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Following some edits at Template:Coleridge family tree where I added references I would appreciate some comments. That tree is trancluded into several articles, but because no references are cited (for the dates of birth & death & relationships between individuals) a tag is added to articles where it is displayed saying "references needed". My addition of a reflist was reverted with an edit summary of "references do not belong on navigation boxes" which seems to go against Wikipedia:Citing sources. In this conversation I was referred to WP:APPENDIX as an argument why there should not be references. If Template:Family tree is used does it count/appear as a navbox so the same objection would occur? I think it is necessary to have references for the claims made but would appreciate advice on the best way to achieve this.— Rodtalk15:46, 3 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Rod I have only just see this entry so apologises for the tardy reply. I went thorough a lot of the family templates adding requests for citations in 2015. {{Coleridge family tree}} was one of them.
Family trees are different from navigation boxes for the reasons you have given elsewhere, but for other that may read this I will explain in more detail, using the article Samuel Taylor Coleridge as an example.
There is a fundamental difference between a navigational list such as often appears in the footnotes of an article and an ancestry tree. A navigational list such as the {{Romanticism}} at the end of Samuel Taylor Coleridge contains a series of link to other articles. However in an ancestry tree there is information conveyed in the tree that is probably not available in of the individual articles to which it links. As an example: where is the source in any article that "Francis James Coleridge (1825–1862)" is the grandfather of Sir John Coleridge?
It is very easy to construct an ancestry tree from unreliable sources published on the internet. However it only takes one mistake for large parts of the tree to be incorrect. For example if a grandmother is recorded as the first wife rather the second wife (the correct mother), then a quarter of the tree will be inaccurate, even if all the other entries for every single person are correct. For this reason trees need accurate sourcing from reliable sources.
It is easy to find the parents of a child in the child's biography, but it is often difficult to find all the children of a couple. However if some of the children are notable enough to have their own biography in a reliable source, this can lead to editors unwittingly adding WP:OR into an ancestry tree.
Let us suppose we are looking for the parents of a daughter X (the grandmother of the subject of an article). However X does not have a biography in a reliable source, but the father of X does (call him Y). In the biography of Y it names his wife (Z). The biography of Y states that Y and Z had a son (A) and four daughters, only 2 of which are named (B,C), but not the other two. Now it maybe that X is one of those two unnamed daughters, or it may be that X is the daughter of another marriage not included in the biography of Y. If one jumps to the conclusion that X is the daughter of Y and Z then this breaks the WP:NOR policy specifically a "synthesis of published material, because to conclude that the mother of Y is the grandmother of X is a synthesis.
So ancestry trees (and those of descendants) are subject to WP:V. The number of sources needed is often much smaller that appears to be the case initially as a reliable genealogical source will often span many generations. See for example Charles I of England#Ancestry where one source covers the whole tree. Even where that is not the case in the example Henry Percy, 3rd Earl of Northumberland#Ancestry all thirty entries are covered by just 8 citations.
In practical terms there are problems with including citations into these trees, because if they are used in many articles it is likely the the format of the citations will not be consistent with those in all the articles and if they are placed below the {{reflist}} in the article the references are likely to show up as an endnote list. For this reason in the edit I made to Template:Coleridge family tree, I included the following code and suggestion in green:
|list2style=text-align: left
|list2=Notes:
{{notelist-lr}}<!--- use either {{Efn-lr}} and/or <ref group=lower-roman /> To fill this notelist -->
This allows the references to be self contain in the template. I have just been through the template adding "group=lower-roman" to the reference that have been added into it, and it is working tickety-boo. -- PBS (talk) 21:40, 18 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NOTGENEALOGY; we have no use whatsoever for generating huge family-tree cruft and trivia from people's GEDCOM files. Family trees on Wikipedia are tiny, limited to key individuals in just a few generations. — SMcCandlish☏¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 12:23, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Requested move 3 December 2017
The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.
