User talk:Cottrells

Bot?
Hi Steve, A website address has changed on us. Would it be possible to have a bot replace http://www.census.gov/geo/www/maps/stco_wall_2003/stco_wallmap.htm with http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/maps/county_wall.html ? Thanks for your consideration, Murphynw 19:20, 21 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi Nathan, I have actioned Special:ReplaceText to replace the URL as given above. I notice that these were all in the File namespace. I used the Special:LinkSearch and the results suggest that I have changed them all. --Steve 15:12, 23 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Excellent. Yes, they should have all been in the File namespace. Thanks Steve! Murphynw 21:59, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

Making the width of the Digital Collections templates equal to the width of the infobox templates
Hi, Steve. On nearly every US county page, the Digital Collection banner is above the infobox template, yet they do not exactly line up with each other. See Crane County, Texas for example. Any way to fix the width of those banners? In the ones we were playing with, the instuction | info-w = 500px had NO effect, even changing it to 600 px. AdkinsWH 21:09, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you
Steve, I completely missed that you added the silver star to my page last month. Thank you so much! I have really enjoyed working on the wiki and will miss it a lot. And many thanks to you for everything you have given to the program over the last few years. You are one of our stalwarts and deserve a silver star yourself. In fact, I'm going to go give you one now. :) I'm glad to know that although we as staff members might come and go, there are people like you who are always willing to give. Thank you. -- janellv 18:35, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Old/Unused Page and Category
We on the Wiki Support Team have been reviewing categories and their pages in an effort to streamline the categories. In regards to the template page Okina, we were wondering if this page and it's category, Category:MSIE font fix templates continue to be needed. Parrisl 03:15, 1 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi LaVera, it looks like that template is not currently being used in any content pages of the wiki, however I think the need for it could reoccur, so I have added a documentation subpage that explains why the template has been created. Hope that helps. --Steve 21:26, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Digital Collections Button
Steve, I was working on Davidson County, Tennessee on the DC button - have changed from the "keyboard" to a treble clef and clock - and it has changed all other states - of which I had NO intention of doing. Not sure what to do to get the keyboard back into other states. joy 21:14, 5 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi Joy, it appears that you edited the DC button, which is the underlying template used on many of the individual state versions. The template that you should have edited for Tennessee is TNDC. I have copied the code you worked on for Tennessee to this template. --Steve 21:59, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

FHL template
Hi, Steve, The catalog has changed for U.S. place name searches. It now requires United States, then the state. Do we need to go in an physically change each one where we have used the FHL template? I don't want to do any changes until I know what magic you can do with this. I don't want a situation where we have {{FHL|United States, United States, [state].... for example. AdkinsWH 16:50, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

New External Link template?
Hi, Steve. We need an external link template for Ancestry.com, since we will increasingly point to specific items for a state or county. (Not census and the big stuff.) The problem arises when we may now need 3 links: 1 for the FHL (AncestryInsititution.com); another for whatever the LDS Account link will be, and the third for just Ancestry.com. What they will all have in common is the database ID. For example: http://search.ancestryinstitution.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2117

If we don't have all three links, do you suggest we just tell people how to access it each time we make the link? Would love your take on how to handle this. Thank you, thank you. AdkinsWH 16:41, 3 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Nathan has previously created three templates Ancestry, AncestryInstitution and AncestryLibrary that creates 3 different URLs. At the moment you can't change the link text - it will always say link. I think that could be changed to allow the contributor to provide different link text. Also is what you really asking for is to have one template that produces all three links in one go? --Steve 17:08, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Creating a list of family organizations
Steve, I have some questions about the design changes on an article that lists family organizations that have a Facebook page. See Surname Pages and Groups on Facebook. We are expanding that list to include family organizations with a website and/or Facebook page. We have questions about the layout design of the page and welcome your suggestions:


 * There are a lot of family organizations so we want to create alphabetical links to a separate page for each letter of the alphabet. I'm pretty sure there is a template we can use for this. Do you know if there is an article in the wiki that is already using the TOC template with links to sub-pages? I'm thinking it would be easier to copy what has already been done, rather than figure out how to do it from scratch.
 * Should there be a separate column just for the surname of the organization? I believe the content would be easier to visually scan if the surname was the only text in the first column, but there could be 100 "Smith" family organizations, so maybe the idea is not so great. Suggestions?
 * Does a separate column for the Facebook page and another column for the website link work okay? Any other suggestions?
 * The list currently has a short description of the family organization. Should we continue adding this content? Is the description helpful to those who are looking for family organizations?
 * What about family organizations without a website or a Facebook page? There are a lot of organizations who can only be accessed through snail-mail. Should this content be added as well?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions. I have added the same list of questions to the discussion page of the article. Fran 20:26, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi Fran, good to hear from you. There was already in the wiki a template that did this for categories CatAZ but I could not find a TOC Template that would link to pages in series. I found a suitable template in Wikipedia and have ported it over to the wiki. It is called A-Z multipage list. It's note quite looking as good as it could, so I will be tweaking it. I have set up the "H" page in this series Surname Pages and Groups on Facebook: H, other pages would need to follow that format. I know you have asked for more feedback and I will try to come back on those as well. --Steve 16:58, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks Steve! We are going to be making the changes today to the page and add all the subpages. We are trying to decide on the name of the page we should change it to because the purpose of the page has expanded to more than Facebook. We will include all family organizations that we can find, so we need to link to those who have websites, Facebook pages, a Wiki page, or include their mailing address if that's the only way to contact them. So now the page name needs to be more inclusive of all organizations, associations, groups, etc. Hope to have all the pages set up today and ready to populate! Fran 18:09, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Testing a new template
Hi Steve, The following template (Template:Auto-outdated) is operational but I would appreciate it if you could look it over to see if I did anything significantly wrong or if you would have any suggestions of ways to improve it. With all the discussions about the wiki becoming outdated (and all the outdated pages I have come across) I thought something like this might help. I know there is a maintenance template to mark outdated articles but this is a slightly different approach to keep them from becoming outdated in the first place. Is anything like this currently available?

Concerning the coding itself, there is a limitation with the parser calculations in that an error output is generated if the time span is two years or more. The one year limitation could be overcome by using the “AgeParse” function but that is not available with the current MediaWiki version and I am not sure if it will be added to the new version. This limitation (which can be overcome by expanding the code a little more) may be a mute point anyway because periods greater than 1 year would be of minimal usefulness. I was also thinking about whether it would be useful to have the option of specifying specific subcategories as a parameter so that a user could monitor “their own” area for articles they are interested in or are responsible for (just a thought at this time).

Other questions:


 * I am also not sure where (or if) to include StripWhiteSpace to remove spaces inadvertently included in unnamed parameters (based on the red color it appears not to be available in this version).
 * If the use of ! is necessary in the coding in place of the bar.
 * How to limit unacceptable parameters (zero and negative numbers) from being entered. I did not get the expected “switch” change over when the parameter was set to 0 (zero) or a negative number.

Thanks for your patience as I am still learning. Luccagenes 06:33, 20 July 2014 (UTC) I have just added to the coding to expand the one year limit to two years (1 to 730 days) although for all practical purposes the recommended range would still be 1 to 365 days. Luccagenes 17:29, 20 July 2014 (UTC) Steve, I also found something unusual (a glitch) with the operation of this template although some of it may be a common occurrence with the server. When the timer expires, the display will change (from OKAY to Expired) and the category is added to the bottom of the page (after about a 1 hour delay which appears to be normal and consistent). The concern is that the page that now has the “auto-outdated” category on it is not being added to the actual category page, Category:Auto-outdated, even a whole day later (have tried several means to refresh the page). The only way to get it to display correctly is to edit and save the template itself at which point any and all expired pages are instantly posted on the category page. Afterwards, when a particular article page is then re-saved (the timer being reset) that page will be automatically and instantly removed from the category page as it should (this problem only occurs in the other direction). Luccagenes 01:44, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Maintenance tag on an archived page.
Steve, on a related note (but separate), there is a maintenance tag on an archived page (Community_News/Archive_2) that was inadvertently saved with the archive and is now showing up in the outdated category listing. I was going to replace the current tag with a "notice" box with the text transferred to the new box (just to eliminate of the maintenance tag) but it is requested that the archive page not be edited. Is it okay to make this correction? Luccagenes 17:16, 21 July 2014 (UTC)