Talk:User group meeting agenda & minutes 28 May 2008

Involving more people in the user group meeting, not just the managers.

This was mentioned on 21 May, and it seems like it could work. But it can't just be all at once. What is needed is a way to break it in, where users would present things at the meetings, and not just the managers.

It might be best to start by asking if a user has something they would like to present something about that they have been doing in/related to the wiki. Once we had one or two, maybe a third week with something like that, try to up it to two user presentations, and so forth, until all that the managers need to do is give updates on system issues and other 'administrivia' related to the site, along with news items they need to share with us on the project generally. What does everyone think of that? JamesAnderson 16:54, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Turning lookers into users. How do we accomplish that, how do we make the case for them?

What I'm finding is there are alot of people interested in the wiki, and we're getting alot of hits. Probably ten visits for every one registered user. And even among the registered users, there are only a handful that are actively adding content. That's not totally bad, because many users will eventually find something useful in their research that they will want to share with others that no one knew about before, and add things then.

The forums are getting alot of hits from guests. Sometimes now as many as fifteen are on at any given time. How do we make a case for them to join up and post? Having a sizeable user base is what is going to drive the forums, as well as the wiki, towards the intended goal. Any ideas on both? JamesAnderson 16:38, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Books Digitized Loaded to BYU Site
Periodically I get an e-mail telling me which FHL books have been newly digitized and added to the BYU collection online. As you know, you can find/access these books by conducting searches of family and local histories on the Family History Library Catalog. If the book has been added, there's a link from the catalog entry to the images online. However, neither the BYU site nor the FHLC is a very good tool for finding such books. I'm thinking it would be a good idea to add links to these books from appropriate pages on the wiki -- like a page that covers histories of a U.S. state. I'm wondering whether there's anyone who would like to spearhead this project. It could be done by either volunteers or by missionaries at the Family History Library. Ritcheymt 20:54, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

The problem here is that they are family histories, rather than county/local/whatever histories, making it difficult to do the right thing yet. dsammy 00:16, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I received a copyrighted article from Gordon Remington about Gustav Anjou, he felt it should be on the Wiki. I looked in Wikipedia and there is a small article about him but not as detailed as this one Mr. Remington gave me to add to Wiki. I'm sure we can add articles about Gilbert von Studnitz, Archibald Bennett, Pere Anselm, Donald L. Jacobus, Milton Rubicon, Gertrude Barber and other high regarded and high volumnous genealogist authors. dsammy 00:16, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Uncategorized Categories
Although there is currently a way for users to browse by country, there are many topics that aren't tied to a place. We want a way that users can browse a heirarchy of topics, whether or not these topics relate to places. To that end, we've created a top-level category called Contents that contains all the others. We will link to Contents from the Navigation bar seen on the left. However, 27 categories have not yet been placed into the heirarchy -- they need to be categorized. (The one exception to this is which, as the top category, should not be categorized.) We need someone to categorize these Uncategorized Categories, which will place them somewhere in the category or one of its subcategories. Any takers? Ritcheymt 21:01, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * FYI...the category Contents is our top most category. Please leave this category uncategorized! Molliewog 21:17, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

There's a major problem - what is happening to "Watch"? It is not working, not since the major upgrade when "Tidy" code started showing up. dsammy 00:18, 28 May 2008 (UTC)