Help talk:Menu/Navigating WeRelate

Some thoughts [16 December 2016]

Yay! Glad you are here! Remember that menu screens are not meant to be exhaustive explanations or to provide every option, so the idea is to keep it very pithy. So, for example Help:Searching would be the place where we would go into a more lengthy explanation of how to search and all of the different options. --cos1776 22:29, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh for sure - just wanted to make sure it was not overlooked. So how do I read what you have here? For example, the page Navigating WeRelate has a link to the (not-yet-written) Help:Searching page and then some text below it. Is the text below supposed to just give an idea of what will be on the Help:Searching page? Or do you envision including it in-line here with users going to the Help:Searching page for more detail?--DataAnalyst 22:36, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Navigating - a comment [2 January 2017]

Hi. Looking good.

I think that the Help page you have named Navigating is the same idea that I had for Basic concepts, which I included in the Getting started section. I agree with you that it makes sense to have it under navigation. We can decide later whether this is just one help page that belongs here, or whether we need both a brief description that goes here and a more elaborate one later. I'm hoping we can get away with one brief description and don't need a more elaborate one. In that case, we can get rid of Help:Basic concepts under Getting started. I have added a note to the Getting started section, accordingly.--DataAnalyst 16:17, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I did see that and agreed with your thinking there, but was going to address it after we finalized the menu names. I could imagine that a new user may look for "Basic concepts" content in a "Getting started" menu as well. I think we could link to the same content from both menu locations, if it continues to make sense to do so. --cos1776 17:51, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Personal trees - what to call them [7 January 2017]

You might note that I removed the word "Personal" from this on one of my edits. The reason is that I don't want to give the impression that the pages in trees are specific to any one user. We have had that problem in the past (especially when people use FTE) - that people believe that any edits they do to the pages just show up in their own personal trees and are not shared with everyone.

It is a conundrum on how to refer to these and to keep them distinct from "family tree". Maybe we have to address it head-on. At any rate, the term used in WeRelate is simply "Tree", so maybe we use that term and distinguish it from "Family tree". Either way, we need to make sure that the concept is clear - a Tree is a scoping exercise, and the pages in each tree are still shared.--DataAnalyst 16:22, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

I did miss that you had removed the word "Personal" already - my apologies. I think I understand the concerns and wonder if we might be able to solve this with a back end terminology change. The terms "Pedigree chart" and "Pedigree map" seem to be used interchangeably in a confusing way. What if we made a distinction between the terms in question as follows:

• "Pedigree chart" REPLACES "Family tree" as it exists now on P&F pages - since that is what it is
• "Pedigree maps" REPLACES "Pedigree-Map" in the menu dropdown and retains the "Pedigree" screen option (which is another view of the Pedigree chart)
• now we are freed up to refer to a "Tree" as a "Family tree", which would keep the terminology in line with FTE, or something else, such as "Tree pages" (bland, but accurate)

AND any content referring to tree pages would be sure to emphasize that the pages themselves are public and that you are simply "tagging" them with a tree name to work with them as a group --cos1776 17:51, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

I like this approach. I would rename "Family tree" to simply "Pedigree" (although "Pedigree chart" works if you think people will relate to that better) and I would rename "Pedigree-Maps" to "Charts & Maps" - because that is what it is (not just a pedigree chart and maps, but also a timeline chart, for example). Then, you are right, we could refer to a "Tree" as a "Family tree", because it ties in with FTE. I think this would be much less confusing.

BTW: Then I think we would want to change the Help page name from "Browsing family trees" to "Browsing trees" (and it would include the "Pedigree" that you access from the Person or Family page), and "Browsing Pedigree charts" to "Browsing charts and maps" or just "Charts and maps".

I'm hoping you are keeping track of these minor changes we want made to the software. The other one that has been mentioned is to change "Preferred name" (which only shows up when there is an alt name) to "Primary name" - I created a Suggestion for this so we would not lose track of it. Hopefully, we can bundle these minor cosmetic changes into a single change request. -- DataAnalyst

Ok - let's go with this. I created a Reminder list on the top Help talk:Menu page, so that we can keep track of these types of ideas that need another step. I like your choice of the terms Pedigree and Maps & Charts.

Are we settled on Family tree for <trees>? The only disadvantage I can think of would be if folks wanted to group non-related pages as a <tree> for some reason, such as a research project, since we discourage the use of Categories for personal projects. Perhaps that idea is best saved for advanced users. I am fine with Family tree. --cos1776 15:20, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

I think it would be best to keep the Help menu and page titles consistent with the WeRelate terminology, which is just "Tree". In the content, we might refer to it as a family tree to explain its primary use (and you are right, occasionally it might be used in a different way). However, if you are thinking of asking Dallan to change the software so that it is called "Family Tree" everywhere, I'd want to think about that a bit more - maybe throw it out to the community to see if anyone raises a red flag. We don't want to confuse people and I find that it is usually a good idea to check in with several people to see what terms confuse them.

I just noticed that on the user page, the term Family Trees is already used. But it appears to be the only place, besides Family Tree Explorer.--DataAnalyst 16:31, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Dashboard - let's not treat it as the main topic [2 January 2017]

I would not treat the dashboard as a main topic with topics under it. Most of the things you can get to through the dashboard can be reached more quickly without going through the dashboard. The dashboard (at least for someone like me with a lot of contributions and watched pages) is actually quite slow to load. I would go back to what I had proposed:

• Trees
• FTE (maybe combined with Trees)
• Watchlist
• Contributions
• Network (looks like I missed this one before)
• and, oh by the way, there is also a dashboard that shows a number of things in one place, with some statistics

This way, we don't have to deal with the user profile and preferences here, which is not where it belongs. We just need to mention the dashboard and the fact that it brings a number of functions together in one screen. We can describe whats unique about the dashboard (e.g., statistics) and link to other help pages to describe each of the features.

I'd really like the help to be function oriented, not menu oriented. That is, focus on what people want to do and explain the various ways to get at the functionality, rather than "here's a menu item, see what you can do with it". For example, you can get at your watchlist at least 3 different ways - let's start with the functionality of a watchlist and describe how to access it, rather than explain it under one of the access methods (dashboard).--DataAnalyst 19:11, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

I misunderstood your previous comment. I thought you wanted to list the dashboard topics, so I did. I have no objection to rolling it back and heartily agree with keeping the menus function oriented. I do that today for another review. --cos1776 15:20, 7 January 2017 (UTC)