FamilySearch Wiki:Contributors Meeting 28 Aug 2014

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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.

Agenda items

Be bold, post your agenda items! Feel free to post on the agenda any items you wish to discuss during the meeting.

Guest Speaker

Next week, James Tanner, blogger, attorney, moderator for AZ and UT, UGA Board member, and much more. Any special requests, or let him select his own topic?

Summary of Yammer

FS Wiki Contributors group.

• Categories: What's the value of having many categories in the wiki with only 1 or 2 members in that category for a total of more than 8000 categories? Should we eliminate categories? Wilma Adkins can you sort our category list by number of members even if the title and the number of members are in the same cell?
  • It would take a lot of time to find which of the 8000 categories we should pick for an article we might be creating.
  • I don't think about looking for a category, I think about typing in a search bar. Even the newest beginners feel safe doing that.
  • it looks like the categories are more for our benefit more than for the public's....I am not sure yet, but it would be good to trim them down, so when we use them it makes actually some sense....but I am not yet sure how to do this relatively quickly and effective.
  • suggest that a usage study be done
  • there are 1769 categories that only have 1 member
  • there is a balance between fixing them as much as possible and spending too much time doing it.

• Tip of the week: Have you ever been doing some editing and wanted to see what happens when you leave out a bit of code or some text, but did not want to write it down or you didn’t think you can remember it if you found that you needed to put it back?
  • Try this, put the material in Notepad++ in a new file tab. If you would like to keep the material for an extended time, because you want to remove even more material, it will stay in that new file WITHOUT saving it, even if you close down Notepad++ when you turn off your computer. The file tab will come up again the next time you turn on your computer. When you are sure you don’t need the material anymore, you can click on the little x on the file tab and the file will go away.
  • Notepad++ is free software and works just like Notepad which comes with your Windows software. You can get it at: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/. You all should get familiar with this great program. It is used by milliions.

• In our quest to make sure that if we change the title of many locality pages to improve SEO we do not create others problems, one of the challenges was the concern that if we redirect twice or more the same page we could get into troubles. However, apparently, if we do this the right way it is possible to redirect twice or more the same page and still the system should work. If this is true, we are very close to be able to make this change.
  • David Smith will share with us an explanation about what to do or not to do to make this system work in the next few days. Thank you David Smith !
  • I personally really like the way that ancestry has organized it's place page titles:
    • State Pages - "State Name Family History Research"
    • County Pages - "County Name, State Name"
    • Town Pages - "Town Name, State Name"

• Saw this in LDSMedia Talk. Gives link to get free Ancestry.com and others sites for those who have not received their invitation to join up as yet. You might want to pass this web address to those in your wards and stakes who have not received their invitation.
  • LDSMediaTalk

• For our wiki power users: Please try out the wiki upgrade test version and report any bugs you locate in the other google doc link.
  • Main Page

• Was not aware but the Church has a section of the Administrative Handbook on how members should deal with the internet. Take a look:
  • Handbook

Moderators and Adopters

Not sure what category this belongs under, but I would like discuss the role of volunteers with assignments (as compared to volunteers with content interests).  When individuals are given assignments to perform routine tasks in the wiki, part of their training and introduction to the wiki must include an introduction to wiki communities and wiki etiquette. 

Edits are being made by people who have not yet bothered to create a user page, and so have not actually placed themselves within the wiki community. These "arms-length edits" may solve short term objectives, in the long run they undermine the overall mechanisms that differentiate wikis from corporate-issued media. While I have a recent example that is personal and anecdoatal, this is an issue that has persisted for years. I believe FamilySearch hopes to build a vibrant, effective wiki community, and so am hopeful that the underlying issues can be addressed. Lise 18:13, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Community Council Report

Items to pose to Community Council

Meeting Notes/Minutes

(please post below this header)