Forum:Organization

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Organization

General

What you are about to read is not a complaint, it's a group 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 subcategories. 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 trying 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 administrators are, what our goals are, etc.
• 4. Genealogy - pages that give information, especially to new genealogists, 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 reason 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)

Great work, AMK. Builds on Forum:Help improve the help pages and adds a few more things. At least two separate subjects; you're an organiser: how about creating separate forums for them (though the one I mentioned may be the best place to continue part)? (By the way, I would be very surprised if anyone could go around in circles clicking successive subcategories or parent categories - show me an example and I will fix it!) Robin Patterson 11:14, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

A lot of articles/categories are categorized with categories that the category their categorized in is categorized as. Like article A is categorized in Cat B and C. Cat C is categorized in B, Cat C is categorized in Cat B. Cats C and B are categorized in Cat D. Cat D is categorized in Cat B and A. It's so confusing, and there are many different types of these circles so examples of these would be time consuming. Perhaps it is better to discuss what exactly we need to inform newcomers to help them. Maybe a less confusing thing to do is just ptu all Help pages in one category, that way we don't have all these subcategories on certain types of help. If necessary, we could jsut subcat them between wiki help and Genealogy research help.

I made separate sections on this discussion page. I brought up all these issues here particuarily because such discussions on organization should be in one place. If the discussion gets to lengthy, such stuff can be archived. Liek I said, we could have a list of proposals and the discussion can be a Support/Oppose kind of thing like on Wikipedia. I just think it's much better to comment on oen page, than to jump to multipel pages to comment stuff. Plus, two different discussions may effect each other. -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 22:18, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Wiki information

Discuss General informatio nabotu this wiki.

Help pages

Discuss the organization and what is need/not needed for help pages. Some help pages may need merging, cleaning up, etc.

Regarding use of wiki

Discuss help pages for people using the wiki.

Regarding Genealogy research

Discuss help pages for people wantign to know how to research/what to do/ etc.

Guidelines

Discuss requirements of pages in this wiki.

Categorization

Discuss how things shoudl be categorized.

People pages

Discuss people pages. This could also develop guidelines.