User group meeting minutes 13 January 2009

= Minutes =

Facilitator was Ritcheymt, Note taker was Jimmy Parker, Time keeper was [Add name here].

Prayer byAlan Mann

This week, there are now 6,191 registered users of the FamilySearch Wiki. That is an increase of 103 new registered users over last week.

Attendees
Alan Mann, Michael Ritchey, Jim Greene, Anne Roach, Fran Jensen, David Dilts, David Samuelson, Sister Felsted, James Anderson, Barbara Baker, Mollie Forbes

Remote Attendees
(Anne Roach), (Mollie Forbes), Carol Ann Smith, Thomas Lerman, Lise Embley, "Headquarters," Jimmy Parker

Items Discussed

 * 1) Maryland Barn Raising Tasks needs more people to sign up to write the topics pages. Use the headings page for suggestions on headings to use, etc. It is also suggested that the topics pages be written for the state level of jurisdiction first, before the county pages. Parameters for the inclusion of websites need to be determined. See Worcester County Maryland Courthouse page for ideas on how to handle county pages.
 * 2) A community member(s) is needed to link Wiki pages to data sets in FamilySearch Record Search, commercial sites, and elsewhere. This could be done as one or more separate barn-raising projects.
 * 3) There is a need for a project to link books listed in the Research Wiki to digitized books, where they are available -- the BYU/FHL project, Google Books, the Gutenberg Project, InstantArchive, etc. This could be done as a separate barn-raising project.
 * 4) There is also a need for a community member to write a page on each of the major data sites for U.S. research. (Please contact Michael @ 801-240-2071.) This would make it easier to link to state and county pages.
 * 5) "I received a notice from my watchlist and the question came up - are email addresses allowed on the Wiki as shown in several instances - Australia Societies?" dsammy 03:14, 8 January 2009 (UTC) We do not currently have a policy for use of personal email addresses. Jim Greene suggests that we not worry about it unless it becomes a problem. I fixed the original "Australia Societies" link in the "New Items" section. Although doing "user at domain dot com" works, I would suggest that it is not very friendly for the most computer unsaavy person. Ideally, all e-mail addresses (personal, info, organizations, etc.) would automatically be obfuscated so bots cannot read any e-mail address at all. I found a feature request for Mediawiki, but it looks like they may not make the enhancement. I personally have had situations where bots found my e-mail address and suddenly I get way too much SPAM. Thomas Lerman 22:24, 13 January 2009 (UTC)]

We need a place to report broken links -- maybe a special page called "broken links." The only way to test for broken external links would be with a crawler or if they get reported back to use by the user. Otherwise, an external link never gets checked by a server. It is the browser that actually goes to the link when the user clicks on it. The originating link does not even know if someone clicked on the external link. A crawler would go through all of the external links on the website and act as if it was a user clicking on the link to look at the status code that is returned from the server of the external link. This, however, is not 100% accurate as a web server can choose to display a nice looking page that contains text that indicates that the page does not exist. Thomas Lerman 16:50, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

A problem was report concerning the editing of redirected pages. That will be discussed and demonstrated in next week's meeting. If I remember correctly, this was discussed a few weeks back. I guess we will see for sure next week. Thomas Lerman 16:54, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

A question was raised about seeking contributions from FamilySearch Center staff. Jim Greene indicated that cannot be done until the Research Wiki is tab-integrated into the FamilySearch web site. Lise asked this question. As Mollie, I believe, said, this will not happen until the hardware can handle the load. Thomas Lerman 16:54, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Action Items
Someone needs to discuss and demo the work-around for the editing of re-directed pages. -- Mollie??