Talk:User group meeting & agenda 30 December 2008

I'd love to see the church make a Wiki site available where people could create pages for individual people. This could provide a much simpler interface to the information on FamilySearch than the old or new interfaces. The beauty of Wikipedia is its simplicity. It's ok if FamilySearch continues to provide a more powerful back-end for power-user genealogists, but how about the casual person who wants to find information about some random "John Doe" and finds that there are four people, and each has 30-100 entries, and he just thinks that FamilySearch is filled with duplicate junk and gives up. Most of the duplication is about stupid stuff like whether a person was born in "1909" or "july 1909" or "July 1909" or "28 July 1909" and so on ad nauseum. Maybe a Wiki page for each person isn't the exact right answer, but I'd love a simpler interface if I want to send a link to a friend about some ancestor. Minus all the mistakes that others have made.

Response to above: It does exist already as an independent site http://www.biographicalwiki.com/index.php/Main_Page This site was created over a year ago by Stephen Robison, a former consultant at the FamilySearch Library. dsammy 08:30, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Since we sometimes have had situations where people have put up biographiphies, might this be a good one to refer people to who wish to put up biographies? I'm thinking we could make reference to it in the various guiding principles documents that we have now on the subject. And thanks again David for sharing the link. JamesAnderson 17:11, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Internal and external linking within article body text
We have had some discussion at times regarding internal article linking and external links within articles. Someone has been doing some things that are very good. Here's an example of a county article that has what I think are good practices to use when creating both internal links to other pages in the wiki and links within the article to pages outside of the wiki. This could provide some good information in a concise way if done right, and in this case I think we may be a little nearer the target than we were before.

Daviess County, Missouri JamesAnderson 03:21, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

I started making some changes to one of the Create an internal link article and see others have continued to improve it quite a bit. I am happy this is happening. Also, the companion article Create an external link also exists. I am still not sure if I will be able to make it to SLC for the next meeting, but then again have not heard whether some presentation was going to be needed or not since the last meeting. Thomas Lerman 19:36, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Portal template test
Saw Mollie's test for England, using the new portal template, and this looks very good. Far superior to the current template, and even includes additional material that was not on the old template or at least not as easy to add. That was the related countries area, as this could be helpful in situations where one wants to link to countries where one's ancestors may have come to taht country from, such as Russians to Argentina. I know someone who found an ancestor in Record Search Pilot that discovered just that scenario. Thanks for putting it together. JamesAnderson 03:05, 30 December 2008 (UTC)