Talk:User group meeting & agenda 16 December 2008

The question was asked last week, "If you could have one thing fixed that is wrong with the Wiki, what would that be?" I wasn't at last week's meeting so I am replying now. My reply is: make the Wiki capable of receiving imported tables from Word. It would be a GREAT savings of time and trouble!

Barbara Baker

I think we got to a little of this at the user group meeting, so hopefully there will be a note or two about that there.

One other matter is there are several word processing programs out there, most can export to Word format, and I'm wondering if there is a possibility that all of those will work with whatever might be found for exporting to the wiki. The largest of these is the free OpenOffice package. But with anything that exports to or imports from something else, there's always something lurking that does not work. What might need to be done in the end if one can import from Word, to ensure that Word table files created elsewhere will also work properly? JamesAnderson 22:34, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Internal Links
I believe it may be a good idea to make sure everyone is educated on how to create an internal link. For example, if you go to the Oklahoma Census article, take a look at the link to the Special Censuses section right below the Historical Background section. You will find that this is full URL to the link such as:

Special Censuses

where it is better to have a relative link such as:

Special Censuses

Yes, I realize that I can change the article, but wanted to make sure it can be used as an example. Thomas Lerman 19:32, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Redundant links
At what point is it too much? I just rollbacked one article because all books had two links to the same source. The 2nd newer link bloated the article so much. Can't the moderator (it was a moderator in this case) check to be sure instead of willy-nilly adding 2nd links when the first links are already there for "ages"? I happen to be moderator for that particular state and this particular moderator didn't have any email linked. dsammy 20:41, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Might this be because there are different ISBNs and the party who put in the links based their rationale for inputting the links based on either multiple ISBNs or multiple forms of book ID numbers such as the OCLC or other numbers assigned to some of those books? We just went over ISBNs in the user group meeting today, so watch for the notes on that because it might have bearing on the problem you ran across. JamesAnderson 22:30, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

It wasn't ISBNs or OCLC I was talking about. I am referring to linking twice to FamilySearch catalog. dsammy 23:59, 16 December 2008 (UTC)