User talk:Cottrells/Archive 3

England headers and links
Steve, you have changed several of the manual search links in the wiki articles that User Guidance created for England, for example, the England and Wales 1861 Census Population They are now in cute little boxes, but I don't like the way the links appear. The one that draws the user's attention doesn't take users to the page that we intended, the collection details screen page that the teeny blue link goes to. We don't know how to edit that type of link, so we can't edit them. I have an employee assigned to edit these as collections are added to Record Search, so we need to be able to edit this paragraph. Dorothy Horan 17:02, December 29, 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Dorothy, I have amended the way the links are formatted. If you still do not like them please explain some more. I would be happy to discuss how this template works with the assigned employee. Please let me know how else I can help. --Steve 19:03, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the portal template!
I really appreciate you taking care of that. Many thanks Laralee 23:47, 26 January 2010 (UTC)


 * You're welcome. --Steve 23:52, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

To all FamilySearch Wiki Contributors: An apology is in order...
By way of introduction, my name is Ben Bennett and I’ve recently joined the FamilySearch team as the product manager for the Wiki and Forums. Put simply, my job is to ensure that your experience, as contributors and users of the Wiki and Forums is excellent. To this end, an apology is in order.

As you know, we recently implemented a new user ID/sign in process for the FamilySearch Wiki. As we implemented this new system, I personally heard from many of you. You shared with me problems that were occurring for you as you tried to sign in, edit or do other things that resulted in lost work, lost time and frustration for you, our key contributors and users. Please accept my sincere apology for the poor performance and poor experience associated with the Wiki during the past few weeks. Please also accept my commitment that the FamilySearch team will learn from this experience and do all that we can to prevent situations like this in the future. To this end, I wanted to share with you ...CONTINUE

CID tags in templates
Steve, you are correct in that Record Search is searching for the formulation CIDxxxxxx with one space after the last digit. I had been led to believe (incorrectly) that the parameters in templates were not indexed and thus we could not hide the CID in them. As we can see this is not the case. I also have no control over how Record Search searches the wiki, I am constrained by their decisions though I have forwarded your ideas to them.

On a side note my team quite likes the template you created for the England and Wales 1841 Census and were wondering if we could use something like it on all of the Record Search Collection articles? The question that I have, would it possible to easily change the link to Record Search to link to the search page for each individual collocation? As the template now stands you have a link to the wiki page describing record Search and the second link goes to the general search page on Record Search. I was wondering if it could be possible that this second link be changed with each article to link to the search page for each specific collection in Record Search, i.e. in the England 1841 Census clicking on the link will take you to the England 1841 search homepage. Spain Civil Registration wiki page the link would go that specific search page etc... If such a thing is feasible let me know. Anyway I am interested in getting your thoughts Thank-you Chris Lake


 * Thanks for replying to the queries I raised. Yes the template could provide a link back to the appropriate Record Search collection. In fact the way the template is written allows for this. When I first added the template to the article a link as you outlined was included (see diff). However the part of the wikicode that does this is in the format CID=xxxxxxx. The easiest way to fix this would be by using StringFunctions to strip out the the numerical part of the reference as that is the key element needed to create the URL. This extension is currently not installed in wiki, but has been requested and added to the dev backlog. If you can help make a case for installing the StringFunctions it would be helpful. --Steve 17:54, 19 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I amended the Record Search article template so that it will display a named link back to Record Search when a parameter is included in the correct format. I have updated the template documentation to explain the format required and why. --Steve 17:26, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

So I want to say thanks for all your help with this template. We have encountered another conundrum and are wondering if there was a way to adjust the template to solve it. Basically the FamilySearch people are changing the way they publish some of the collections. They are creating "supercollections." These are collections that have multiple CIDs but are linked to the same wiki article. They also have to have a seperate link back from the wiki article to various sub-collections in FamilySearch. An example is Illinois Cook County Vital Records. So I was wondering if it might be possible to add a parameter much like the |sceduled= that would add a phrase saying something to the effect "To access these records clink on the links below" or some such. We are not sure of the upper limit of the CIDs that can be part of a supercollection, and new sub-collections can be added to a supercollection anytime. If you could help us that would be great. We have really liked the look of this template and want to keep using it. Thanks. (also is there a limit to the number of paramters that we can put in the template? Just wondering if I have to hide multiple CIDs in the template. Chris 15:52, March 23, 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi Chris, good question. It's one I've been pondering for awhile. Today, prompted by your question, I have put my idea into production and it seems to be working OK. See User talk:Cottrells/Template where I tested it out. I have amended the documentation for the template explaining that additional references should be defined as CID2, CID3 etc along with title2, title3 etc up to a maximum of nine pairs. --Steve 17:27, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Way to Go!
Thank you so much for all of your hard work on cleaning up the Policy namespace! What would we do without you!!!

You da MAN
Thanks, Steve, for all the behind-the-scenes "mop &amp; bucket" work you do, including decrementing and finally removing the Policy namespace. Your efforts help keep this project humming. RitcheyMT 22:00, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Question about magic words and/or template
Hi Steve. I was wondering if you could direct me to information about or help me with a categorization question. I have one area that I add categories to Category:Old microfilm number conversion which are pages showing old and new FHL numbers. Right now all these 100s of pages show up on their category page under Old. I know I can add the number or number range to the category so it would file by number but was wondering if there was a way to use either a template or a magic word that would allow me to automate this - where it would look for the 5th 'word' or the first number string as the filing word. I don't know what the volunteers at the FHL use when they create these pages but perhaps it could even be added to that. Thanks - I stand in awe of folks like yourself who can understand this sort of stuff Laralee 20:00, 6 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi Laralee, I have created a template Old microfilm number conversion index that will extract the 5th word from an article title. If you use it as follows


 * It will index the article under the number reference given, providing the article name is in the format Old microfilm number conversion xxxx. See Old microfilm number conversion 2988-3011 as an example. If you like I could build the category into the template so that you just need to add the template rather than adding it only as the sort key. Let me know what you think. --Steve 20:53, 9 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you Steve. I've added this to the style page (template) that's on the wiki for the conversion pages. I don't know if it's used consistently since there was a category on it but I still get pages w/out the category, but now if they do use it it'll get the category and be sorted nicely as well. Many thanks. Laralee 19:27, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
 * This is cool !!! Thanks Steve for helping Laralee with this project. We appreciate both of you for your efforts! -Fran

Need Record Search article example
I've been looking for a Record Search article that has a few images on the page in a gallery. You showed us how to create the gallery a few weeks ago, but I can't find that page. Do you remember the name of the article? I want to use that page as an example in the Wiki class I'm teaching at the BYU conference next month. Thanks in advance! --Fran 00:23, 18 March 2010 (UTC)


 * The example that I pointed out to you before was "England Cornwall Church of England Parish Registers and Bishops’ Transcripts" but that article was deleted. --Steve 16:54, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Stats on wiki growth over time
Hey Steve, is it possible for us to get data on growth in pages or in edits over time without installing an add-on? I need to create a line graph for NGS conference at the end of April but our statistician just had his hard drive crash and he's behind by at least two weeks. I was hoping we could use magic words to get a snapshot, but the only magic words I see on Mediawiki.org give a current snapshot. Is there any way to make them give a snapshot with a date parameter? Or is there some other way to do this? I was assuming I could just use a magic word with a date parameter and re-run it for every month since Jan 2007 and enter the data into Excel, but I don't see a way to get the data. RitcheyMT 21:02, 23 March 2010 (UTC)


 * I do not think that it is possible to obtain the statistics that you want without using an extension or add-on of some sort. I've seen the reply that Thomas gave you to the same question and I agree with what he has said. --Steve 13:31, 24 March 2010 (UTC)