constructed for quick porting. European languages and possibly many non European might be able to use such a generic template but by avoiding grammar dependencies this may more resemble a recitation of lists of facts. The ideal will be for a skilled template writer to custom create a subpage template tuned for their language.
  • Each language version should be stored in a subpage using the language code eg {{showfacts biography/es}}. Although it is not doing it currently, the main page will vector to the correct language depending on the user preference language

Implementation

• Revision idea- The template should do a single query with all variables that the template might want to access. This will dramatically reduce the number of queries on the page and may improve readability and ease of manipulation for those not familiar with SMW functions.