User:RitcheyMT

Michael Ritchey, the founding manager of FamilySearch Wiki, is a community and content manager of the Community Services team, a workgroup in the Family History Department, Corporation of the President, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Community Services workgroup was assembled in December 2008. Roughly half the team came from the Research Support workgroup who are the founders of FamilySearch Wiki.

My favorite report
Here's a report regarding wiki edit output from FHL reference units and individuals.

Good articles

 * 1) Prussia-Brandenburg Civil Registration details jurisdiction changes that affect which office would have documented vital records of ancestors there. Shows old place names with their modern equivalents, and links to indexes listing streets and their corresponding civil registration offices.

Users from whom I solicit opinions
These are the users who I invite to weigh in on wiki discussions -- particularly governance or Manual of Style issues.


 * 1) Diltsgd
 * 2) Dsammy
 * 3) Alan
 * 4) Thomas Lerman
 * 5) Franjensen
 * 6) Bakerbh
 * 7) Familyjournals
 * 8) Jbparker
 * 9) Baerbel
 * 10) Sonja
 * 11) Genguide
 * 12) Karawahlquist
 * 13) Batsondl
 * 14) Phillip Dunn
 * 15) Mormor
 * 16) Hendricksonp
 * 17) Proarenee

Usability concerns
The following are usability issues I think we should address in usability meeting:


 * 1) User:Diltsgd reports that Search isn't finding any of the articles he authored in mid-July, namely 3 July - Southern Pacific Railroad; 4 July – Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway; 4 July – Texas and Pacific Railroad; 4 July – Butterfield Overland Mail; 6 July – Atlantic and Pacific Railroad; 6 July – Central Pacific Railroad.
 * 2) Search returns false results -- deleted page content. Reported by Diltsgd. If you use the Search box to hunt for the Butterfield Overland Mail one of the items it will return is Sandbox 17. On 18 June the Sandbox held content related to the Butterfield Overland Mail but now has all content about trails removed. So we are getting a false hit on a page that no longer holds that content, and missing a hit on the page that is most directly about that title.
 * 3) Diltsgd reports: From time to time I have noticed that an ampersand (&amp;) symbol appearing in an Internet URL is multiplied many fold in the Wiki. I notice it particularly on footnotes and other places where I will often include a URL address. If the phrase starts out in Rich Text Editor as "Railroad&amp;old" and in Wiki Text "Railroad&amp;old", after awhile (several saves?) it seems to turn into "Railroad&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;old"
 * 4) Diltsgd reports: Is there anything that can be done to make intermittent behaving Wiki footnotes more stable? The problem is that ALL the note numbers in the text appear as the number [1] and none of the actual words of the notes appear in the footnote area. About 1/3 of the time this problem happens, especially on articles with more than two footnotes. The articles with the most footnotes seem to have the poorest record. I would estimate that out of the last five times I’ve opened the New Sweden page with 90+ footnotes it has actually displayed the footnotes only once. But the problem crops up intermittently on almost every page with footnotes.
 * 5) Users are giving me feedback that the red words in search results are confusing them because in a wiki a red link means a page that has not yet been edited. Red=stub. And stub=lame article I wouldn’t select if it showed up in search results. They ask for search terms in search results to appear in a color other than red.
 * 6) How-to pages are "all over the place" according to one user, and need to be consolidated under one page. And other users say we need more cross-referencing between them.
 * 7) Changing the style of headings. Heading 1 currently has bigger text than a page's title. We need to fix the styles site-wide so people can use Heading 1. (Added as a MOS item 16 June 2009.)
 * Bug: Look at the list above. On number 10 and 11, the leading 1 doesn't render right in IE7.
 * Bug: internal links are getting ruined to look like this: &lt;a href="FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Linking to Books in the BYU Family History Archives"&gt;linking wiki articles to local histories on BYU Digital Archives&lt;/a&gt;
 * 1) Insert white space between end of an article and the social bookmarking tool.
 * 2) When someone clicks Discussion on a page, they then see a title "Talk:[article title]. This is confusing. The name of the link (Discussion) should match the name of the namespace (Talk).


 * I would agree with Talk vs. Discussion (#11 above). However, I believe that "discussion" would be more clear to most people especially those that are beginners. In other words, I would rather see Discussion than Talk being used. I also believe that the "Page" namespace can be a little intimidating and that "Article" (as Wikipedia uses) is a more friendly name. Thomas Lerman 15:07, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

New items to prioritize in the backlog

 * 32k limit on page size: What browsers and browser versions choke on editing a &gt;32k page?

Other current projects

 * 1) &lt;a href="FamilySearch Wiki:How Community Governs Wikipedia"&gt;FamilySearch Wiki:How Community Governs Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;
 * 2) Link to all US/Canada &lt;a href="FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Linking to Record Search"&gt;data sets on Record Search&lt;/a&gt;.
 * 3) Link to all US/Canada histories loaded on the &lt;a href="http://www.lib.byu.edu/fhc/index.php"&gt;BYU Digital Archives&lt;/a&gt;.
 * 4) Update all census pages for the U.S. at the country and state level. Add information to these articles from sources on &lt;a href="FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article"&gt;FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article&lt;/a&gt;.
 * 5) Update all vital records pages for the U.S. at the country and state level. Add information to these articles from sources on &lt;a href="FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article"&gt;FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article&lt;/a&gt;.

Feb 18 - Mar 17 Sprint

 * 1) Copy United States Reference Documents from &lt;a href="http://www.familysearch.org"&gt;FamilySearch Internet&lt;/a&gt; to FamilySearch Wiki.
 * 2) Copy &lt;a href="Canadian content in FamilySearch Research Guidance and Help"&gt;Canada Reference Documents from FamilySearch Internet&lt;/a&gt; to FamilySearch Wiki.
 * 3) Add county creation dates and parent counties tables to all U.S. states. See an example: &lt;a href="Wisconsin County Creation Dates and Parent Counties"&gt;Wisconsin County Creation Dates and Parent Counties&lt;/a&gt;.

Jan 17-Feb 17 Sprint Organize and enable FHL staff for Maryland barn raising
See &lt;a href="Maryland Barn Raising Tasks"&gt;Maryland Barn Raising Tasks&lt;/a&gt;

Replacement for portal template
&lt;img src="/en/images/thumb/9/94/Dbase_error.jpg/180px-Dbase_error.jpg" _fck_mw_filename="Dbase error.jpg" _fck_mw_type="thumb" alt="Here's an error" class="fck_mw_frame fck_mw_right" /&gt;The place portal pages (those titled "Portal:[place name]" use a MediaWiki template to create and lay out the boxes on the page. This template is problemmatical for two reasons. First, the content of each box on a portal page is actually a sub-page, so none of the content in the sub-pages is considered by search engines to be on the portal page itself. So although a portal's sub-pages may contain a lot of great content, search engines don't attribute any of that content to the portal page itself. That means words within in the sub-pages cannot be used in a search engine to find the portal page. As far as search engines are concerned, then, the Denmark portal page is just an empty shell with some code, not a content-rich page on everything you need to know about Danish research. This problem is common to external search engines like Google as well as the wiki's own search engine. To solve the problem, we need to find a more search-engine-friendly way to lay out boxes in our place pages. Mollie, Fran and Michael have all tried different solutions; have a look and see which ones you like.


 * 1) Mollie's &lt;a href="England/Test1"&gt;England/Test1&lt;/a&gt; page
 * 2) Fran's
 * 3) Michael's &lt;a href="Pennsylvania"&gt;Pennsylvania&lt;/a&gt; page

Marketing tools

 * Online PR: Top 40 Ways To Get Noticed Online (apart from Twitter)

Admin/Sysop/Founder aids

 * &lt;a href="Running a Project"&gt;Running a Project&lt;/a&gt; gives helpful tips on how to manage a team to write targeted content.

Authoring aids

 * &lt;a href="FamilySearch Wiki:Headings for Articles about Records"&gt;Article headings&lt;/a&gt; the wiki community has developed for use in articles.
 * &lt;a href="Portal:Contribute"&gt;Contributer Portal&lt;/a&gt; covers all things relating to authoring on the wiki.
 * &lt;a href="Help:How to add citations"&gt;How to add citations&lt;/a&gt; shows how to add wiki code that creates endnotes in an article.
 * &lt;a href="Policy:Purpose and Appropriate Topics"&gt;Purpose and Appropriate Topics&lt;/a&gt; lists the types of articles writers should and shouldn't write on this wiki.
 * &lt;a href="FamilySearch Wiki:Sources Consulted but Not Referenced"&gt;FamilySearch Wiki:Sources Consulted but Not Referenced&lt;/a&gt;.
 * &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiProject_Alternative_Music"&gt;Wikipedia:WikiProject Alternative music&lt;/a&gt; may give us some ideas about how to create a project page.

Related pages
&lt;a href="User:Ritcheymt/Sandbox"&gt;Michael's sandbox&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href="User:Ritcheymt/Sandbox 2"&gt;Michael's sandbox 2&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href="User:Ritcheymt/sandbox 3"&gt;Michael's sandbox 3&lt;/a&gt; &lt;IMG class=FCK__MWTemplate height=1 src="https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/extensions/FCKeditor/fckeditor/editor/images/spacer.gif" width=1 _fckfakelement="true" _fckrealelement="0" _fck_mw_template="true"&gt;

&lt;a _fcknotitle="true" href="Category:Help"&gt;Help&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href="Category:Family_History_Library_Employees"&gt;User:Ritcheymt&lt;/a&gt;