Community Center

Welcome to Our Community Center

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We are glad you are here and hope you will stay! This is the place to get involved with the FamilySearch Research Wiki. We invite you to find your niche and connect with other like-minded genealogists. Help improve the wiki in wiki contributors, ask questions on the forums or find a friend in the social groups. Check out the ongoing discussions and join in!

Community Bulletin Board

Discussions needing community input

• Your vote counts! Do you like these possible site changes on the Site Design Ideas page? We are ready to make some of these changes soon.
  
• Linking to works in the Family History Library Catalog.
• Replacing "Family History Library" with "FHL" in references.
• Referencing OCLC/Worldcat works.
• Format for OCLC and FHLC references.
• Creating Numerous, Repetitive Links.
• Manual of Style
• There is an ongoing discussion about the development of record-type articles. The two discussion points include: (1) The headings that should be used in record-type articles, and (2) The pros and cons of having long article or short articles with multiple links between them. This discussion is taking place within the context of the Maryland Newspapers article. Join the discussion on the talk page at: Talk:Maryland Newspapers.
• Naming Conventions for Project Pages. People are having trouble finding project pages because we're naming them so many different ways and putting them in multiple namespaces. Please help us figure out what to do by adding to the discussion page.

Projects seeking contributors

(Add new projects at the top of this list.)

• Rural Records of Mid-Southern United States
• Indians of North America.
• Sweden.
• Ireland Court Records.
• FamilySearch Wiki:Welcoming committee needs volunteers to welcome new contributors and help them get started in various ways. Also to help develop the guidance for committee members.
• Linking to Record Search needs volunteers to link wiki pages to new indexes and digitized records in FamilySearch Record Search.
• WikiProject Linking to Books in the BYU Family History Archives needs volunteers to link wiki pages to digitized county and state histories on the BYU Family History Archives site.
• Professional Genealogists, a project to help professional genealogical researchers market their services for free on their user pages.
• Integrating Place Standards Database with FamilySearch Wiki
• FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject U.S. Vital Records.
• FamilySearch Wiki:Naming Conventions for Project Pages In order to make project pages easier to find, we need to the community to propose and discuss the standardization of project naming conventions and decide which namespace to put project pages in.
• The England Barn Raising project has launched! Tasks await English experts, wiki experts, and volunteers willing to help with routine editing. Anyone willing to help can sign up now.
• Copying Research Guidance and Help Content from FamilySearch.org into the Wiki.
• WikiProject Maryland News and Events needs volunteers to find genealogical news and events relating to Maryland and link to them from the News and Events section of the Maryland Portal.
• Denmark has several individual projects that need volunteers to help with expanding and improving content about Danish research.
• Link wiki articles mentioning the Periodical Source Index to the main PERSI article.

Continuous maintenance projects

• Add external links to articles
• Add internal links to articles
• Categorize articles- As of 29 July 2009 there are 973 pages in the Wiki without a category. All uncategorized pages need at least one category added to the page.
• Uncategorized category pages - 8 category pages need at least one category added to the page.
• Disambiguation
• Expand an article or short page
• Double redirects need fixing - 14 pages as of 18 Dec 2008 have double redirects. Each case needs to be fixed.
• Link dead end pages in FamilySearch Wiki to other pages as needed - 2139 pages as of 18 Dec 2008 that do not link to other pages in FamilySearchWiki.
• Unused Categories - 168 categories in the Wiki are unused as of 18 Dec 2008. Evaluate each instance and either delete, redirect, correct, or use the category.
• Stub Pages - As of 18 Dec 2008 there are over 5,000 wanted pages. The wanted pages are those that were created as a stub article, meaning the beginning of an article that needs to be written. There are two ways to view the list of stub/wanted pages, (1) Stub pages and (2) Wanted Pages. Both lists are the same, but are organized differently. Find one of interest and add what you know about the subject.
• Wanted Categories - As of 18 Dec 2008 there are 438 categories that need a description added to the category page.
• Merge articles - when two articles contain the same or similar content they can be flagged for review.

Creating new articles

• FamilySearch Wiki is "international" so any article with a general title such as "The Census" should really cover the entire globe! If you are writing an article which applies to one country only, then that should be made clear in the title of the article, such as The Census in England or England Census‎ etc..
• To make your article easier to find by others, make sure you insert a Category at the end of the article, e.g. [[Category:Scotland]]

Notices

• List of Changes to the Research Wiki Skin

Article Collaboration

Submit an article that needs a group effort to improve and expand the content. Every month, beginning January 2009, a new article will be featured here for collaborative improvement.

• The Barbour Collection is a small article that needs lots of improvement!
• The Research Wiki has several entries in the Glossary about the Julian and Gregorian calendars (see Double-dating; Julian; and Gregorian entries). Unfortunately, an article about the usage of the Julian and Gregorian Calendars in family history research does not exist. There are many websites related to the history of the calendars and also a site that helps with converting dates to a variety of other calendars (See Calendar Converter). In addition, there are several other articles within the Wiki that refer to either the Julian or Gregorian calendars. Each of these article could eventually be linked to this new page! If interested, please join in a community effort to write this new article for the FamilySearch Research Wiki!

Guidelines, Help, and Resources

• The FamilySearch Wiki:Purpose, Policies, and Procedures for this site.
• Overall FamilySearch Wiki Policies
• Copyright, Copyleft, and Intellectual Property
• Privacy Policy
• Image Approval Policies
• How to Run or Manage a WikiProject
• FamilySearch Wiki User Group meets weekly online to discuss various aspects of contributing to the wiki.
• The Manual of Style contains guidelines on writing.

See Also

• Wikipedia:Community portal yields ideas that can help this page evolve.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject is a nice, simple way to list many projects.

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