FamilySearch Wiki:Contributors Meeting 26 June 2014

WebEx ID: 990 733 804; Join the meeting; Dial-in number: Local / International: 1-801-240-9700 U.S. Toll-Free: 1-855-537-4000; 1 p.m. Mountain time on Thursdays


 * You can join up to 10 minutes early. If you try to join the meeting at any other time, you will get an error that the meeting doesn't exist.

Business/Announcements
No meeting next week, July 3. Can someone plan and moderate the meeting July 10, as Wilma will (most likely) be unavailable.

Summary of Yammer
FS Wiki Contributors group.
 * Giuseppe: help us identifying the main groups of pages we already have. Statistics
 * US counties (3,000) ; England parishes (14000), Indexing pages (3,000), historical records pages (5,000) ...etc.... it seems like 78,000 pages are too many, or there is some big chunk of pages we are missing
 * ... etc... likely includes (besides talk, redirect) FamilySearch Wiki, MediaWiki, Templates, Help, Category, Portal, Policy, and Widget.


 * There is a list of articles about the wiki that were in the old Amdox system and that are now in Salesforce about the wiki. They are outdated. Not all of them, but many, some also have broken links.


 * Discussion item: renaming/redirecting locality pages
 * Example: Illinois would become Illinois Genealogy Research
 * Giuseppe's reply is informative "when we asked our FS marketing/SEO experts a few months ago they confirmed what we already knew. We did not make any change at the time because we wanted to discuss this more with the community, but it is important to understand certain principles.
 * We need to define better our titles. Almost 50% of our searches come from Google.. with this change we will probably increase that number.
 * this should not make more difficult our internal search because if people look for Illinois they should find that page in the search together with the new titled page, and when they open the page they should be redirected to the new page
 * We do not want to go to the other extreme of having long titles for those locality pages. Long titles are not good because they dilute the value of the keywords and it would even complicate the searches
 * Our support missionaries would be able to create those redirects quickly for all State and later county pages
 * One comment: I can see it now: "Illinois Genealogy Research Genealogy"
 * The topic pages won't be renamed, will they? (Such as Illinois Vital Records)


 * Interesting / Fun
 * Volunteers uncover pioneer cemeteries long lost
 * Your Ancestors Didn’t Sleep Like You
 * Some touching poems
 * Can a first cousin, once removed, return?

Wiki Content
External links back to the Wiki "External links" from the Wiki to other Wiki pages A few years ago, a friend and I did a search for these links and fixed the majority of them. Newer contributors may not realize how external links are counted as "bounces" and skew the usability statistics.

Templates for common links: Not everyone is aware of the templates and how to use them. A few years ago, the Library Catalog made changes that affected the URL, and every catalog link broke. As a result, the FHL template was created, so links were more robust.

Other templates were also created:
 * Library Catalog: Template:FHL
 * Example:
 * FS Historical Collections: Template:RecordSearch
 * Example:
 * Wikipedia: Template:wpd
 * Example:

Community Council Report
Items to pose to Community Council