FamilySearch Wiki:Contributors Meeting 18 Oct 2011

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Updates and follow up

 * During an 11 October 2011 meeting of the Wiki Community and Wiki Engineers, a committee was appointed and charged to address issues related to stubs in the wiki. Our report follows; we invite comment and discussion on this forum. Items are numbered to facilitate responses to specific points . 1. We need stubs. Without the stub on the page the page does not exist. This also makes the article searchable, and easier to find.
 * 2. Changing the name “stub” is not a good idea; this would cause many dead links and things that would need to be corrected.
 * 3. Develop a system to track all stub pages, so that we can maintain them. Place them on the maintenance page sorted by date of last edit. a. Develop a template to put on a stub page that indicates it will be removed by _____ [insert a date] if content is not added. This would be accompanied by an email to the last contributor to the page of the pending action. b. At present there is a sentence on the FamilySearch Wiki:Stub page (https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/FamilySearch_Wiki:Stub) that seems to capture stubs. It states “Find a listing of them in the Category:Stubs.” This page is inadequate, however; it returned only five stubs (on 12 October 2011). See Category:Help stubs https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Category:Help_stubs. We know there are many more than five. 4. Refine the criteria for removing stubs. The present criteria just defines the challenge: FamilySearch Wiki:stub (https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/FamilySearch_Wiki:Stub) “There is no set size at which an article stops being a stub. While very short articles are likely to be stubs, there are some subjects about which there is very little that can be written. Conversely, there are subjects about which a lot could be written - their articles may still be stubs even if they are a few paragraphs long. As such, it is impossible to state whether an article is a stub based solely on its length, and any decision on the article has to come down to an editor's best judgement “ We have place this on the Forums

Project Help Requests

 * Need help with your project? See a project that needs to be done? Add it here:

Improve the Wiki

 * What is the process for selecting feature articles? How do we emphasize the best?  How do we make sure less-than-best or less-than-ready don't end up featured? Lise 14:07, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Subpages – Clarification and possible policy change. Help:Subpages says: “By default, MediaWiki's subpage feature is turned off in the main namespace, but can be used on talk pages and user pages. See Help:Namespaces. In namespaces where the feature is switched off, any slashes (/) within a page name are simply part of the page name and do nothing special.”


 * The above paragraph seems to talk about two different things.


 * Where subpages can be used. This seems to imply that subpages are only for talk and user pages.
 * The breadcrumb trail that can be automatically generated. Should this be turned on for other types of pages? Judy 19:39, 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * What are all the FCK editor bugs? Can someone volunteer to add them to the Known Issues page and/or the Editing Tool page?

Forums Overview

 * Be part of the solution! Make your opinions known! Post comments to an existing thread or start a new discussion at Wiki Contributors Corner forum.