Wiki Stats - End August 2020

The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 September 2020) now stands at 10365 (previously 10226, 10104, 10041) an increase of 139 pages during the month. Of the total, 1968 pages (was 1938, 1897, 1874) begin with a number and are most probably a date related gleaning.     We currently have 4415 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 3953 begin with the letter "R".

Community members should log in to see more.

TRP Users

We ended August 2020 with 448 user accounts registered in TRP, an increase of four. We had six users successfully activated their accounts during the past month. We welcome to our community Kathleen Windsor, Daniel Reeves, Erica Flake, Dorothy Evans, Andy Haworth and Janis Reeves. Three of you have created a real name for yourself, thank you, but sadly none of you have yet created an AboutMe page or drop by the talk page to say "Hi".

Whether you joined TRP recently or a while ago, if you have yet to do so, please set a meaningful name for yourself as described in First Steps - Part 1. It isn't difficult and only takes a couple of minutes to do. If it helps, think of it as a name label badge; so your first name plus surname (or at least surname initial) would generally be a good choice.

If you have already started the enrolment process and are having issues, please do let us know. Please contact New User Admin by sending an email to TRP123 (at) TheReevesProject (dot) org if you're stuck and need help. If you are not yet a member and would like to contribute to our community, please complete our Join Us form to start the membership enrolment process.

Mentor Teams

Since the earliest days of TRP, we've enrolled every new user into one of our four Mentor Teams, snappily designated A, B, D & E. Mentor Team C was kept back in the hope we might be overwhelmed by lots of folks with strong Canadian roots, but that has yet to happen. Mentor Team E is predominately composed of members researching in the British Isles in the 1800's and earlier. The members of teams A. B and D are mostly researching in North America in the 1800's and earlier.

The rate at which we were adding new members during 2018 and 2019 didn't justify using all four teams and whilst the pages for all four teams remained available, we focused new members to teams A & E. But 2020 has seen much more interest in TRP. Consequently, we've made the decision to re-awaken Mentor Team D and I'm please to announce that Jonathan has agreed to take over the role of lead mentor for that team from Beverly, who continues to lead Mentor Team A. The role of the lead mentor is mostly administrative and you'll see all senior TRP members continuing to contribute within all of the Mentor Team's talk pages.

If you've forgotten which Mentor Team you were allocated when you joined TRP, drop by HomePage_Mentor_Teams where you'll see a reminder, but you do need to log in first.

Mentor Team Talk Pages

As well are re-awakening Mentor Team D, we've also refreshed the look of all our Mentor Team talk pages in the past month. Lacking familiarity with TRP's wiki ways, we know some new users have struggled to find the "Edit" button at the foot of the page. So we've added a second larger button near the top of the page. Both do the same thing. We've also added a mini "table of contents" to the top of the page, to make finding a specific thread a little easier. If you've created an AboutMe page, we'll have included a link to that in the description of the thread, So if you click on your name in the list of threads, you'll be taken to your AboutMe page. To go to the thread, make sure you click on the left half of the index entry, which typically will read "Exchange in Mmmm...", "For Member..." or something similar.
NB New messages won't feature in the list of threads until a senior community member adds a title and wraps the tread in its box; we don't expect new members to attempt that on day one.

Hints and Tips - Multiple Browser Windows

If you're working on a mobile device or a tablet, this month's tip isn't going to be of much use, sorry. But if you're working on a desktop or laptop with a reasonably large screen, have you thought about having two separate browser windows open, both for TRP? Most modern screens have a resolution of 1920x1080 (HD 1080), a width to height ratio of 16:9. TRP was originally designed with older computer monitors in mind, with a screen ratio of 4:3. (For more background see FAQ_Device_Types_Supported). So if you take your browser out of full screen mode and reduce the width down to about 60%, TRP should still look familiar. (Reduce the width too much and it will change into a portrait mode more suitable for a tablet.) Move this browser window to the left side of your screen and then open a second browser window and move it to the right side. You can now view one page on the right side, whilst editing a related page in the left side window. But please note, editing two pages at the same time is NOT a good idea.
(If you're comfortable working like this, reducing the width of the right side window, so it does drop into tablet mode can be helpful as the left and right side margins drop below the content.)