FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject U.S. counties

These are some notes from the meetings community members had regarding county page design.

Notes from 6/28 and 6/30/2011 and 7/7/2011

Sections
Courthouse information: List courthouses as needed in other sections. Link pages out to separate courthouse page when it seems prudent to avoid page bloating. Link county page infoboxes to the Courthouse page instead of putting the contact information of the courthouse in the infobox. In the infobox, the reference/link should be short; not more than three to five words.

Courthouse section of Infobox: Need new variable of "courthouse" where the the "County Name Courthouse" will be added with the courthouse name and a link to the courthouse above the picture. Under that will be just one main address/phone#. A link to an official courthouse site should be done on the wiki courthouse page.

Web variable of infobox: This variable is for the county page, not the courthouse page.

Libraries, Archives, and Museums: The reason Lise’s draft does not contain headings for IRAD depositories, Family History Centers, and public libraries is that she wasn’t sure about when a Records and Resources section needs a subheading. That is, what would the word-count or paragraph-count be that prompts writers to add a heading? Our resolution on this is the "Breaking a heading/section into a separate page" section.

Places/Localities: Move to the bottom of the page, after Resources

Topics
Breaking a heading/section into a separate page: We resolve to add a guideline that when a section becomes between half a screen and a full screen, the writer should seriously consider creating a new page for that section.

Adding headings to county pages: We resolve to add the headings initially and hope it prompts people to add information. We will not add trailer words like “If you know information about this section, please add it here.”

Links: Links should be inline (within the sentence) instead of saying “For resource X, click here.”

Subpages: We resolve not to use subpages (titles with slashes). Backlinks (a MediaWiki feature that makes subpages attractive) don’t even work in the main namespace anyway. So if we need to break up a page by taking some of its sections and creating new pages for them, we will make those new pages regular pages (not subpages) and link to them from the original page.

Section editing: Although during the meeting of 6/30/11 the Illinois page was broken (with the right nav bar displaying underneath the content), the team agreed that we should not turn off section editing. They would rather learn how to fix the div tags when the bug occurs.

Breadcrumbs: Later let’s make a decision on real or manual breadcrumbs.

Two options: We are going to create three options of the County pages - one using the new Taxonomy, one showing important resources first, and one using a flat list of what we've been working on to this point. This will allow us to do some usability testing to test the three pages to see which one works better. Here are the links to those three pages:


 * Original flat format
 * New common taxonomy
 * Important resources first

Questions

 * Should it say Vital Records or Birth, Marriage, and Death?
 * How do we highlight "quick finds," what the most popular links/important resources are?
 * Restrict heading level?? (can't remember what this note referred to...)

Mock Up Pages
McHenry County, Illinois - Lembley/sandbox5