User:Luccagenes/Sandbox/TestPage5

Evaluation page testing (just out of curiosity) Can additional instruction be beneficial? Play with new tabs: How to "organize a WikiProject" and "Suggest a WikiProject". First thing is that the current pages appear to need some repairs (check div tags for relative and absolute position boxes?

One of the best ways to help get a lot of similar pages filled out in the wiki is to start a WikiProject.

A WikiProject is a collection of pages devoted to helping to update or add content to a specific topic within FamilySearch Wiki.

With a WikiProject, you can:


 * Bring groups of people together to work on a project
 * Separate out the work that needs to be done
 * Give instructions that can always be updated within the wiki
 * Find the best ways to communicate with each other


 * For a good example of one successful WikiProject, see the Idaho WikiProject.

Project Features:


 * Projects have project pages where ideas are generated, tasks are assigned, and progress is tracked.
 * All known WikiProjects should be listed at Projects Seeking Contributors.
 * The Talk page attached to a project page is a convenient place to discuss ideas for the project.
 * All project pages should reside within the FamilySearch Wiki namespace. (Also see Help:Namespaces for more details about all the namespaces in the FamilySearch Wiki.)

 A WikiProject is a collection of pages or activities devoted to helping to grow and develop the wiki or add content to a specific topic or locality. With a WikiProject, you can:

 Wiki Barn-Raising Illinois State Project When starting a new project, one key to success is in the planning that is done before the project begins. The following are vital to a successful project:
 * 1) Bring groups of people together to work on a project
 * 2) Separate out the work that needs to be done
 * 3) Give instructions that can always be updated within the wiki
 * 4) Find the best ways to communicate with each other

Identify a Project Leader

 * A project leader can define what it is you want to accomplish and how, and be able to communicate a clear picture of what the project will do. The project leader will take care of the following or assign others to do so:
 * Clearly define the scope of the project
 * Recruit individuals who can help with the project
 * Hold regular meetings or discussions on where things are, give kudos, etc.
 * Train and give individual attention to volunteers to do the tasks spelled out

Name the project, and create the project pages &amp; tasks

 * Name your project: Following these conventions will help your project be found:
 * The name of the project should begin with the word "FamilySearch Wiki" and followed by a colon, ":"
 * After the colon type the word "WikiProject"
 * Then type the name of the project.
 * Example: FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Utah
 * Add the new project to the list on the Projects Seeking Contributors page, under the subject heading that is related to the new project
 * Create a Welcome page that:
 * Includes general information about the project
 * Gives an area where people can sign up to participate
 * Shows what stage the project is in (kept up to date) and what currently needs help
 * Explains how the project members will communicate with each other going forward. (See #3 below for more information.)
 * You can create your Welcome page on your own or you can use this template to help get you started.
 * Define tasks and create pages to explain the various tasks. Make the tasks simple so that someone new to the wiki doesn't feel overwhelmed with the scope of the work. On each task page, add the description of the task and a include sign-up sheet for the tasks that give information about the task, a spot for people to sign up, when the task is completed, etc.

Decide how you will communicate
Frequent communication is vital to the success of a project. Some options are:


 * Regular meetings in Webex Sometimes regular meetings over the phone can help kick start a project. When having regular meetings, however, be sure that the information discussed is tracked on Wiki pages so that those who can't attend are kept up to date.
 * WikiProject Talk pages Talk pages keep the conversation together with the project
 * Skype Skype is a great instant messaging tool for more immediate group communication

Seek volunteers to help

 * (This piece is so important that it gets a spot on this page, plus its own page.)


 * Bringing in volunteers and promoting your WikiProject is the best way to get the project off the ground and bring it to completion. Plus, working with others is so much more fun than doing it all yourself! That's what the wiki is all about, community working together.


 * See the Promoting a WikiProject page for specific places where you can talk about the project and look for volunteers.

 A WikiProject is a collection of pages or activities devoted to helping to grow and develop the wiki or add content to a specific topic or locality. With a WikiProject, you can:

 Wiki Barn-Raising Illinois State Project      There are two areas to consider when promoting your WikiProject - one is in looking for volunteers to help with the project, and the other is letting the general public know when you reach milestones in your project or complete the project.
 * 1) Bring groups of people together to work on a project
 * 2) Separate out the work that needs to be done
 * 3) Give instructions that can always be updated within the wiki
 * 4) Find the best ways to communicate with each other

Seek volunteers to help

 * Volunteers who would be interested in helping can be found in many places, such as:


 * Wiki Contributors: Look at who has contributed to existing pages in that topic area in the past and invite them to join in on the project.
 * Online Community for Wiki Contributors: Click here to request an invitation to join
 * Community News: Mention the new project and any major milestones on the Community News page.
 * Facebook Community: See if there is a Facebook Genealogy Research Community for this area, and invite people to participate there.
 * Wiki Contributor Newsletter: For larger projects, send an email to [mailto:researchwiki@familysearch.org researchwiki@familysearch.org] to submit the idea for inclusion into the Wiki Contributor newsletter. Please submit the suggested wording you would like to see in the newsletter.
 * General public: Invite those in the community who have special knowledge about research in this area to be a part of the project. One way to find some of them is through bloggers at Geneabloggers (see a list of bloggers by type). Be careful and do not spam them - spam is sending out copies of emails to lots of different people. Do your research and only contact those who you feel really will be interested.

Let the public know about the new resource

 * There are at least two times when you should let the public know about your project:


 * When you reach milestones such as completing major pages
 * When you complete the project


 * To let people know about the project:
 * Post milestones about your project in all of the same areas above.
 * The blogging community is also interested in these kinds of updates. As mentioned above with Geneabloggers, they may not have time to help, or be interested in every single milestone, but they will be interested in project completion and some major milestones.
 * For large projects and major milestones, discuss in the Community Meeting the possibility of FamilySearch creating an official press release about the project.

 A WikiProject is a collection of pages or activities devoted to helping to grow and develop the wiki or add content to a specific topic or locality. With a WikiProject, you can:

 Wiki Barn-Raising Illinois State Project      A WikiProject is a community venture in which contributors work together to create a collection of pages devoted to a specific topic or family of topics within FamilySearch Wiki. WikiProjects consist of project pages, which enable the management of the work, and content pages, which provide genealogical guidance. All known WikiProjects are listed at Projects Seeking Contributors. This page is a collection of best practices about how to launch a wikiproject and organize a team of contributors to write the associated content pages.
 * 1) Bring groups of people together to work on a project
 * 2) Separate out the work that needs to be done
 * 3) Give instructions that can always be updated within the wiki
 * 4) Find the best ways to communicate with each other

Define the project, then recruit
A wiki project is defined on a project page, which documents a project's scope, assignments, and progress. Many wikis contain chicken-and-egg discussions about which to do first -- recruit a team or create the project page. Creating a project page first helps to define the scope of the project and possible assignments. Knowing what you want volunteers to do is very helpful when recruiting them because that helps you to recruit for specific skill sets. It also helps prospective volunteers commit with confidence, knowing that the tasks waiting for them are a good fit for their skills.

Components of a project page
Some possible components of a project page are:


 * A proper title (see Creating the project page below).
 * A welcome to new team members.
 * Usernames of each team member. These usernames should be links to user pages or user Talk pages.
 * Scope of the project.
 * Major components of the project.
 * Orientation challenges that will help new users learn the rules of the wiki and how to use the authoring tools.
 * Tasks that need doing. (Include a way for users to check off the tasks they've completed.)
 * Links to any communication tools the team will use (like Online Community, Skype, or Adobe Connect.)

Creating the project page
If you would like to create a new project, follow the naming conventions for WikiProjects to help make your project easy to find:


 * 1) The name of the project should begin with the words FamilySearch Wiki followed by a colon.
 * 2) After the colon type the word WikiProject.
 * 3) Type the name of the project. Example: FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Utah
 * 4) Be sure to add the new project to the list below, under the subject heading that is related to the new project.

People propel projects
Successful projects aren't launched just by creating a project page. A project isn't a project without a group of contributors. If you want a project to succeed, recruit a group of dedicated people who will commit to adding content on a regular basis.

Roles
Project volunteers may play a variety of roles. (Note these are not system roles requiring specific system permissions; these are socially-defined roles within a project.) Here are some possible roles or skillsets that project leaders might want to recruit for:

Volunteer: an entry-level member of the project, this person can handle simple assignments such as "copy and paste" tasks and adding links.

Googler: a team member who can do everything a Volunteer can do plus use search engines to find relevant Web sites and add links to those Web sites.

Researcher: A team member who can do everything Googlers can do plus be assigned to conduct research on a subject, make a list of references located, and recommend what should be written.

Writing Specialist/Editor: A team member who can do everything a Researcher can do, plus synthesize what was found by other team members into a succinct wiki page or section of a page. These folks are good at grammar, writing bridges between ideas, adding intuitive headings, etc.

Content Specialist: A team member who can do everything done by Researchers, plus review and recommend additional content.

Team Lead: Alternately called coach, coordinator, or moderator, this person is knowledgeable about the subject in question. The team lead usually has a legacy of knowledge he desires to leave to the community, and could use some help fulfilling other project roles.

Be a friend -- communicate often
A wonderful way to make teammates feel appreciated is to look for them on the system and continually ask whether they have any questions. It doesn't even matter if you know the answers -- you may just help them get answers by routing the questions to the right people. There are many tools you can use to communicate with other contributors:


 * The Talk page attached to a project page is a convenient place to discuss ideas for the project.
 * Various wiki groups on our Online Community (click to join)
 * Skype is a tool used for chat and VOIP (Internet telephone)
 * Traditional methods such as phone or e-mail.

Finding your teammates
One way to find your teammates is to add links to each of their Talk pages to the project page. (For an example, see the Contributors section of the Indians of North America Project.) When you leave messages on their Talk page, the system will send them an e-mail to notify them.

To find who is contributing to the wiki at any given moment, you can:


 * Click Special Pages on the navigation bar.
 * Click Recent Changes to see who is doing all the latest changes on the wiki. Or if most of your project contributors are new to the wiki, you can go to User Contributions, enter in a date, and click Show contributions of new accounts only.

Orient new contributors by issuing challenges
To orient new contributors regarding how to use the wiki technology and how to work in teams, issue them challenges periodically. For a list of orientation challenges used in one project, see WikiProject: Rural Records of the Southern United States.

Have writers periodically report percentage of completeness
Project leaders find that it is useful for team members periodically report their progress. (For example, see the Indians of North America project.) This allows team members to see how the project is progressing overall. This yields a sense of group achievement, and can motivate team members to contribute more to "keep up" with their teammates.

Completeness: blood-rare does not equal well done
When regarding an article, each writer's idea of "complete" is different. Like a steak, a wiki article can seem fully cooked to one author and extremely undercooked to another. Some will use headings; some will link to many useful Websites; some will research exhaustively; some will link to OCLC/Worldcat rather than just citing Family History Library Catalog listings; some will add source citations; some will link to related articles; some will post queries on related forums and e-mail lists to get information from other experts. Some will do these things, and some won't.

So what's the solution? Is there a way to get writers to add the abovementioned value in every article? Is there a way to more accurately record a percentage of doneness for each article? Should a cleanup crew be held in reserve to go through articles that have been cooked blood-rare and tip them up to well done?

One possible solution is to work with several writers and see if they can form a team of sorts to add content. Find one writer that for example knows how to add OCLC/Worldcat info, another to add FHL calls, and maybe a third to add ISBNs once the technical issue with those is resolved, and so forth. Have theim do their work in no particular order, since there is no real need for one to 'go first' when editing a page. Still other teams could be set up to add specific content to pages such as references regarding land records, census data, probate, etc., so there is a specialist adding content to pages that knows the territory well.

This is not to say others can't also edit the same content. Experts will miss the most obvious information regularly. All this is to seed the wiki with content, and put 'meat on the skeleton' so to speak. Then everyone else who has something will add theirs, and this is how it will continue to grow JamesAnderson

Measuring correlation between # of edits and % done
The topics pages linked from the Maryland Barn Raising page indicate that there may be a correlation between number of edits to a page and how close it is to being "finished." This is true with longer pages like Maryland Military Records, Maryland Societies, and Maryland Maps, not short pages like Maryland Bibliography. There may be some kind of ratio our community can use to calculate % progress on an article we must revise based on its initial word count before revision begins vs. its number of edits or character count of edits as the article progresses. Ritcheymt

Make assignments more granular than "Revise Page X using Template Y"
Barn raisings are most effective when contributors are given assignments smaller and more detailed than "Revise Article X using the headings on page Y." Two such successful highly-granular barn raisings completed by volunteers are these:


 * 1) Creation of tables for each state listing county creation dates and parent counties such as Maryland County Creation Dates and Parent Counties. The request for volunteer Dsammy's help on this project was made on his user:talk page under the heading Need your help, Sammy.

Watch for "edit stalking"
Each contributor has strengths and weaknesses. Some contributors focus all their efforts on watching the contributions of others and adding value to their articles. If User A writes several articles and User B systematically jumps in and edits several of them, this can leave User A feeling as if he is being stalked. It breeds some resentment and defensiveness, even if User B is adding good stuff to User A's articles. If you get signals that this is going on, it's a good idea to redirect User B towards creating a body of fresh, new content rather than following User A's contributions and fixing them. There is a lot of virgin ground to be planted in this wiki; a lot of desert that has never been developed; a lot of places, topics, and records that have never been written about. It's easier to keep everybody happy if contributors aren't made to feel like somebody is watching and policing all their contributions. In order to keep all the contributors happy, it is sometimes necessary to tell a contributor "Hey, why don't you write [New Content X] rather than dressing up [Someone Else's Content Y].

It helps to adopt a formal management process
Project managers in the professional world use formal management processes to help teams progress efficiently on projects. One popular management process, called Scrum, has been very helpful to employees in the LDS Family History Department. Agile vs. Waterfall: A Tale of Two Teams is an artful, 8-minute video contrasting the burnout, distraction, and stressfulness of waterfall management with the focus, motivation, productivity and high morale of the Scrum process. Scrum in under 10 Minutes is a short introduction to Scrum by Hamid Shojaee. Scrum is the WikiPedia article on Scrum.

Require consensus, not just majority, for many-page style changes
If you're running a project which requires a similar style or layout over many pages, arrive at the initial style for the first draft through majority vote. But after the first draft of these pages is created, require a consensus of about 70% for any subsequent change proposals. If adoption of a change proposal requires only a shift in majority opinion, and the topic at issue is a hot one, majority opinion will change back and forth many times as new contributors are added to the project. This forces the community to rewrite or restructure large groups of pages repeatedly as majority opinion shifts back and forth. Instead, after the original drafts are written, require a consensus of 70% before a sweeping style change is made. This quells wasteful re-work while still enabling the most essential changes to happen. For a more detailed discussion and use case, see Community Authoring, Consensus and Avoiding Re-work.

Virtual meetings
A wiki team is usually spread across a wide geographic area, making face-to-face meetings impossible. But many project teams find that periodic meetings help them make better progress on a project.

Software
Several free or low-cost Web-based tools allow groups to hold virtual meetings using their computers and phone lines.


 * Yugma allows up to 20 users to meet virtually for free. If you have tried Oneeko, share your thoughts on its performance on this article's Talk page.
 * Oneeko is an inexpensive tool ($50/yr. for the instructor) that allows screen sharing, chat, shared markup, whiteboarding, file transfer, and Web cam support for up to 8 people. Oneeko requires no download. If you have tried Oneeko, share your thoughts on its performance on this article's Talk page.
 * Mikogo is a free Remote Desktop tool for your Online Meeting, Web Conferencing &amp; Remote Support needs. Share your screen with 10 people live over the Web.

Recording meetings
If you can, record or at least take minutes of meetings. Recordings make it easier to:


 * Remember instructions given by team leaders.
 * Remember technical tips or guidance given by wiki veterans.
 * Review commitments made by team members.
 * Review and troubleshoot dependencies and bugs.
 * Document and troubleshoot bugs mentioned.