Thursday, September 17, 2009

FamilySearch Wiki Portal Template Migration

I received the following from the FamilySearch Research Wiki team.

Dear Wiki users,

In the past several months the FamilySearch Research Wiki Community has discussed removing the portal namespace and portal template. After several discussions, the community consensus has been for removing all pages that are currently using the portal template. Only pages that begin with the characters “Portal:” will be effected by this change. Two major portal pages, England and United States, have already been moved and are no longer using the portal template.

As a community, we decided that due to the technical nature of transferring these pages, we should assign this task to one community member. One of our Wiki Contributors, Eduardo Seoane, has agreed to move these pages to make sure that no links or data is broken. Moving these pages is a very detail-oriented task, and we are confident that Eduardo has the skill-set needed to help make this transition take place smoothly. The process Eduardo will follow is as follows:
1. He will review the portal discussion page for comments about the migration.
2. He will post the “Inuse” template at the top of the portal page and on all of the sub-pages affiliated with that portal page.
3. He will post an estimated time period needed to transfer the page on the portal discussion page. If you have recommendations, comments, or concerns, feel free to add information to the portal discussion page in question so that Eduardo may use this information to help with the transition.
4. He will be temporarily lock down the portal page and subpages (only one portal at a time) for a short period of time to make sure new content is not added to the page while he is making the transition.
5. He will create the new page and copy all of the content from each of the portal page and subpages.
6. All pages that link to the portal and portal sub-pages will be re-linked to the new page so that there will be no broken links associated with these pages.
7. All content from the migrated portal and sub-pages (after being moved and double-checked) will be removed so that users don’t get confused about the pages and try to add content in two separate places, and the portal page will be redirected to the new page.
8. For example, a page titled “Portal:Afghanistan” will be moved to a page titled “Afghanistan,” and all of the content and pages linking to the former portal page will be moved into the page titled “Afghanistan.”

Once these steps have been followed, it will be very easy to make changes to the new page containing the old content. At that point, the community will need to determine whether or not to keep the portal namespace, or remove it altogether, and whether the old portal pages should remain as re-directs to the new portal pages, or be deleted as discussed earlier. To weigh in on these decisions, please feel free to add your comments on the Manual of Style page, and to attend our weekly Community Meeting.

If you have comments or concerns about the portal page migration, please add your comments and concerns to the discussion page of the portal in question, rather than contacting Eduardo directly. There are many portal pages in the system, and he will be migrating them one at a time. Communicating concerns directly on the portal page discussion page will allow him to address individual concerns as he prepares to migrate that portal page rather than receiving all of these concerns out of context.

Thank you!

FamilySearch Research Wiki Admin

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