Show checkboxes for adding pages to family trees on edit

[DallanQ]

See EditPage.php lines 1215, 1235.

"Trees" are subsets of watched pages. They are used in the Family tree explorer, which is being deprecated, and in gedcom export to filter the pages to list / export.

Trees introduce a fair amount of custom code. Can we replace them with something that dynamically filters your watchlist?

[samwilson]

For the exporting things I've played with I've been working on an idea of a 'treebranch' (for want of a more suitable name!) which is simply the collection of pages found by starting at a person and traversing either up or down their ancestors or descendants (and optionally with more than one starting point). This seems to be how I most often want to look at a bunch of people: for example, the collection containing of all of a given person's ancestors, and all of the descendants of that person's four grandparents (if you see what I mean?!). Or something like:

<treebranch>
<ancestors>Madeleine Carabin (1)</ancestors>
<descendants>Madeleine Carabin (1)</descendants>
<descendants>Florent Carabin (1)</descendants>
</treebranch>

I've stuck some of this work in https://github.com/samwilson/WeRelateTreebranch

So, not really a replacement of the current trees, but complimentary? I don't actually use the existing tree function, so I can't comment about how useful it is as it stands. How complicated is the extra custom code? Would you rather keep or get rid of it? I would say it's a trade off between what you think the maintenance burden of it is versus the number of people who think it's good! :-)

One thing I have thought a bit about is the idea that all data be stored in the wiki, in the pages proper. Watchlists are different, and are sort of ancillary to the real 'data' of a MediaWiki wiki.... I guess from one point of view, it seems best to avoid using them for things that might be of use to more than just a single user (watchlists are considered 'private' usually and only accessible for oneself, or others if you have their watchlist token).

(Hmm, sorry if I've rambled a bit here! I guess all I'm trying to say is: how about a shareable, calculated, idea of a 'tree', instead of the current explicit one?)

[DallanQ]

I came across this extension the other day: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CollaborativeWatchlist

I haven't played around with it, but the idea of being able to participate in multiple collaborative watchlists seems like the thing we want to do with trees. Also, I like your idea of a calculated tree, especially for gedcom exports.

I wonder if the two could be used together somehow? I want to get rid of the current trees notion if possible.

I'll be able to spend more time on this toward the end of the week.