The Reeves Project Learning Series

This is one of a series of pages to guide you through a single activity. The first six parts of First Steps were about equipping you with the skills necessary to add new Person Pages for your ancestors, where such a page didn't already exist.

In this Step 7, we explain our approach to making changes to existing pages within The Reeves Project wiki. The philosophy outlined here is applicable to any type of page within TRP, but below we'll use changes to a Person Page as our example. These notes do not apply to a newly created page you are actively working on.

Handling New Information - Making Changes

It happens to all of us every so often. We come across a new piece of information that enables us to challenge a previous proposition.

But how do you handle that situation in the dog-eared note book which goes with you on your visits to archives and sits beside your computer at home?

In some situations, you'll reach for the eraser (or correcting fluid), perhaps to change a minor point. But there will be a few circumstances when you carefully cross out the old information and write the new information in alongside the old, together with an explanation. It often helps to keep track of the prior version as it saves revisiting the same point at a later time.

On our computers it's very easy to reach for the delete or back-space key and in some circumstances that is the most appropriate option. But within the Wiki, we do have the ability to cross something out.

Before You Start Making Changes

Please don't simply change something because you believe it is wrong. If you're going to make a change to the content of a TRP page, you must also reference sources which support the change you intend to make. Where ever possible, those should be primary sources.

Please take particular care with places. Place descriptions should be appropriate to the time at which the event took place, even if that is now seemingly wrong. If later boundary changes mean "Anytown, Old County" is now found in "New County" that may be reflected in the Narrative or Research Notes Section, but "Anytown, Old County" should NOT be changed.

What is a Substantive Change?

The strike-through approach, described below, is not suggested for corrections to pages currently being worked on. Defining what is a "substantive change" is going to be subjective and you are encouraged to use your discretion. New community members are encouraged to consult with their Mentors via their team's Talk page to discuss to proposed change before embarking on making the corrections.

For person pages, substantive change will mostly affect the "Summary" section. Changing an existing parent or existing spouse would invariably be considered substantive. Changing a date by a few years probably isn't, but by a decade or two probably is. Changing a place is.

Judicious use of strike-through along with associated narratives is another way in which we can challenge some of the mis-information about the Reeves families which is circulating on the world wide web.

How to Strike-Through on a wiki page

The syntax to produce strike-through text uses a pair of minus signs to start and stop the mark-up. It can be added either by typing the pairs of minus signs or by selecting the text which needs to be struck-though and then click on the "Strikethrough" button denoted by  S  .

For example, --This text uses strike-through-- produces This text uses strike-through.

When to Strike-Through on a wiki page

Such an approach is appropriate to a substantive change to an existing, long standing page. For example, on an existing person page, if a father had previously been ascribed to the principal of the page and that information is now considered incorrect, rather than replacing "Smith, John" by "unknown", consider the following approach

Father: Smith, John
Father: unknown

and remember to include within the narrative an explanation of the change and add source information to support the change or a link to a TRP wiki page with the explanation and source information.

Some might argue that a strike-through approach is overkill; after all the wiki has a rich version history on each and every wiki page. That is true, but a page's history isn't accessible to non-members and it would be laborious scouring all the historical versions of a page just to see if something had or hadn't ever been included.

And Finally

If you have any queries about the guidance presented here, please leave your mentors a message on their talk page.

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This guidance was initially published within the February 2012 News page as topic Strike-Through or Erase