Portal talk:Article

Items to include [12 February 2009]

Articles are a confusing lot. They are those pages that don't have a "namespace" associated with it and appear under (Main) in the recent changes log. Anything that doesn't go under one of the other namespaces would go here. Types of pages that are classified as "articles":

• State and county research/genealogy guides
• WeRelate projects: Great Migration Ships for instance
• Articles related to genealogy in general: Genealogical Standards for example
• Family Exchange Pages vs. Shared research pages?

Mmm... I thought that there WAS a namespace for ARTICLE. This is what has confused me recently. Oh poo! Sigh. I so hate being a newbie. I just did a search of all pages in the namespace ARTICLE and I see that they ARE at the root directory, and not in some "directory"/space "Article:" ugh!

I just figured that since there was a namespace called ARTICLE that that's where all articles would be stored and that it would look like all other namespace variants, namely, www.werelate.org/wiki/Article:pagename. Now that I see that ARTICLE is an exception to all other namespaces, I'm feeling rather ridiculous about questions I've raised at the watercooler, recently. Poor Dallan: he's probably been wondering, what the he$$ is she talking about????

So we MIGHT want to include some language for people who think like I do that explains that the "Article" namespace is an exception to all other namespaces.

Humbly, jillaine 08:51, 12 February 2009 (EST)

AND... I still think the "article" space is a mess! 8-b -- jillaine 08:53, 12 February 2009 (EST)

Helping Out [4 March 2009]

From Dallan at the Watercooler:

"it would be nice if someone were to organize those articles [at the root level] by assigning them to various categories (which is how Wikipedia organizes their articles), and listing the major categories in our brand new Article portal. "

I should point out that this is JUST the sort of "organizing" project that I would love to do. ;-)

-- jillaine 14:23, 12 February 2009 (EST)

And gratefully, this is just the sort of project User:Jillaine is now doing! See User:Jillaine/Article Project. If Jillaine wants to, this could be a good project to enlist others' help on the portal page.--Dallan 14:53, 23 February 2009 (EST)

And yes, I would like to have this category project be a way that people could help out. Jennifer, I see that you took out the "Opportunities to Help" or "Volunteer" or whatever it was called box. I don't feel quite ready for prime time on the Article categorization project yet to invite people to help. I'd like to set it up better so it makes it easy for people to help. I also want to get some admin feedback on the categories I'm coming up with. (Dallan's given his initial input. I'd like some other folks. Cuz, you know, I get myself into trouble if I go my own way here.) -- jillaine 15:39, 4 March 2009 (EST)

Need Sample Article Page [7 March 2009]

While I probably should be flattered from the fact that you choose to use one of my pages as an "example", despite the image shown, what you ended up linking to was the Southwest Virginia Project page---which is actually a portal, though you didn't have that as namespace when it was created. Q 12:40, 4 March 2009 (EST)

Bill's right. That's not a sample article page. We should find another one. And highlight his SW VA project on the Community portal as a featured Portal. But Bill, I bet you have a good sample article page buried in your SW VA portal somewhere. -- jillaine 15:36, 4 March 2009 (EST)

I'll get you a list to choose from.

Dreams and Portents interesting stories

Giving Directions in Southwest Virginia (really, this is the way they give directions out in the hollers)

Maple Sugar

List of Forts of Southwest Virginia (more pointed toward genealogy than the others)

Russell County, Virginia Tax List 1795/Acreage Analysis More analytical than others.

I chose to go with the Maple Sugar article, and added that over on the portal page. Thanks for bringing this to my attention! Regarding highlighting the SW VA project on the Community portal, I'm going to venture to say that there would be no easy way to move this to the Portal namespace! Is everyone ok keeping it as is and linking it to the Community Portal? It looks like you've also added the Category:Portal link to the page - nice.--Jennifer (JBS66) 08:21, 7 March 2009 (EST)

I briefly considered converting it to "Portal" namespace---or at least the "Gateway" article. Since the backlinks to the Gateway are embedded in a template, all I would need to do would be to copy the gateway to Portal Namespace, and then change the template accordingly. I decided NOT to do that because the look and feel of the SWVP (portal though it may be) is quite different from the other portals. I didn't want to introduce a discordant note in something that was just getting off the ground. I'm happy just including it in the category page, at least for now. However, I suspect that many more such projects will develop, similar in intent to the SWVP and The Great Migration Project. Most of the current crop of portals are administrative types (e.g., links to article namespace, source namespace, etc. There will probably be a few more of those administrative portals added as time goes by, but the big potential is with the geographic and event specific type. It may be useful to establish two or three distinct sets of portals---one of an administrative nature, one focused on "How to" portals , and one focused on Georgraphy (SWVP) and Event (Great Migration) portals. Q 10:16, 7 March 2009 (EST)