Talk:User group meeting agenda & minutes 2 July 2008

Please add suggestions for the agenda here. We welcome your contributions! To add a new topic, hit the "+" tab. To add comments to an existing topic, click that topic's "edit" link. Please remember to add four tildes ( ~ ). at the end of your entry to "sign" it with your name. That'll help us contact you if we need clarification on the item you'd like to address in the meeting.

Meeting Assignments
Currently, we have assignments in the meeting for note taker, time keeper, and moderator. Would it be possible to have someone assigned to monitor the "chat" that may occur from remote attendees? It might be helpful to have someone also monitor the sound as well. This may be the same person and would help being more proactive for those speaking. Thomas Lerman 20:37, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Ann Roach has currently been filling that role. She may have missed some comments today, since she was also presenting a portion of the agenda. And she will be gone next week, so we will need to have someone do it for that meeting.Jbparker 21:57, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Just speaking as one that has been virtually in the meeting a few times, it seems like I am not heard much. I would rather be physically in the meeting to be heard. I know Anne has many things going on at the same time and do not blame anyone for that. Thomas Lerman 14:01, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Tabs on articles
We have discussed at the past couple of meetings about adding new subjects to a discussion page by using the "+" tab. I noticed that Wikipedia renamed tabs shown on articles to make them, in my opinion, clearer. That may be something we may want to consider? Charts comparing the names on the tabs are shown below. . . my suggestion is to rename "page"->"article", "edit"->"edit this page", and "+"->"new section":

Thomas Lerman 14:22, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Looking further, Thomas Lerman 17:26, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
 * 1) It appears that the reason "page" is being displayed is because the articles do not seem to be in a normal namespace (they are in "(main)" instead of "Article").
 * 2) The "Portal talk" pages are in the "Main page" namespace. This does not seem right.
 * 3) The "policy" namespace is empty. Is that intended for something in the future? Can this namespace be deleted?

FHL Favorites and Wiki
Incorporating the Family History Library Favorites in the Wiki.

Stephen Bobowski 30 June 2008

There are 15,000 links supposedly in the FHL favorites file, that as a whole is unwieldy for a wiki page of its own, so in order to incorporate any of them, some way would need to be found to accomodate their use in some form or another.

The best way I can think of right now is to have an 'external links' section of an article. That would allow for links to specific pages related to the article to be displayed there. Since most articles are going to in the end be very specific in what localities they cover, that would mean that the list need not be all that long as far as what localities that the FHL favorites have listings for. Some major locations may have a good number, but for most, not all that many would apply, and that might be just the way to manage this particular issue after all.

There certainly needs to be additional discussion on the matter, and we should to at some point come to an understanding of how to go about this and what to do regarding the favorites list. JamesAnderson 04:06, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Adding Links to external websites
There has been a problem experienced creating a link in the wiki and getting just a number as the link. Marc Feickert has worked out the reasons this happens and what can be done to make a link appear as intended.

If you are in wiki text mode and you enter a URL in wiki markup (such as ) THEN you get the number instead of a link in the HTML view. If you put a space and then repeat the URL (http://Feickert.us), you get the linked URL in the HTML view. This works as designed for wiki markup. The first part is the link URL, and the second part is the surface text.

If you are in FCK Editor mode and you type a URL (such as http://feickert.us) and then press the spacebar, then the URL is hyperlinked, and the underlying wiki text is created as http://feickert.us. A hyperlinked number never appears.

Darris 17:34, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Advanced Search access
https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Search_Tips lists Advanced Search tips, but does not tell how to get there. I am guessing that this is old, non-applicable information and should be deleted. Is this true?

You're possibly quite right, but the other way of looking at this is that the information was placed there, but the action descriptions needed were inadvertently left out of the page. It could come down to the need simply to update the page to reflect the missing information on advanced searching tips, and add that to the page. JamesAnderson 15:35, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that is another possibility I left off here. My guess is based upon many of the fields it describes not really available from the Wiki. So, if advanced search is available and the field list is not, then both would need to be updated. Anyway, I guess we will find out soon. Thomas Lerman 15:48, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Unicode characters
I know that the Wiki supports Unicode characters (non-Latin characters) such as what I put on my user page. I also know that some browsers especially older one's may not support the characters. My question though is whether we want to put things such as glossaries in images or in text. The disadvantage to the images is that one cannot search them. The disadvantage to the text is everyone MAY not be able to see the characters. Sorry for the late topic, this may have to spill over to next week. Thomas Lerman 18:42, 2 July 2008 (UTC)