Talk:User group meeting & agenda 29 October 2008

Important news item relating to US Genweb links.
Looks like there has been a tiff between Ancestry and US Genweb.

The end result is that many US Genweb links may be changing, and moving to new hosting services, some of this is due to the bylaws of US Genweb and headers/footers, etc. Many links in the wiki may need to be checked, then reset if there are bad ones. The news story is on this bloggers page, it's todays (29 October 2008) entry.

http://ancestryinsider.blogspot.com/

Much of the article is very very OLD information - it was March 2008 when the exodus took place. I should know because I moved my sites from there to different place. That comment about Wiki format was out of question completely because anyone can ERASE the information quite easily. The USGenWeb Project management team are elected, not appointed and as such they do NOT tell the site coordinators where they are to be. It is up to local coordinators. And out of all that - I have to DISAGREE with the blogger about the statement that The USGenWeb Project hurted itself. You need to see the data had grown considerably at very accelerated pace since moving off. I am ONE of The USGenWeb Project coordinators. dsammy 16:19, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

David, I agree with you there, much of the news is old, but that doesn't mean there are not bad links in spots. Fortunately, there may not be as many as thought, given it is older news, but we still need to be on the lookout for broken links in the wiki articles where they refer to USGenweb projects. JamesAnderson 18:51, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

James, the constant problem is in one part of The USGenWeb Project - that is the County sities, the coordinators can change layout at their own will, whereas The Archives side is pretty much set. Easy to link there at county level. dsammy 19:28, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

An interesting thought. . . can I say this. . . it seems like it would be VERY cool to get those projects into the Research Wiki! Thomas Lerman 04:18, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Already in the Wiki - see article for USGenWeb. I am working county by county, state by state to get them listed under "Web Sites". dsammy 17:09, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

I realized that I may not have been clear. . . it would be great to have the projects that have "jumped ship" to use the Research Wiki instead of creating new pages elsewhere. . . not just the links to the pages. Thomas Lerman 17:16, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Not recommended, their priority is to add data, not resources. dsammy 17:49, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm, I personally do not believe data is a bad idea. It can provide some great seed material for resources. . . just a thought anyway. Thomas Lerman 18:19, 30 October 2008 (UTC)