Wiki Stats - End January 2012

The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 February 2012) now stands at 3829 (previously 3724, 3672, 3645), an increase of 105 pages during the past month. Of these 669 pages (was 591, 576, 572) begin with number and are most probably a date related gleaning. We currently have 1274 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 961 begin with the letter "R".

TRP Users

We currently have 64 user accounts on TRP, including 5 new members who successfully activated their accounts in December and 3 in January. We welcome Susan, Noel, John, Kellie, Greg, Christopher. Lois and most recently Teresa and look forward to their contributions to TRP.

If you are one of the five potential members who have registered their account but has yet to follow the link in the validation e-mail that was sent to you, please do so.
If you can't find the "Confirm your email at thereevesproject.org" e-mail, please contact Martin at TheReevesProject123 -at gmail -dot com. Please only use this e-mail address for new TRP account administration queries, thank you.

Strike-Through or Erase?

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? In some situations, you'll reach for the eraser (or snopake 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 the vast majority of circumstances that is the most appropriate option. But within the Wiki, we do have the ability to cross something out. The syntax to produce strike-through text uses a pair of minus signs to start and stop the effect.
For example, --This text uses strike-through-- produces This text uses strike-through.

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 incorrectly ascribed to the principal of the page, 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 or a link to a wiki page with the explanation.

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.

The strike-through approach 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. For person pages, substantive change will mostly affect the "Summary" section. Changing an existing parent or existing spouse probably is. Changing a date by a few years probably isn't, but by a decade or two probably is.

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

You can see this technique used by Beverly to good effect on the person page for George Reeves.