Talk:User group meeting agenda 12 May 2009

Manual of Style
I have added Manual of Style material to its discussion page:


 * Naming conventions (geographic names)
 * Wiki: Disambiguation

How do we get material on the discussion page considered, approved, and moved into the actual MOS page? Diltsgd 15:10, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Second question is, how long does it have to be vetted before approval and moved into the MoS page? Not keen on long debate. dsammy 17:42, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Interactive Maps Suggestion
The interactive maps of the United States, individual states for counties, Britain, (others?) are wonderful. However, for someone unfamiliar with the geography (or bad at reading maps), the maps may pose a challenge finding the sub-division of their choice. Please consider a Manual of Style guideline that when employing an interactive map, the author should accompany that map with at least a short link to a page that shows an "Alphabetical List of States/Counties" sub-divisions linking to the same places as the links on the map. Diltsgd 23:28, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

That will be perfect. Have a link right below the map that will go to a page with all the localities on the main divisions shown on the map, not the localities within the divisions shown. If say, you wanted to see a map with county divisions of a statek there should be a separate map showing counties within a state, or with a state like Texas with a large nmber of counties (270) maybe a page taht shows a map of Texas divided up into maybe five regions, then when you click on the map see a map of counties in that region. There should also be a page with a full listing plus pages for the regions that would be linked off of the region map. That's an example of one way we could take this.

JamesAnderson 18:20, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

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Indirect vs Direct Links
Topic had been added to address masked paid subscription sites. Please refer to the MoS discussion page concerning this. dsammy 18:19, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

North Carolina Portal or not
Get rid of the Portal. We already knew the problem associated with the portals in search engine results. dsammy 06:33, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Geocities linking
Yahoo.com announced they are closing down Geocities by end of the year. see the announcement. There are many genealogy sites. Some users are making efforts to move their contents to different places. dsammy 17:10, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

That will be important because alot of people, including Alan Mann, had pages there that were personal but had loads of genealogical information on them. Conventional thinking on the reson why indicates this is because almost everyone can get free web hosting from many other providers now, including their ISP, and copious amounts of bandwidth for both storage and traffic. Geocities made sense when it was started and 5mb of space seemed like enough. Yahoo said they will announce a way to port whole pages over to a new site or service away from Geocities by sometime in the summer, the site will be closed completely at the end of the year.

JamesAnderson 18:25, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

That is interesting information, Sammy. As you allude to, those links will become dead when Geocities are shut down. If the content is appropriate for the Wiki, I think it would be great to see the author move the information here. Is there a way we can approach the authors about this option? Thomas Lerman 18:53, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Kudos
Michael, I noticed the kudos that you added for "English Phonetic surname Aliases 1750 to 1800 is growing wildly. Thanks to Bottpa for the majority of 315 revisions!" I have seen and/or heard other kudos in the past as well. While I think kudos are important, I wonder what is the best way to do that and encourage people in the best method. Do we want to encourage people to:


 * 1) Create new content?
 * 2) Save for the sake of more revisions? I really doubt that Bottpa is doing this, but rather putting in information as time allows. I took a look at one of the revisions and it has addition to 18 names (probably all that could be done at that moment). Obviously, it is important to save periodically in order to prevent loss of data.
 * 3) Go around making minor changes to another person's pages that they are working on?
 * 4) Etc.?

I am not saying any of the things are necessarily bad, just trying to look at what is being encouraged. Thomas Lerman 19:29, 12 May 2009 (UTC)