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. This workgroup was assembled in December 2008. Roughly half the team came from the Research Support workgroup.

Authoring aids

 * Article headings the wiki community has developed for use in articles.
 * Contributer Portal covers all things relating to authoring on the wiki.
 * How to add citations shows how to add wiki code that creates endnotes in an article.
 * Purpose and Appropriate Topics lists the types of articles writers should and shouldn't write on this wiki.
 * FamilySearch Wiki:Sources Consulted but Not Referenced.
 * Wikipedia:WikiProject Alternative music may give us some ideas about how to create a project page.

Projects within the development sprint, 20 Mar 2009 - 14 Apr 2009

 * 1) Launch projects to overhaul 2 U.S. record types at country and state level.
 * 2) Enable community to work on projects. The community needs a way to see and then volunteer to engage in multiple projects.
 * 3) Enable community to vet best practices. Enable the communty to vet and decide upon best practices re. architecture on where to place cemetery information (county vs. town pages).
 * 4) Add 1st round of policies and procedures. Add to the wiki the 1st round of policies and prodedures that will allow the community to gevern themselves.

Other current projects

 * 1) FamilySearch Wiki:How Community Governs Wikipedia
 * 2) Link to all US/Canada data sets on Record Search.
 * 3) Link to all US/Canada histories loaded on the BYU Digital Archives.
 * 4) Update all census pages for the U.S. at the country and state level. Add information to these articles from sources on FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article.
 * 5) Update all vital records pages for the U.S. at the country and state level. Add information to these articles from sources on FamilySearch Wiki:Sources of Information for a United States Record Type Article.

Feb 18 - Mar 17 Sprint

 * 1) Copy United States Reference Documents from FamilySearch Internet to FamilySearch Wiki.
 * 2) Copy Canada Reference Documents from FamilySearch Internet to FamilySearch Wiki.
 * 3) Add county creation dates and parent counties tables to all U.S. states. See an example: Wisconsin County Creation Dates and Parent Counties.

Jan 17-Feb 17 Sprint Organize and enable FHL staff for Maryland barn raising
See Maryland Barn Raising Tasks

Replacement for portal template
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 England/Test1 page
 * 2) Fran's
 * 3) Michael's Pennsylvania page