Welcome to The Reeves Project

Now that you've got your account validated, its time to start getting to grips with the ins and outs of TRP and its Wiki based global genealogical collaboration. This is one of a series of pages, each of which will guide you through a single activity, with a view to helping you become proficient in using TRP. The previous activity was setting your Real Name in TRP. If you have yet to create your "Real Name" you should do so now, before continuing here. To see a list of the first six parts in our First Steps guide, click here.

In this step 2, you are going to create your first wiki page and in the process tell us a little about yourself and your interest in the Reeves name. This will help fellow community members understand your area(s) of interest and expertise. You may find it helpful to print this page so you can refer to these notes as you continue to work along.

Creating your AboutMe page

Before you start your own About Me page, you might care to see what one or two others have written. (Hint search for Wiki Pages Names which contain "AboutMe", remembering to deselect the "Exact match" tick box.) There is also additional guidance on what to include (and what not to include) in the FAQ_AboutMe

To start your About Me page, please click on the "Add New Wiki Page" link in the left column. This page contains forms for adding various types of new pages and they are listed at the top of the page. Clicking on "Add a New AboutMe Page" in that list should put the form of the same name at the top of the window.

We ask that all "about me" pages are named "AboutMe_" followed by the name you chose as your Real Name. Any spaces should be replaced by underscore characters. So Mary Anne would enter "AboutMe_Mary_Anne" in the box before clicking the "Create New About Me Page" button. This will load the Edit screen.

The Edit Screen can be viewed either with or without Tabs. There is a button to the right which will either be marked "No Tabs" or "Tab View". For the moment you should ignore this button. Clicking on it may loose the skeleton content describe below, which is designed to help you complete your AboutMe page.

The Edit Page section of the screen already has some content, which is designed to keep the information you add only visible to fellow TRP community members. Please take care only to change the lines noted below.

• Change the line "! Your RealName goes here" to show your Real Name. The "!" tells TRP this is the page headline, a level one heading. So Mary Anne would change this line to read "! Mary Anne"
• Replace the line which reads "Please replace this text with a little information about your Reeves interests." with some summary information about how you got started in genealogy and about your line(s) of Reeves research, where they came from and in what time period. Please do not include a full lineage here and please do not include identifying information about other living family members.
• The line which reads "Optionally, please tell us a little about yourself, or delete this line." is a place holder for sharing some information about yourself and your other interests. There is additional guidance on what to include (and what not to include) in the FAQ_AboutMe

The text editor in the Wiki isn't currently WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), but instead relies on a not too friendly mark-up syntax. So don't spend too much time trying to make your "AboutMe_" page look pretty at this stage. You can come back and do that once you've gained some experience.

You can "Preview" the information you've entered as many time as you wish. Before you click the "Save" button, please remember to add information in the "Description" section of the page, along the lines of "xxxxx's interests in the Reeves name", where xxxx is your Real Name. If you are in the Tabbed view, you'll need to click on the "Properties" tab to find the field where you can enter your page "Description".

Once you've saved your page, it will initially appear in the list of "Updated Pages" on the right side of the screen. You can always find your page again by searching for "AboutMe". To change the page once you've saved it, view the page and click on the "Edit" button which you'll find at the bottom of the page.

Next Steps

In the next part we'll help you to update your Mentor Team's Talk Page

And Finally

Don't worry about making mistakes as your mentors will help you to straighten things out. It's all about learning and experimenting at this stage; mistakes are expected - we made enough of them when we were starting out (and still do).

That's all for this time,

The TRP Mentors