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)

Do we want to put biographical material on our Wiki?

Jbparker 17:54, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Size of Portal Pages
How big do we want the Portal Pages to be? I thought Portal Pages were intended to be rather short, to introduce subjects relative to the locality or subject, and to point the user to how to get to more information. Some are getting rather long. Not all subjects can be placed on a Portal Page or they will get to be "books" in and of themselves. What are the limits?

Jbparker 17:57, 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)

Watch list
'''I have moved this discussion to the forums at http://forums.familysearchsupport.org/showthread.php?p=389#post389. Please document your problems with watch there so that we can get all of the information to our admins. We want to get this resolved! Thanks''' Molliewog 15:40, 28 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)

Dave, I'm still seeing 'Watch', so is something happening that is causing that to break, you might want to see if it happens when the Tidy code appears.

Yesterday I did the Nigeria States stubs, and the error came up on every page, tonight I saw Jimmy put in some pages for specific Indian tribes of North America, and most of the time the Tidy error did not occur. I'm going to take a gander and see if there are problems with using the Watch feature either way.

Michael: I saw the uncategorized categories list, some of them belong higher up than the localities, because some of them reach across multiple localities. One is actually a locality category, Glamorganshire, and the others actually are their own categories, such as the one for DNA research.

Am I making sense here? JamesAnderson 02:22, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Update: I clicked on 'Watch' on two articles. When I went to my watch list I got a screwball number pagename in red and upon clicking the URL went to a nonexistent article page (add new article). Obviously I didn't want to create anything because the page returned was bogus. Here's what it brought up instead of the watched article.

https://wiki.familysearch.org/w/index.php?title=13422&amp;action=edit

The number after title= should not have been there, instead, the title should have been there.

Is that what you saw Dave? JamesAnderson 02:32, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I just found something related to my last posting about the Tidy error, it has to do with the number in that URL I posted, that leads to a bogus article that has that number.

It appears to be a serial number used in the article creation process, so in other words, something may be broken in the redirecting of 'watch' requests, causing it to stop at the article creation serial number, and not loading the requested article or its title.

Is this a possibility? JamesAnderson 13:27, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

'''I have moved this discussion to the forums at http://forums.familysearchsupport.org/showthread.php?p=389#post389. Please document your problems with watch there so that we can get all of the information to our admins. We want to get this resolved! Thanks''' Molliewog 15:40, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Meeting time
May I suggest that the meeting time get fixed at a specific time. Or at least, if it gets changed that more notice is given. I just got to the FHL in SLC and noticed the time got changed in the Wiki 45 minutes before the meeting is to start. If I were planning on getting here just in time, I would not have been able to arrive on time because of the drive. If someone was coming on-line remotely at the prescribed time, they may miss the meeting too.