Community Meeting Agenda 15 September 2009

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

Administrative items

 * 1) Assignment of time keeper and note taker
 * 2) Introduction of new members: 10 seconds for name and desired takeaways.
 * 3) Review of Minutes
 * 4) Today's agenda preview

Information items
For those that post any items, please remember to take notes directly in the agenda for your items during the meeting. This will help so that we not only have a record of the discussions &amp; decisions, but also for those that are not able to attend the meeting. This is a new procedure that was discussed in the 08Sep2009 meeting. Thomas Lerman 21:35, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Changing of the Portals
Anne Roach has arranged for Eduardo Seaone to create un-portal copies of all the portal pages. Ritcheymt 15:53, 15 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Recording talks about the following have been converted: Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, and Idaho. New York is in progress. Contrary to some discussion, nobody has been able to show any evidence that search engines do not pick up portal pages. The information in the boxes are included on the server side and therefore the search engines will see. They show up within DIV HTML tags. Thomas Lerman 18:33, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Heads UP! Links changed in Pilot
Found out today (Saturday 12 September) the links from Wiki to pilot.familysearch.org had been altered sometime after September 1. Dsammy 21:14, 12 September 2009 (UTC)


 * For a slight correction, the product name is "Record Search". Yes, it is still a pilot product . . . kind of like the Research Wiki is in beta (and we do not call it "Beta Wiki"). Thomas Lerman 18:35, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Linking to maps
Item carried over from the 8 September meeting. As a result of the discussion last week, Steve agreed to provide some examples of how could be used in conjunction with the wiki. Examples will be provided in the talk page. --Steve 21:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Part of the discussion from last week included having PlaceOPedia, WikiMapia, and Wikipedia linking to us as well. Thomas Lerman 02:00, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

With regards to issue 1, the examples on the talk page were reviewed and it was decided to carry-over this item to Community Meeting Agenda 22 September 2009 where it should be pointed out that input is needed from the sysops about the technical possibility of adding the MediaWiki extensions required if this idea is to be progressed. BTW Jim Greene get well soon.
 * Summary of discussion at the meeting : This items has brought up two distinct issues
 * 1) FSWiki linking to on-line mapping providers
 * 2) Other sites linking to FSWiki

As for item 2, it was suggested that someone who represents FSWiki should contact the sysops/moderators of the proposed sites, that could include links back to FSWiki, so as to mitigate any conflicts of interest issues (for background see and ).

--Steve 22:11, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Georgia
We have a major problem. It's Georgia vs Georgia.

In category, both the state of Georgia and Republic of Georgia are combined. Shall we recategorize all out of category:Georgia into more appropriate to match the urls, Category:Georgia (state) and Category:Georgia (country) ? This does not require MoS action at all. Just a quick agreement to clean up the mess. This was brought to my attention Monday night when somebody was categorizing the towns, etc (another story). Dsammy 03:58, 15 September 2009 (UTC)


 * There are two seperate categories Category:Georgia and Category:Georgia (country). I have added some further explanatory text into these category pages pointing users to the alternative category. --Steve 16:22, 15 September 2009 (UTC)


 * One problem is Georgia (state) Category:Georgia (state) is already established as Georgia (state) in url, so it needs to be ? Dsammy 16:47, 15 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Normally I like the way Wikipedia does things, but I dislike how they've named Georgia (country). I see on the discussion page that some people say people from that country call the country Georgia, but the argument doesn't seem strong to me because a lot of Americans call their country America -- yet the name of the country page is United States. The formal name of Georgia (the country) is Republic of Georgia.


 * The other side of the argument is that when two place names are ambiguous, the page that wins the name is the one representing the place that the most people associate with the name. I like the way WikiPedia handles Boston. If you go to Boston, you'll see a page on Boston, Massachusetts. The first line on the page points to the Boston disambiguation page, which leads to (among other things) the Boston in England, which greatly predates the one in Massachusetts, but is tiny in comparison, so most people aren't familiar with it. Ritcheymt 16:50, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Slight correction . . . we live in the country named "United States of America". I do not believe there is a country named "United States". It probably was a typographical error. Thomas Lerman 17:04, 16 September 2009 (UTC) P.S. I would agree that if the country is officially called, in English, "Republic of Georgia", that is what the name of the article should be. However, I do see that the CIA World Factbook calls it Georgia . . . of course, they also call the USA as United States even though their own seal says "United States of America". Thomas Lerman 19:12, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Categorize Little Villages/Towns
Somebody took up the matter of category practicially every village/town before I stepped in to stop it, pointing out the unintentional consequence of them listing mish-mashed with the topics in the state/country category. This person stopped when advised of it. This person still thinks every one should be categorized. Sometimes it doesn't work out that way. Dsammy 03:58, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Should they not be categorized at all, or should they be put directly into their counties? Laralee 15:52, 15 September 2009 (UTC)


 * No, they should not be categorized at all just because it is a small town or village. It messed the state category's bottom portion which has only topics or articles. Jimmy has better solution but that is for incorporated cities Category:Cities of Idaho and Category:Cities of Utah. However there is another option - Template:US county Navigational box. (hint to sysops, I am still waiting for collaspible tables javascript). Dsammy 16:43, 15 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Every article in the main namespace should belong to at least one category. As pointed out the issue is really what is the appropriate category. Remembering multiple categorization schemes co-exist simultaneously. My opinion is that articles about settlements should, at least, be categorised by the smallest administrative sub-division that includes it. However it is better to categorise at a higher level if a lower level category does not exist or there would be only one article in the category. In the example you mention Category:Cities of Utah there is currently only one Corinne, Utah, but more are likely so that is a good category. In fact in the future that category could become crowded, it may become necessary to assign a deeper category like Category:Cities of Box Elder County, Utah. Some may say Corinne, Utah could be tagged with Category:Utah, but it would be lost in the crowd, so it is better that it is not. --Steve 19:28, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The drawback to your suggestion is in the eastern United States, such concept is useless. This is clearly seen at Chenango County, New York localities template, showing a big number of villages, communties, etc. Dsammy 20:12, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Obviously, I was not at the meeting because of traveling, so I may not follow the issue extensively. I agree that all articles should have at least one category. What is the problem with having little villages in a particular locality category? Thomas Lerman 04:46, 16 September 2009 (UTC)