What is happening with the wiki?


We are working on infrastructure changes and an improved contributor experience.  As a result of these updates we will no longer be using the wiki.

Over the coming weeks we will be transitioning help articles and project instructions from the wiki to the Support Center .  There will be a few growing pains as we transition but we are hoping to make a smooth transition.  Due to the ongoing changes edit capabilities on the wiki have now been shut off.

Moving away from the wiki will mean an increase in traffic to the message boards for questions and reviewer feedback.   Posting messages on the appropriate message board will help contributors find project related information.

Although the project widgets haven’t been working well we will also lose this functionality – we are working on a solution to provide more statistics but this will take some time.  You can view your 90 day stats and accuracy on the Dashboard and in the keying tool.

If you have questions or feedback please send us a message, worldarchivesproject@ancestry.com.  Thank you in advance for your patience as we work on this transition and for your continued support of the World Archives Project!

 

 

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Here is an example of what the project instructions will look like, https://goo.gl/GPx5Du .

It would be wonderful if we could have just one place for all questions and answers for a project. At present we have to plough through the wiki and various message boards and its easy to miss an instruction.

There needs to be some form of Contents pane (as at present) to quickly move to the relevant field or form type.

“It would be wonderful if we could have just one place for all questions and answers for a project”
I agree. I can understand why there is a main page and a discussion page (which is really an “interpretations” page). Questions on the Discussion page are often missed and ‘discussion’ as such detracts from its value as a more detailed guidance. I suggest that questions are limited to the correct message board.

BTW, trolling through the message board to find the current guidance is very time-consuming and unreliable. Any ‘findings’ in these boards should be reflected in the Discussion page.

First, thank you for redirecting AWAP through Ancestry.com, where I have always felt it belongs..to me that is just a logical transition. I agree with comments 2 through 4 with also the inclusion of an index format for each project that contributors are working on. In the past I have inquired on projects I had been working on and never received an answer to my data entering concerns; I have wondered if inquiries were lost in the world of wiki and therefore not seen by those responsible for responses. If q&as could be ‘filed’ under each specific project instead of having to time-consumer searching it would be most helpful. But I am sure you guys are all being quite vigilant to improving the Project for us and I would like to thank you all for your work.

“If q&as could be ‘filed’ under each specific project”
This would depend on whether the message board alerts worked. They don’t at the moment, at least for me, and haven’t for some time. Neither do the thread alerts (set when you post a message). Otherwise the number of boards to ‘poll’ could get quite large.
Currently the project’s Message Board link points to the relevant location board (Australian Records for most of mine). Given that there are rarely more than 3 or 4 active Australian projects, this works fine for me.

I think the detailed advice which crops up in the message boards must be collated and reported somewhere in an orgaised manner. This might be something like the current Discussion page, or could be on the project page itself. Issues like Common Keying Errors need to be collected somewhere.

I would like to keep the wiki and get rid of the message boards. Couldn’t the Discussion page on wiki take place of message boards? Scrolling thru those boards is so annoying as they’re not grouped by project; they don’t alert me to new posts; and they don’t alert me to answers to my posts. So why keep them?

We appreciate your comments. The move away from the wiki does mean some changes in how we communicate about the project. We will keep you posted as we make updates.