FamilySearch Wiki:Contributors Meeting 18 Oct 2011

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Purpose of the meeting Improve the Wiki Forge solutions with other community contributors. Share best practices, ideas, and content. Discuss current issues, community matters, and strategies. Move issues to decision.

Introduce new members

• Chelsie Woehl and Dorthy Horan

Kudos go to ...

• Jane Colmenares

Updates and follow up

• During an 11 October 2011 meeting of the Wiki Community and Wiki Engineers, a committee was appointed and charged to address issues related to stubs in the wiki. Our report follows; we invite comment and discussion on this forum. Items are numbered to facilitate responses to specific points
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  1. We need stubs. Without the stub on the page the page does not exist. This also makes the article searchable, and easier to find.
• 2. Changing the name “stub” is not a good idea; this would cause many dead links and things that would need to be corrected.
• 3. Develop a system to track all stub pages, so that we can maintain them. Place them on the maintenance page sorted by date of last edit.
  a. Develop a template to put on a stub page that indicates it will be removed by _____ [insert a date] if content is not added. This would be accompanied by an email to the last contributor to the page of the pending action.

• Concerns about adding a date or deleting these pages. Removing leaves no incentive to add to the page. It could be perceived as a threat, rather than an invitation to add more.
• Some pages were set up but never developed. Moderators and/or Adopters could be looking at Stubs and evaluating them.
• For pages that have been there a long time, projects that are working with these pages could evaluate the usefulness of the page and put the stub template on the page.
• How do we get stub banner removed on pages that have been developed.
• A project could link to a list of stubs for that project so that people can see what needs to be added.

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  b. At present there is a sentence on the FamilySearch Wiki:Stub page (FamilySearch Wiki:Stub) that seems to capture stubs. It states “Find a listing of them in the Category:Stubs.” This page is inadequate, however; it returned only five stubs (on 12 October 2011). See Category:Help stubs Category:Help stubs. We know there are many more than five.
  
  4. Refine the criteria for removing stub labels. The present criteria just defines the challenge:
  FamilySearch Wiki:stub (FamilySearch Wiki:Stub)
  “There is no set size at which an article stops being a stub. While very short articles are likely to be stubs, there are some subjects about which there is very little that can be written. Conversely, there are subjects about which a lot could be written - their articles may still be stubs even if they are a few paragraphs long. As such, it is impossible to state whether an article is a stub based solely on its length, and any decision on the article has to come down to an editor's best judgement “
  We have placed this on the Forums
  

• Wikipedia has a graduated template, depending on the status of the article, but we don't have the people to follow through on something like this. It could be a future project. How do other sites handle this?
• The community could be helpful in working with the stubs.
• Could the contributor evaluate whether the article is needing more information or is complete, but is it ready to be used as a feature article?
• The stub template needs to be more inviting. Would you like to help?
• Review of short pages are probably stubs but are not identified with the template

Business/Announcements

• Pass along cards can be mailed out. James Tanner, Lynda Avery, Dorothy Horan, Ken Knight, Linda Carver, Wiki support team,

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Project Help Requests

Need help with your project? See a project that needs to be done? Add it here:

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Improve the Wiki

• What is the process for selecting feature articles? How do we emphasize the best? How do we make sure less-than-best or less-than-ready don't end up featured? Lise 14:07, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• A criteria is needed - could use one from Wikipedia with refinements.
• Would be nice to have a page with articles that will be featured in the near future, so that edits could be made before it's featured. Put a comment on the Talk page so that people will be notified of the change.
• Spam - how to get it removed very quickly - in Forums. Sometimes, there is a time lag before marked threads are dealt with. Could there be a way that the thread is hidden until it is deleted.

• Subpages – Clarification and possible policy change. Help:Subpages says: “By default, MediaWiki's subpage feature is turned off in the main namespace, but can be used on talk pages and user pages. See Help:Namespaces. In namespaces where the feature is switched off, any slashes (/) within a page name are simply part of the page name and do nothing special.”

The above paragraph seems to talk about two different things.

1. Where subpages can be used. This seems to imply that subpages are only for talk and user pages.
2. The breadcrumb trail that can be automatically generated. Should this be turned on for other types of pages? Judy 19:39, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• What are all the FCK editor bugs? Can someone volunteer to add them to the Known Issues page and/or the Editing Tool page?

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Forums Overview

Be part of the solution! Make your opinions known! Post comments to an existing thread or start a new discussion at Wiki Contributors Corner forum.

Current forum threads of interest: Polls New since last week Community Center - rework Comments re: Community Center Wiki Index is Convoluted?] Includes comments re: search problems Comments added since last week Refining the Moderator's Role Check out the refined guidelines! Decisions made since last week

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