FamilySearch Wiki:Feedback

A call for Feedback! We need your feedback! We are eager to hear input and feedback from you because the FamilySearch Research Wiki is a community driven, community maintained site. Our goal is to make the FamilySearch Research Wiki a friendly, welcoming place that is easy to use and make contributions to, for both experts and beginners alike. Please leave your comments regarding any suggestions, solutions, or any of the following issues you may have encountered. We want to hear about the good, the bad , and the ugly .

The Governance Council needs your feedback, ideas, and suggestions! With a lot of our effort currently focused on format and standardization, we need you feedback and ideas to answer the questions: What's working? What's not working? How can we improve?

While we cannot promise to address every issue immediately or implement all solutions and ideas posted, your voice will be heard and all of them will be reviewed by the governance council."

How can we improve?
1. The bright red warning "If you are unable to edit the wiki after logging in, you will need to request editing rights using this form. You will be notified when editing rights are granted" is ugly. Can you change it to black?


 * Answer: We really enjoy the help our contributors offer us and so we want to make sure people can easily see the notice for how they can get involved.

This new policy also seems to contradict the pages that invite participation. Why not scrap the lockdown policy and change that statement to something like "Help us fight vandalism. If you see a page that is inappropriate click here"


 * Although your suggestion above would be nice, the spamming attacks that caused us to change this policy were happening very quickly and causing enough trouble that a simple warning like the one you are suggesting would not work in this situation. 

At the very least perhaps give church members the benefit of the doubt. I don't know the extent of the problem, just giving my perspective.
 * Answer: This is not a trust issue. It is an issue of setting up a structure that will allow us to continue to leverage the skills and talents of the community while protecting the security and integrity of the content.

2. The following life preserver link is found throughout the wiki ->

When a new editor clicks on this, they are taken to a very generic FamilySearch help page (and there is no box there for Wiki-help). I would think a solution to this would be to add a wiki box on that page, or better yet change the help page to this support page instead. As someone with experience with Wikipedia I can easily code and tell you these things. Most new comers trying to give feedback would probably just give up and disappear.

3. The font is freakishly small on this site. One of the few site that require me to hit "ctrl" and "+". Not very friendly for the visually impaired. This is especially true for superscripts
 * and for bullet points, which are fairly common.Superscripts within a bullet are next to impossible to read


 * Answer: The FamilySearch Wiki is is powered by Media Wiki, the same wiki software that is used by Wikipedia. When we launched the newest version of the wiki we removed a lot of custom coding that was causing all kinds of bugs in the wiki and went back to the same out of the box settings the wikipedia has so that we would be better able to avoid many of the bugs we faced previously as we move forward. We use the same font-size as Wikipedia.''

4. New user on Wikipedia usually get a welcome/orientation message on their talk page when they first set up an account. This would be a good thing.


 * Answer: We 100% agree. Currently we do have missionaries and volunteers who have taken on the responsibility of sending welcome emails and messages on new contributor's talk pages.

5. I've noticed a there's a push for creating more articles, rather than improve existing articles. I don't think FS wiki has the resources and volunteers like Wikipedia to maintain quality. More pages = more maintenance. Going for quantity over quality will make this look like Cyndi's list (an ugly directory of resources) rather than an online encyclopedia and how to guide for genealogy. It may already be too late ...


 * Answer: Quality is extremely important. Within the wiki we believe one component of a good wiki page is a complete wiki page. Currently across many areas of the wiki we have pages that have missing sections or only have small amounts of content. We also understand that there may be some missing pages that are low hanging fruit for people to create and add value. When we say we are interested in creating and improving articles that is what we mean.

6. It would also be good to have a different introduction for new editors who have experience in editing on Wikipedia. Maybe a special page to tell them how this Wiki is similar to Wikipedia and how it is different.

7. Templates should be made for international and national resources that are repeated on numerous pages. For example a template for Findagrave.com could say the exact same thing on hundreds of cemetery pages. This provides consistency and accuracy as well as easy maintenance and updating. Similarly for each USA census. This could also be done for topic introductions (i.e. "cemetery records usually contain... They are useful for ..." can be templated).

8. Article quality ratings - Wikipedia has articles labeled as "good articles" and "featured articles". These act as a gold standard to which others can rise to. This might be something to consider using here.


 * Answer: there are many features that would be very beneficial to have. We have VERY limited engineering resources so some of these feature/ functionality requests may take a backseat to more pressing issues... ex. When you have a bucket of water you can use to water the plants or put out the fire in your living room chances are the living room fire will take priority. 

9. Respond more promptly to feedback. Pages such as this should be on the administration's watch-list. It's been over a month since I posted this. I placed tags and pings that most new editors could not do. Even a brief acknowledgement would be better than nothing. If another user wanted to leave feedback, it would be difficult to do so. Just a few of my initial impressions. I hope to use my Wikipedia experience to help make this site better. I hope this feedback is useful. Asparagus (talk) 16:02, 28 November 2016 (UTC) User:Caleblove1 Pinging the last contributor (Wikipedia -style). Asparagus (talk) 02:23, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Answer: For more prompt responses we encourage people to join our Yammer community where interactions are faster paced and the platform allows us to have more collaborative and fluid conversations.

This page is watched. I sent a message to the Wiki managers right after your first comment. I will resend and see if we can get your comments answered. Brepouille/Wiki Support Team (talk) 17:04, 1 January 2017 (UTC)