Community Meeting Agenda 20 October 2009

Be bold! Post your agenda items!
Feel free to post on the agenda any items you wish to cover during the meeting. If your item requires details or feedback, post some details on the discussion page and link to the discussion from the agenda.

Administrative items

 * 1) Assignment of time keeper and note taker
 * 2) Introduction of new members: 10 seconds for name and desired takeaways.
 * 3) Review of Minutes
 * 4) Today's agenda preview

Information items

 * Some of the past agendas, especially from February, March and April of 2009 were somehow inadvertently removed from the User Group Archive. Links to those agendas have now been re-installed. Jbparker 20:46, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Replication of Instruction Pages
While doing some categorization I noticed that many of the states have basic research guides for where to look for information and suggested search priorities. While I haven't checked them all the ones I have looked at seem to be nearly identical in the information they provide - they are guides to the sorts of records to look for, not specific descriptions of the records for that state. Here are some examples:

Alabama, United States - Birth - 1702-1816

New York, United States - Birth - 1700-1775

Maryland, United States, Births 1776-1849

The only obvious differences in most of these (that I could see) are the date ranges in the titles. Would it be better to have these pages consolidated and linked to - rather than replicated in all or most of the states? It seems a lot of work to wikify each page for each state, if its not necessary. Laralee 17:49, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

The Krispy Kreme Conveyor -- fresh out of the oven
How can our wiki automagically show our customers a conveyor belt full of well-written articles — a list of articles which are pretty engaging and which have reached that threshold within the last few hours or minutes? For background, see my blog post Adding Hot-off-the-Line Freshness to a Wiki. Ritcheymt 16:49, 19 October 2009 (UTC)