User group meeting agenda & minutes 13 Feb 2008

Please contribute ideas for our agenda by adding them to the Discussion tab above.

Information Items

 * Introduction of time keeper, note taker, and facilitator
 * Introduction of members: 10 seconds for name and desired takeaways.
 * Agenda intro: Michael
 * Format of these meetings: Michael
 * Where we'll look for initial ideas to cover (feedback page and agenda discussion page)
 * Where to propose items for next agenda: Michael
 * A peek at portals: Mollie
 * Browse by topic
 * Linking from Labs to Mediawiki instance
 * A recap of proposed takeaways for this meeting's future

Discussion Items
Prayer: Elder Parker Facilitator: Michael Ritchey Time keeper: Geoff

Add agenda items by clicking on the User Group link in the Navigation box on the wiki and open the agenda link for the next meeting. Click on the edit tab and add the information that you would like to have covered. Add shift+~ four times to add your name and date/time stamp.

Before the meeting the facilitator will finalize the meeting agenda based on what has been added to the wiki.

Portals: Mollie Michael showed the India page on Wikipedia then the India page. A portal breaks information shown into more engaging and organized frames. If you start to figure out what types of information you want for a country page this is a way to set the page up. It is not easy to set up a portal. We are trying to provide a way that is simple for creating a portal. We will not dictate what will be on a portal page. The community will decide and this will allow us to figure out some best practices.

Mollie – What it takes to create a portal page. Look at the United States:Portal which only has one box filled in.

How to fill in the boxes: The red links mean the page has not been created. Each of these pages is a sub page of the portal. If you click on a link and add something to the page and save there is now something in the box. If you click on edit after that it will open the page for that box.

Anytime you want to edit the background/code of a template page you have to turn off the editor tool. Go to preferences –

There is a portal instruction page titled: FamilySearch_Wiki:Portal Instructions

When you click on the edit tab after turning off the editor the page opens in the wiki code view.

Because this is such a bad bug we will make a name space so no one can break anything.

To add another box, copy and paste the code from the article: FamilySearch_Wiki:Portal Instructions

Questions: David Dilts-What topics are good for portals and bad for portals? If there are many articles a portal can be used as a gateway.

We will have no duplication of a portal page and a country page like wikipedia. When a portal page is done the country page will be deleted.

The United States is a category and United States of America is a category with articles in each is that intended? It needs to be cleaned up.

David: Is there a book to read about this? No

If there are ideas for experimenting or changes to boxes check with Mollie. We are open to changes.

Geoff:What about images on portal pages? We’ve been working for weeks to define business and license rules around images. We have the site under the Creative Commons license. We are working to include images in the telescope system. There are some issues with images that are more complicated than text. Wikipedia has their community add images only created by their users and adds lots of metadata.

Feel free to ask questions by using the “discussion” tab. Mollie has that marked for watch on the portal instructions page.

Geoff: What about the color changes on the portals, can we use more than the FamilySearch brand colors? There is a lot of flexibility within the FamilySearch palette. You can ask for more flexibility using the “Feedback” link. By no means are we through experimenting.

'''Browse by subject: can we add browse by subject for topics to get at racial and ethnic issues. What page would we want a browse by topics page to link to?''' View the “Categories” page. Some categories are for countries and some for topics like adoption. This will take a working meeting to discuss this and develop some ideas. Could we have everyone bring a page with their ideas on how to solve this? We may need to have a different meeting but we could have a talk page to get the ideas flowing. The user group meetings should be the place to present possible conclusions reached in a work group meeting.

'''Where would you like to see talk pages for something like this? Should we build something like a village pump link?''' We will try to put something together and set up a task force meeting to get this going.

Question:When will a new link from FamilySearch Labs to the new version of the wiki be created? Not until some security things are fixed.