The Reeves Project Learning Series

Creating a Person Page for your Grandfather Reeves

In this lesson you will create a page about your grandfather REEVES (or other Reeves connection). Please don't enter information about yourself or any other person still alive.

It is possible that somebody may have already added information about your relative, lets call him "Alpha Reevez". So before going any further it is important you use the skills learned in First Steps - Part 4 to see if a wiki page already exists for your "Alpha Reevez". If it looks like a page already exist for him, please consult with your assigned mentor team. You will learn more about editing an existing page later in Part 7 - Changing an Existing Page.

To create a new person page you will need to give it a wiki page name. One key thing to remember is that the wiki does not recognize spaces in its page names, so please ALWAYS use an underscore rather than a space as a separator.

Within TRP we ask that a person page name start with the family name (surname) followed by an underscore followed by one or more Given Names, again an underscore, not a space, between names. For Alpha whose second given name is Test, the page name might be Reevez_Alpha_Test_76543. You can use any random number suffix of your choosing; you're just trying to avoid all the other Reevez_Alpha pages. If you are creating a page for your Reeves grandmother, please use her maiden surname. We explain how to handle indexing married women, but don't worry about that for now.

In the left column, click on "Add New Wiki Page". This will take you to a page (which you've used previously when creating your AboutMe page) that contains forms for adding various types of new pages. Available forms are listed at the top of the page. Clicking on "Add a New Person Page" will position that form at the top of the window.
Enter the page name for your relative such as "Reevez_Alpha_Test_76543" (without the quotation marks) in the box. Next click the "Create New Person Page" button to load the Edit screen.

Note that once you begin editing a wiki page a 25 minute timer starts. The purpose of the timer is to protect the wiki against abandoned edit sessions that occur when networks or computers crash. You can reset this timer at any stage by clicking on the "Preview" button (found at the very bottom of the screen) which shows TRP you're still working on the page.

The "Edit:" screen is divided into a number of tabs/sections and we'll cover each bit in turn.

Edit Page Tab/Section

The Edit Page Tab/section comprises three parts, the bulk of this tab/section is the box via which you edit the page content. Below that is a field to "Describe the change you made" and a check box to "Monitor this page"

◆ Content Editor Box

The content for the wiki page is typed within this section and a skeleton of the content will have been automatically added for you.

Note the text editor within TRP is not WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), but rather it relies a unique markup language. Clicking on the blue question mark icon found in the top right corner of the Content Editor box will show details of the wiki syntax. As you are getting started, don't expend too much effort in making things look pretty - that will come with practice and looking at the source of pages created by others.

On the first line type over "FamilyName, GivenName" with the name of your relative, in this example that would be "Reevez, Alpha Test"       Leave the exclamation mark at the start of the line; that tells our Wiki this is a level one heading.

The "!! Summary" and the existing text on next few lines should not be altered. Add any information you know about your relative to the end of the appropriate line, leaving a space before you start typing (using spaces in the edit mode is okay). Please remember to keep it brief as this is only a summary section. It can help to think of this Summary section as a 5 by 3 index card. Don't try and squeeze everything into this section; keep it easy on the eye and the brain. You should expand on the information in the Narrative section that follows.

For Alpha Reevez, we know he was born on 1 April 1881, so that part would now read

__Birth: __ 1 April 1881 in Southampton, Hampshire
__Birth Source: __ Family Bible

(The double underscore characters are part of the wiki mark up language. They denote the starting and stopping of bold font. Please leave them unchanged.)

We also know his father was Charlie Test REEVEZ and his mother was Elizabeth. So for Alpha Test Reevez his parent's lines should read

__Father: __ Reevez, Charlie Test
__Mother: __ mnu, Elizabeth

where mnu is an abbreviation for maiden name unknown, since we want to list all individuals primarily by their birth name.
In the Summary section, please limit places to one of village/town/city plus the state/county/province. Fuller addresses may be included in the Narrative section.

Below the !! Narrative line (which should be left unchanged) enter as much information as you know about your relative. Please include references to the sources you have used and please make sure the information relates to the subject individual, don't digress with information about other relatives. Listing their children is appropriate, but the life stories of each child is not. (For additional information see FAQ Detailing Children on a Person Page.) Create a new Person Page for each child later, if appropriate.

Below the !!Research Notes line (which should be left unchanged) enter information which supports the Narrative, but is perhaps inferential or lacks good sources.

Below the !! Sources line (which should be left unchanged) enter information about the sources you've used for this individual.

That completes the bulk of the "Edit page" tab/section, but there are a few more bits to complete before you click save. You can click the "Preview" button as many times as necessary and continue to correct the information you've entered.

◆ Change Description Field

On the Edit Page tab, below the content editor box is a text entry box labelled "Describe the change you made" which allows you to associate a brief comment with this version of the page. It should be left blank when initially creating a page. On subsequent edits, it can be used to briefly note the reason why the page is being changed, for example "corrected typos" or "added parents" or "added info from will" etc etc.

◆ Monitor this page

If you would like to know when somebody comments on or updates this page, click in the box "Monitor this page". You will receive an e-mail notification alerting you to the change. Please use this feature sparingly, if every user requested notification from every page, TRP would quickly get flagged as a spam generating machine, even though you had individually opted in to each request email.

Categories Tab/Section

As you're just getting started, you can safely skip over the categories section for now. We'll come back and look at this topic later.

Because this page was created using the "Add New Person Page" form, the Categories section is collapsed and won't be visible until this wiki page is subsequently edited. This is to protect the initial selection of the People category.

Properties Tab/Section

The Properties Tab comprises five distinct parts, the first two of which you should ignore at this stage. The first is "Apply content template" and this is done automatically for you when you created a new page via the "Add New Wiki Page" feature from the left hand side menu. The second is "Attach file" which is something we do NOT encourage as explained in this FAQ, which you don't need to read right now and should be ignored. You should also leave unchanged the fifth part "Show page title". That leaves two part requiring your attention...

◆ Properties Section - Tags

The Tags should reflect all locations mentioned in the Summary and Narrative. Both country and state (US), county (GB) or province (CAN) should be reflected, but not towns, parishes or US counties. Rather than spelling out place names in full, standard abbreviations are used. (Check with your Mentor Team for help with other countries.) Our Alpha Reevez was born in GB ENG HAM (Hampshire) married in LDN (City of London) worked WEX (Wexford) IRL before emigrating to SAS   SK (Saskatchewan) CAN. 1   You'll find most of the frequently used tags appear below the box and you can click on the appropriate entries for your relative or enter them manually.

◆ Properties Section - (Page) Description

Entering an accurate Description for a page is critical. Firstly the individual's name "Reeves, Alpha" and then in parenthesis the year of birth plus State/County/Province of birth followed by a hyphen and then, in similar fashion, year and place of death.

• Please do not include commas or fullstops within the brackets
• If a year is not exactly known, please prefix the year with "c" for circa/about, "bef" for before or "aft" for after. A range of years for a single event should NOT be used here.
• If either birth or death information is unknown, leave a blank before or after the hyphen.
• If a date is known, but the place is unknown, please use ?? in lieu of the place, but never use ???? in lieu of a year.
• If a date of death of an adult is unknown, then consider using the abbreviation "fl" for floruit/flourished followed by the exact year and place code for the last documented and cited sighting of the individual.

The description for Alpha Reevez reads "Reeves, Alpha (1881 HAM - 1925 CA-SK)"

Please preview your entry, making any corrections as needed before clicking "Save".

Congratulations you've just contributed your first individual to the project.

Some Background

You'll find two three related FAQs for Person Pages which provide additional information.
Please see FAQ_Person_Page_Naming, FAQ_Person_Page_Content and FAQ Detailing Children on a Person Page

Next Steps

In the next part we will create links between wiki pages so you can navigate from father to offspring and back again.

And Finally

You might want to leave your mentors another message on their talk page asking them to review your first person page. 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).

Once your first page has been reviewed, go ahead and enter one or two further pages for the immediate kin of your relative. But don't get carried away, you've more to learn yet about Person Pages.

The TRP Mentors

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