Talk:User group meeting agenda 3 March 2009

Unlikely sources
Google Books have more books than we know of. The source is WorldVitalRecords.com. An user and I looked at them and realized there are much more books not ready apparent.

To find the family history books, go to WorldVitalrecords.com's search engine, enter only 'place names" and to all location places only.

The results show many more family history books that BYU Family Archives and FHL don't even have. The user thought they should be listed and linked at county and city/town levels since these books may be the cracks we are looking for in the brick walls.

The user and I whipped out the preference order of books:


 * 1) BYU Family History Archives (F)
 * 2) Google Books, predating the copyright (they are usually shown with PDF downloads) (F)
 * 3) WorldCat books
 * 4) Heritagequestonline.com (they do have a lot of the books, requiring (LAR )
 * 5) Text Transcriptions (usually found at free sites such as USGenWeb county sites or in the USGenWeb Archives or similiar sites
 * 6) Family History books (not digitalized yet)
 * 7) Google Books, post-dating - often with snippets leading to the sources to buy the books.

dsammy 01:15, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Is the WorldVitalRecords search of Google, etc., free? In other words, do you not have to be a subscriber to use that search?

subscription is not required for that at all. I already linked several Google books courtesy of them otherwise we would not know about the lesser known books scanned by Google. And not only that the Google book urls are not within WVR at all. dsammy 01:39, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Also, I have found that the FHL has scanned some 25,000 books so far, they are gearing up to give us even more. There may be links directly to the books in the online FHLC, don't have an example but you might see if one of the BYU or books in the historical books tab on familysearch.org is actually showing by looking one of those up in the catalog. JamesAnderson 01:35, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

These are the SAME books in question covered by the BYU Family History Archives. dsammy 01:39, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Exposed or Masked Urls for official goverment sites
Personally, having been involved with the Wikipedia, the standard practice is that they are exposed, not masked.

I felt they must continued to be exposed in the Wiki for very obvious reasons - to ensure that the urls are current without having to open each time just to check. This is the reason the sysops prefer the urls be exposed for cities and counties. 3,300 plus counties plus who know how many cities having their own pages can be very very daunting task to check for masked urls.

These exposed urls should always be in the upper section (Quick Facts, Quick History or whatever the section may be named containing snippets of quick facts.)

For this reason, I would rather have a decision be made sooner than later before it become a nightmare. dsammy 01:15, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Another possibility is for clarity in the article, mask the URL with the word that will lead to it in the article's text, but in hte 'external links' section put the URL in unmasked. That will allow for the article to flow more easily for printout, and yet the unmasked URL will be there also and will show in the same printout of the article. So it is possible we can have it both ways, it's all in how we place the masked or exposed links and where. JamesAnderson 01:29, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

James - you got them in reverse and bit fuddled. In Wikipedia, the urls for them in their "external links" are masked, but are NOT masked in their "Infobox" portion (our version would be "Quick Facts"). Masked urls are not allowed in the infoboxes. Can have the same urls masked but only in the "Websites" (our version of "external links".) The reason the urls are exposed in Wikipedia is because the counties and cities government sites would change without notice so their sysops don't have to hunt and open every time PLUS there are many users who do not bother with masking when changing the urls. the government users remember their urls easily rather than masking. dsammy 01:43, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

How big are the infoboxes? Will the size of the infobox make any difference on which way we go here with URLs placed in them? It would seem to me that the size of the box in association with the general length of the URL text itself being what would end up to a degree tipping our decision one way or the other. JamesAnderson 02:13, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Infoboxes are small sized and are kept to a specific limit on width and usually on right side as seen in Wikipedia for countries, states, counties and cities. The urls if longer are word-wrapped to prevent them from forming single line on purpose in Wikipedia. I've seen a few that got word-wrapped to prevent single lines. dsammy 04:42, 27 February 2009 (UTC)