Talk:User group meeting agenda & minutes 4 June 2008

Please add suggestions for the agenda here. We welcome your contributions! Please remember to add four tildes at the end of your entry to "sign" it with your name. That'll help us contact you if we need clarification on the item you'd like to address in the meeting.

'Articles Wanted' page?
Might it be about time to put a page up titled 'Articles Wanted'?

This is something found on many wikis, where a wiki needs content even if it's been around a while and needs people to write articles on subjects of interest to others.

This would be a page where links would be created to stub pages, and pages that are not created yet, someone could then create either the stub or create the article with content.

That way, there would be a way for users to find articles that need content added, or that others need created, so that content could be added more quickly, and the needs of others who may be browsing the wiki will have content that meets their needs more quickly as well.

JamesAnderson 19:12, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Revisiting portal pages and their size/length.
A recent discussion in the user group meeting had to do with the size of the portal page, or rather the resulting length of the page.

Most pages are just right, but there are a few states that have county listings where the state has over 100 counties, so that makes the page longish and there are some formatting problems in some browsers due to the number of columns that might be created or were created.

I looked at West Virginia, and that portal has a very good way of handling the jurisdictions listing. Listed in linear fashion rather than bulleted lists in columns.

Is that something we may want to do is rearrange the jurisdictional listings so they are listed in linear fashion like words in a sentence are (with separators) rather than have a bulleted list?

JamesAnderson 00:09, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Recruiting additional contributors
The greatest part of this wiki project is the people. In order to see the wiki grow and reach its' potential we need to involve more great people. There are many individuals who might become active participants if approached and encouraged. Let's talk about ways to invite people to participate and maybe even identify some of those people out there we would like on our team.

Darris 21:59, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

On July 30th, alot of people will be at BYU during the annual genealogy conference, has anyone thought about holding either this meeting or a one at a special time there so that we could better introduce the wiki to those there? They only have less than a thousand people at that conference any given year, so it would be a smaller but very influencial audience. JamesAnderson 00:29, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Moderators, etc.
This item, from the one of the May meetings, should be carried over to next week.


 * 1) What should we be doing to help with user needs?
 * 2) Cleanup states (Categories?)
 * 3) Add links, cleanup old research outlines, update links to "this section of the outline" (Research outlines)
 * 4) Involve genealogical societies in cleanup?
 * 5) Each portal has a things you can do box. This needs to be updated! Do we need to change the placement of the box on the portal page? Move it towards the top?
 * 6) Have state, country, county coordinators. Could we advertize this need on a portal page? Coordinators should have genealogical experience? Have a way to give feedback on coordinators/moderators so those that are not effective can be evaluated and changed as needed.
 * 7) Voluteers for moderators


 * Jimmy Parker: Idaho, Indians of North America
 * Lisa McBride: Tennessee
 * Darris: Wales
 * David Samuelsen: New York, Oregon, Luxembourg, Germany
 * Baerbel Johnson: Germany