(Discussion) - Various thoughts from a new WikiTree member

Question

 Hi there, Community

 I have a few observations I'd like to share and perhaps engender discussion.

 First off - Would it be cool to have a `discussion about WikiTree` tag within G2G? It was only after checking with Chris@ that I learnt that this was the correct path and I've was unable ot identify site related discussions easily

 Search functionality within G2G appears to be rudimentary (it appears to be word1 OR word2 at the moment) . Is it possible to use some kind of advanced search criteria or external search engine (Google, I guess, would be very out of date) ?  If nothing else, the ability to search within category would be a boon.

 G2G sort functionality. Looking within WikiTree Tech, I couldn't establish how to read frequently read Questions, nor Questions with multiple responses. 

 Confidence in Profile Managers: The big question I find myself agonising over was whether profile manager is acitve or not. Being able to see `last login date` would go a long way to establishing confidence in the profile managers degree of active status. Similarly, if a person is a family member, it would be fantastic to be able to identify who the associated (generating) Geneologist is. 

 That's it for now. Thoughts? 

 

 

Comments

Tom - Thanks for all your comments.  I especially like the suggestion to see last login of someone.  I have so many "old" merge requests/ requests to be added to a trusted list, it would be really helpful to know when the person last logged in.

And welcome to WikiTree!

Cheers,
Liz

Answer 1

Tom, it's nice to get first impressions from new people to WikiTree. It's also very good you are motivated to help make the site better.

Others who are more knowledgable can address the majority of points you've made. I've been here less than a year, but have discovered on the profile page, yours, for instance, there's the following line above the badge section:

 Tom's 39 contributions | 11 thank-yous received | Last profile change on 18 November 2012

I don't know if the statement "Last profile change on 18 November 2012" means the last change on your profile or on any profile you've changed, but if you click on "Tom's 39 contributions" it will take you to a page that shows when a person was last working on the site.

18 November 2012
17:41: Tom Jasper edited the data for Arthur Jasper.

Concerning another point you made, when you click on one of the three category links, there's a number on the right side of each question that tells how many people have shown an interest in the question, 8 views, for instance. I don't know how that's calculated--if it means eight different individuals have clicked on the question or four people have clicked on it twice.

Perhaps these answers are too simplistic for what you've addressed, but regardless, I hope this helps a little.

Comments

 Debby,

 Thank you very much for your praise and taking the time to add your thoughts. However small / simplistic you perceived them to be, I believe they are valuable.

 I strongly suspect that you are right about the "last profile change" fact. To test, I shall resist adding any more information to my own profile and (hopefully) continue to populate the branch of my tree that I'm working on at the moment. Then I, you, etc. can see exactly what the field means.

 Looking at "Tom's 39 contributions | 11 thank-yous received | Last profile change on 18 November 2012" , it occurs to me that the "thank-yous" recieved is misleading and I wonder if it would be better to calculate the field as the sum of unique thank-yous per user per day. I rather suspect that I am over-praised at the moment.

 I suspected that it is page views that are represented by fact displayed in the "x views" field (did 47 people really look at what I wrote...).  To test this, I duplicated the page a few times in my current (Chrome) browser, opened an in-cognito browser page and viewed through that (i.e. not logged in) and I logged in via browser (IE10) which hadn't accessed the site before, went to the index (still 47) and then the thread. The count remains at 47 views . Thus I conclude that the views represent unique member views or unique member views per day - hopefully the latter).

 Regarding the number of views (& #comments). I believe that it would be wonderful to have a way of quickly viewing those which are `very active` or `recently view active` as well as the current Questions /  Unanswered / By Defined Tag / By Category functionality 

Oh, my original intent on opening this thread (although by the time I did I became carried away with ideas and ran out of time) was to suggest that a finer grain of privacy control was preferable for ones own profile. My example being that I would like visitors to see that my preferred name is Tom although my given first name is Thomas...

 It's odd that within the dialogue window, Google's spell check doesn't function (no red underline when I entered an "i" before "e" after a "c" ).

I guess those who read this can sense a strong IT / Analytical Business background - I hope that's not too stifling. 

 

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Tom:

These are good and valid points you raise, and I doubt the the sysops and team members here will find them in any way "stifling".  In fact, others in a better position to do so may recommend a few places around the WikiTree for you to jump in and lend your talents.

Thanks for your interest!

Keith Baker - contributor

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Following is one link that may be of interest to you, Tom:

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:WikiTree_Enhancements