Wiki Stats - End July 2011
The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 August 2011) has grown to 3418 (previously 3311, 3172, 2940), an increase of 107 pages. Of these 1220 pages (was 1181, 1132, 1034) begin with the letter R and are probably related to a R*v*s individual and 506 pages (479, 463, 413) begin with a number, so are probably a date related gleaning. We currently have 1272 wiki pages categorised as "People" of which 960 begin with the letter R.In the past couple of weeks, we've had three expressions of interest from potential new members in TRP. Thus far only Jonathan Reeves has actually completed registration. Welcome Jonathan.
Changes to Login & Logout
Further to the notification of 15 July, with effect from today (1 August 2011), the Login bar has been removed from the site Mast Head. The two most visible effects of this change are- The login box is now available within the body of the home page.
- The logout button has moved to the top of the left column.
Finding TRP - Part 3
As they say, "the saga continues". As I indicated last month, I was regularly checking Google in the hope of seeing 3000+ indexed pages from TRP. Perhaps I was over ambitious. As I noted in an update posted on 12 July Google had discovered and indexed 2472 pages.A few days later, the situation was essentially unchanged and with Barry's assistance an updated site map with 3210 (up from 3060) unique url was loaded to TRP for the crawler's digestion. As Bev noted on 24 July, the number of indexed pages had gone down and this morning (1August) hovers around 1700.
There are at least two factors that I'm aware of at play here. Firstly some of our pages have had no unique content. They are leaf nodes in structures and simply read "Table of Contents:". It would be reasonable for Google to discard them as duplicates.
Secondly all our wiki pages have at least FOUR urls which show the same basic page content, for example
(1) http://thereevesproject.org/data/tiki-index.php?page=Reeves_Emily_2317
(2) http://thereevesproject.org/data/tiki-index.php?page=Reeves_Emily_2317&fullscreen=y
(3) http://thereevesproject.org/data/tiki-index.php?page=Reeves_Emily_2317&fullscreen=n
(4) http://thereevesproject.org/data/tiki-print.php?page=Reeves_Emily_2317
This is a feature of the Tiki software. Again, Google may see them duplicated pages and penalise us for trying to cheat their system. Alternately they may index all the variants and present inconsistent looking results to potential users. Neither is what we want.
Of these four styles of link, we want Google only to index the first form. Again I've been working with Barry to address this situation and as of last evening Barry made an updated to TRP which will, hopefully, stop further crawling of the type (4) links. We are still debating the most effective way to block types (2) & (3) without risking also blocking the type (1) links. If we get it wrong, the crawlers will find only a handful of TRP pages!
Tackling Mis-Information
As experienced genealogists we are all too aware of the pitfalls of failing to adequately research information we find. The work published by others varies considerably in quality and is best regarded as a resource and not a source. (The primary exception might be were the quality of the work has stood the test of time and sadly some of the sources cited have subsequently been destroyed.)The Reeves Review II is particularly prone to "issues" and Bev has made as great start to dispelling some of the mis information it contains based on an evidential approach. Please see The_Reeves_Review.