FamilySearch Wiki:Contributors Meeting 2 August 2012

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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.

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Kudos go to ...

• Sandra Pond - we are down to just 12 Portal pages!

Updates and follow up

• Discuss policy for protecting and unprotecting pages; see the sandbox for a proposed FamilySearch Wiki:Page Protection Policy page. Please place any comments on the talk page.

• New template: Protect
• Could a protected page (such as a presentation to a conference) be copied and uploaded as a PDF and then the original page could link to that, but the page about the article could be edited.

• We need a proposal on how to handle conference addresses, such as World Conference? They are asking for contributions to a book they are producing.

• Link to books (BYU collections, etc.), rather than have the whole address in an article. If they're available in a digital version, they should be linked to. World Conference on Records are available on FS.org and a link can be provided. Page could then be unprotected.

New Agenda Items

Style Guide discussion - linking. The Style Guide is woefully inadequate here, so let's discuss best practices, and then translate those best practices into Style Guide examples. Some areas for discussion:

• Links do or do not need some kind of supporting text/explanation? (I'd suggest that any link that goes off of the FamilySearch wiki site should at least be labeled with where it's going so that users know what to expect when they click.)
• Links should or should not show the full URL? (Should not according to current style guide and online content common practice.)
• Use of repetitive text to explain a link. See items under Church, Court and Land on the Adams County, Ohio page as an example.)
• What words to "bury" a link under. Title of the web site? Explanation of what users will find? Something else?
• Other examlpes/ideas?
• "Vital records at . . ."
• Somerset County,PA - good example of linking
• We need some good examples of linking - patterns that could be used

The article Writing Online: Best Practices had some very solid suggestions. Lise 14:29, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Any interest in a project to add pages for "crowdsourcing" projects like this in the community? -- janellv (talk| contribs) 15:11, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

It would be a good idea to have a page on the Wiki that could list projects like this that need volunteers - family history oriented projects, with the Wiki being number 1.

Is there still a size limit on Wiki pages? Murphynw 19:02, 2 August 2012 (UTC) The warning message doesn't come up anymore - warning about long pages. Special pages lists Long pages. There is a limit to file sizes. Suggested limit is 35,000 bytes. A useability group to test some of these items would be great.

Forums Overview

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