Forum:Organization


 * What you are about to read is not a complaint, it's a goup of suggestions that I have made after observing editing in the past few months. I hope you take these into consideration before we have millions of articles.

Okay, I have been compiling an index to list all of the help pages here. Upon looking at Category:Help and the Help page, I saw that people may get confused because there are help pages with different names, yet they have the same basic information. Some help pages are categorized, others are not categorized. Some help pages may be categorized too much, as in they are located in the help category, the browse category, and help category sub categories. Basically, you could keep clicking on a category and/or subcategories and go in circles. I bet there's at least 100 help articles out there. And if new people come and participate, they need help. Are they going to read though 100 help pages to know exactly what to do on here? I doubt it. Sure, they may need just a bit of help, but some of the help pages are worded as if only a very experienced user could understand. This goes for both the Help and Genealogy namespaces. I'm confused just looking through those pages while tryign to compile a simple index. I've been trying to get some organization going, but I can't do this alone. We really need some organization in this area. What I see is four basic types of pages:
 * 1. Help - pages that guide/help/tell people how to edit articles
 * 2. Guidelines - pages that tell people what we require them to do while editing (like Naming conventions and birth/death categories, for instance)
 * 3. Wiki Information - pages that give information about this wiki, like who the adminatrators are, what our goals are, etc.
 * 4. Geneaology - pages that give information, especially to new geneaologists, on stuff like abbreviations, record keeping, research tips, etc.

What I suggest we do is go though all these articles and just organize them. Simplify them to just a small, well-organized group of articles. We don't need anyone getting confused.

Now, regarding the people pages. We have been having a lot of talk about categorization and formats, but we're basically jumping all around from a lot of different discussions and yet, some articles are being categorized with categories not discussed. What I suggest we do is make one proposal page, perhaps, and like Wikipedia, have a Support/Oppose discussion on how we categorize things. If we come to a decision, we can create a guidelines page to easily inform people what is required of people. If someone disagrees with a way we do something months after the debate, we could have another Support/Oppose discussion and maybe we will make an improvement.

Also, we have pages in which people can request research help. In addition to person talk pages, we have the county queries boards and developing county article groups. Now in the future (I say future for the resason that we have a lot of organization to do before we get into another project) Wikipedia has Portals and WikiProjects. In the future we could have such projects for certain areas of research, if a group of editors develop who work on the same set of articles. If we do this it should be either Portal or Project, not both.

Well, that's all I could think of for now, thanks for reading. - AMK152 (Talk • Contributions 00:53, 10 December 2007 (UTC)