* Knowledge Curation

[davidf]

From a post about Step Son showing in Descendants, where the OP expressed thanks and asked how to "show the issue has been resolved in the forum?"

Your last posting has done that. There is no formal sign-off.

This is true - but highlights a weakness in our "contributor based help system". We need to keep finding ways for users - particularly newer ones - to quickly find their way to solutions that enable them "to do genealogy" rather than wade through discussions of esoteric aspects of FH.

Background

Some of these discussions can attract a lot of interesting (and mainly useful, if not fully immediately relevant) discussion. Some of us may read everything on particular sub-forums - or at least the whole of threads that interest us. But we are the geeks!

But that may not help someone who is "just looking for an answer" - which is a valid quest no matter how naive in the context of a flexible program like FH and which has many "camps" of users (lumpers vs splitters, generic template users vs ...)

Some contributor help systems have a means of up-voting useful "answers" which are particularly useful for questions that may have easy answers that do not require much to-ing and fro-ing to understand the OP's issue. And OPs do have a means of marking that the issue is "resolved". With these systems many readers just read the original issue and the most popular solution - and if that works read no further.

We don't "close the loop". I'm not sure how we do that without losing the valuable discussion that can deepen understanding, resolve misconceptions, spawn plug-ins or give rise to wish list requests. And sometimes we are divided on what is a solution - either because of different approaches to using FH or due to different views on the acceptability of a work-around. I think fundamentally our type of forum is best suited to this particular task. But can we tweak the whole system (Forum, KB etc. etc.)?

Yesterday I was working on a bunch of "outliers" - a distinct group sharing my surname but with no apparent link back to the source of my family surname. I visit this project once or twice a year - usually when I spot the availability of some useful records becoming available on-line. I realised that in my multiple visits I had created a lot of duplicate "micro-families" (couples and children). I wanted to find them. I know how to merge them (and their family records etc.!) - I just wanted to find them in an easily presented form, so I could check my current work against them and merge as appropriate.

Naively I went to the fhug help and looked for "duplicate names".

Result of Search of KB for "Duplicate Names"

Screenshot from 2022-08-16 10-37-57.png (164.99 KiB) Viewed 3045 times

I had expected a more direct bit of help! The forum results look potentially more helpful even if the posts are quite old. The "abstracts" shown when you hover don't actually help - at least not in this case.

But then you get into your waders and start ploughing through the posts. Well I find such discussions interesting because "systems" are almost as much of an interest as "genealogy" - but I fear for the sanity of someone who just wants an answer!

The fifteenth posts of those listed in the search is probably where I want to start (searching for "find duplicate names" may have been a better start - but I am old school with internet searching where I was taught "less is more")

The answer to find duplicate names does seem to be a plug-in - but to get there involves a lot of wading through old discussion and old versions of plug-ins (where hopefully the links are dead).

Possible Solutions

1. Can we get the plug-in store included within the scope of search? If we can't (because it is on a different domain - technically not impossible but potentially difficult politically), can we maintain a list of plug-ins with abstracts and a plain link to the plug-in store somewhere within the indexed knowledge base so if someone searches the knowledge base for a phrase that near as not matches a plug-in name, the existence of that plug-in gets reported?

2. How can we define some form of curation process that, because it is unlikely to be automate-able, is neither time consuming nor contentious? For instance, what is involved in adding ("after the event") as say the second post (position wise) in selected (say 5% to 10%) of all forum topics a TLDR post? This would enable many readers to quickly decide if they want/need to read the whole of a possibly multi-page topic.

A "Too long, didn't read" post:

• Could be from:
  • possibly a mod (more work),
  • possibly the originator (can we/should we enable OP's to edit their original post well after the edit window has closed?) or,
  • one of a group of "semi-mods" or area experts who have a particular interest in the subject area (e.g. "working with diagrams" or grouped by KB major heading). Is it possible to define adequate access rights? How do you assign the role - probably on a thread by thread basis?
• It would contain:
  • A brief summary of the actual (clarified) issue
  • A brief summary of the consensus on potential solutions - with links to the KB
  • Keywords, to catch the indexing engine's eye.

The contents of such a post might be contentious. Is that a risk worth taking - we seem on this Forum to avoid "flame-wars"? Would we accept the role of a writer of TLDRs?

3. Some way to get learning points from threads back into the Knowledge Base? This is no easy task and updating the KB for V7 was a massive task (to which I only made a small contribution before that and other activities lead to fatigue that just laid me out). One of the issues was that the old KB had become complex and a confusing place to navigate - we don't want that to happen to the new one. So we probably don't want people just throwing in additional paragraphs to crafted articles in the light of a forum thread.

But if we had TLDR's being added to the more significant forum topics, we could link those topics (as part of the TLDR creation process) to the "Related Forum Discussions" section of KB articles. This would mean that people reading the KB would be aware of the thread and when editors of individual pages occasionally review their work they can see new relevant threads which may trigger a revision of a KB article.

Would it be easier from a systems point of view if the TLDR content was actually in the form of a free-standing micro article actually in the KB and the TLDR post in the Forum was just a link to (or even an embed of ?) the micro article? Those micro articles could then be linked to KB topics such as Diagram Tips. In due course they might get incorporated into the main articles.

I think we are missing a few tricks in assisting some users. The question is what is the most economical (time wise) to improve what we have?

[ColeValleyGirl]

After we've solved this, we should make a start on World Peace

Seriously, it's a good question but I'm not sure there is a good answer. The place I know that does this best is the StackExchange collection of Q&A sites (never call them a forum!) but they do it at the expense of perceived friendliness, with rigorously enforced rules about eliminating duplicates, drawing question scope very narrowly and avoiding chit-chat; and a voting system that is intended to bring 'good' answers to the fore and relegate or eliminate bad ones. The success of the system relies heavily on elected Moderators (I know; I used to moderate the Genealogy website there, and one of our members here still does so) and even more so on users who have accrued enough 'reputation' to undertake curation work. Plus asking a question there is a big undertaking if you want to get it 'right'. I don't believe we want to be that kind of place.

(1) We don't have anywhere near the number of forum members who would participate in curation activity to make it effective (the members here who might do so, based on their current activity, are already overloaded). The number of people currently contributing to the KB can be counted on the fingers of one hand (no need for the thumb).

(2) As you correctly identify, some answers are contentious. There are many ways to do things in FH, and not all of them are wrong . If somebody suggests their preferred way X to do a task, I won't necessarily jump in and suggest another way Y, if X will accomplish the job satisfactorily. But I wouldn't want X written up as the gospel answer, so whoever was doing a TL;DR post would have to put almost as much work into it in some cases as into a KB article. (I'd much prefer they put the effort into a KB article, tbh, but I would say that, wouldn't I?).

(3) The technical things you ask about are all probably beyond the capability of the forum software -- inserting a TL;DR post after the original query (out of sequence) -- or undesirable (allowing users to edit their own post indefinitely -- there's a whole load of work involved in stopping people making edits that remove the whole sense of the following thread once they've got an answer they're happy with -- I've seen it in other forums and it isn't pretty). Perhaps the original topic could be edited to include the TL;DR but I would have severe reservations about allowing anyone to edit other people's posts other than for moderation reasons.

(4) I would favour a KB-based solution (it is supposed to be the curated and distilled wisdom of the members here, after all). As you know, all new articles and changes to existing articles go through a review process, so the risk of KB content suffering from 'random paragraphs' is reduced. I don't like the micro-article idea -- I think it would clutter up the KB and take it back towards the problems of the old KB. We do have the Maintaining the KB forum where things like Showing record flags on main tab of Property Box (20799) can be posted and acted on by anyone who has or wants KB editing privileges... Can we leverage that? (We'd need more editors, of course).

(5) I'm not sure that including the Plugin Store in the Search facility would get us a lot further forward. Even if it was technically possible, I think it might get a bit expensive, because CP is a commercial entity whereas FHUG are not. More importantly, it might address a subset of the problem ('questions whose answer is a plugin') but that's actually quite a small subset.

[LornaCraig]

I think the length of the original post (TLDR !) indicates the scale of the task and Helen is right to compare it with achieving world peace.

However I do have some sympathy with David's point that even though a plugin exists which provides the solution to his problem its existence can't be discovered by searching the Knowledge Base. I assume he is referrring to the Find Duplicate Individuals plugin. You just need to know it exists (or try searching the Plugin store on the off chance). Perhaps a single sentence could be added to the section about merging duplicate records, referring to the plugin which helps you find those records (in the case of Individual records) in the first place.

[AdrianBruce]

I would concur with the issue of the Plug-In store not being included in the forum search. I am fairly certain that I was looking for a Plug-in recently - naturally I didn't know its name, so I searched for the topic in the FHUG site. Didn't get very far - or perhaps more accurately, I spent some time before working out that I wasn't searching the plug-in store.

As an aside, as a test, I just searched FHUG for "place-names". Well, yes, I know, that's not exactly a rare topic. I'm not commenting on the KB results but the Forum-Results might be thought less than helpful since they appear to list posts, not threads and the first answer is a 26-post thread which, naturally, takes all of the front screen. Is there no way to gives answers at the thread level? (Though the "pop-up" might be an issue - presumably a pop-up of the initial post might be OK? Though it might not contain the search term??? )

If this has already been raised, apologies, but I've forgotten if it has.

One minor detail is that on that thread, at least some of the posts are time-stamped on that front screen of Forum Results one hour different from the post times in the thread.

[AdrianBruce]

By the way, as part of curation of posts, please don't consider closing threads once the question has been answered. I got very annoyed with the Facebook user site of one of the UK's genealogy providers when the mod closed the thread down because the answer had been given. The supposed answer was "Raise a support query with the site". Yeah, sure. I had wanted to add something to the thread that might help people find at least part ofthe answer for themselves. Nope.

[davidf]

You just need to know it exists

But of course many users don't - which is why they are searching! One of the issues with help systems is that they are often most easily used by those who already know!

Looking just at the specific example that I quoted from my own recent experience, we either need to be able to search the plug-in store as part of a KB search - or incorporate the information within the KB with an outbound link.

I've had a play and using a conventional search engine to search CP's plug-in store doesn't work - it's because of the server based nature of the store, not due to CP banning search spiders see robots.txt.

So how to get the information in maintainable way into the KB?

I notice that CP maintain a one page summary of plug-ins which I suspect is server created and maintained. Is there a way that we can embed that page into a KB article "FH Plugin-in Store"? Technically I suspect that WP has a block style that can do this and I can't imagine that CP would object - it's their page and copyright so we must ask. But will such an embed index?

The systematic issue I will address separately (and I will try and do so without writing a draft treaty!)

[davidf]

One minor detail is that on that thread, at least some of the posts are time-stamped on that front screen of Forum Results one hour different from the post times in the thread.

Is this a "Summer Time" issue?

[AdrianBruce]

...
Is this a "Summer Time" issue?

Almost certainly. Once upon a time I had to reset my time-zone on the FHUG forum for each clock change. Jane appears to have done something to make that unnecessary but maybe the Forum Search Results get left as GMT? Just a guess... (Actually my first guess was different again, because the first odd time results that I noticed came from one of our Californian correspondents - then I realised that California is 8h behind the UK so 1h was not logical...)

[ColeValleyGirl]

One minor detail is that on that thread, at least some of the posts are time-stamped on that front screen of Forum Results one hour different from the post times in the thread.

The search displays time in UTC. The forums display it in the users Time zone.

[AdrianBruce]

...
The search displays time in UTC. The forums display it in the users Time zone.

Ah! Does make navigation a bit confusing if you want to go to a specific post, though. Then again, I suspect that most would want to read the full thread anyway...

[Mark1834]

Pity the forum software relies on manual time zone setting rather than converting UTC to local time automatically so always displaying user time even if not logged on. Feels a bit primitive to me...

[Jane]

It is not the forum software, but the search api I overlaid to get a better search across both the WP DB and the Forum.
So yes it probably is a bit primitive, because I have not found a quick way to pick up the users details from the forum db and then apply it to the json results from the Algolia search to change the time. My feeling with a search being a couple of hours off was not the end of the world. So I am sorry if you are not happy with what I have tried to do to improve the search over what was included with phpBB and Wordpress.

If you want to dig through the documentation for Algolia it is here: https://www.algolia.com/doc/api-client/methods/search/

[Mark1834]

No criticism implied - I'm sure you do a lot to support the forum. I'm not bothered about that aspect of searching, more the fact that the general FHUG forum may look a little better if times were all users' local times, but agree not worth extensive work for a cosmetic detail.

I do like the idea of a "thread search" though, so the search doesn't return a long list of posts all in the same thread.

[AdrianBruce]

... So yes it probably is a bit primitive, because I have not found a quick way to pick up the users details from the forum db and then apply it to the json results from the Algolia search to change the time. ...

Jane - apologies if that sounded like a criticism from me. I hadn't twigged the steps that would be necessary to manipulate the times.

I don't know if the raw forum search could easily give the answers at the thread level instead of the post level - or if there is any other way to get thread level results - but if it is possible and if you ever found the time to look at that, it would be hugely appreciated by me.

[ColeValleyGirl]

This might be an good time to post this link, Donate, in case anyone wants to help Jane with the "lot" she does "to support the forum", which includes paying for it (and the search facility and other software involved in the Knowledge Base) out of her own pocket. I understand that the level of donations so far for this year didn't even cover New Year's Day.

[Mark1834]

Helen - good reminder that FHUG doesn’t just happen of its own accord, but it’s a broken link - I can’t access it, even when logged on. Would it be better to make it a much more conspicuous public one linked from the home page?

There’s a bit of a paradox here. FHUG must be a users’ forum, but CP receive enormous benefit from it promoting and supporting their product. Is there a model somehow whereby they provide some indirect support (e.g. server hosting) while content and editorial control remain wholly with members?

[ColeValleyGirl]

Fixed in my original post, and redirected from the home page as well.

Personally, I think the independence of FHUG from CP is important enough not to ask them for any support.

[davidf]

This might be an good time to post this link, Donate, in case anyone wants to help Jane with the "lot" she does "to support the forum", which includes paying for it (and the search facility and other software involved in the Knowledge Base) out of her own pocket. I understand that the level of donations so far for this year didn't even cover New Year's Day.

That last sentence is sobering.

Generally there is a problem if "us users" are using the facility and wanting more, yet our financial contributions are not covering the cost.

However many of these sort of "enterprises" give little indication of the sort of costs involved. I know that my own hosting (web and email) is less than £50pa, but I have a modest setup and very low usage and it just "switches off" the web hosting when I reach my "monthly limit". (A nasty surprise when a certain pillock ran a routine than repeated downloaded big pdf files of family trees - which I have now had to put behind a password wall - as well as blocking that user - even basic web hosting is not admin free - and I still get spam from "east of GMT +2" ). The bigger cost for me is the ISP and bandwidth costs.

I think donation pages need to give some idea of either annual cost and volume (say posts - as a proxy for bandwidth and hosting?) or a "cost per volume" (e.g. cost per post) and then those of us who are regular users might consider annually paying a multiple (5x 10x?) our "cost per post".

If the regular users see that it is an appreciable (and inappropriate) cost for one person, but when spread amongst the regulars it is an amount we can all afford to pay, we might (I hope) stump up.

If we see that even when spread across the regulars it is still a massive amount, we have to starting thinking (and continue to think) about whether we are demanding too much.

CP are of course free to use the donation page and for all we know they might - helping that way does maintain the arms-length relationship that ensures our independence.

[Mark1834]

David, I think that is an excellent idea. I have no idea whether FHUG costs £10, £100, or £1000 a year to keep running. “FHUG accounts” would bring everything into the open. How much does it cost? What is the income from the donation page? What income is there from other sources, such as groups or individuals paying directly for personalised support?

At the moment, we’re all running blind without knowing what the facts are.

[AdrianBruce]

... I understand that the level of donations so far for this year didn't even cover New Year's Day.

Ouch....
Donation made...

[ColeValleyGirl]

What income is there from other sources, such as groups or individuals paying directly for personalised support?

What on earth makes you think there's any of this? All support given under the FHUG banner is free and always has been.
Unless Mike has a thriving side-line in secret plugins? (Just joking, Mike). And even if he did, that would be his own business and nothing to do with FHUG. Ditto for anyone running FH courses, like the ones detailed here.

[davidf]

David, I think that is an excellent idea. I have no idea whether FHUG costs £10, £100, or £1000 a year to keep running. “FHUG accounts” would bring everything into the open. How much does it cost? What is the income from the donation page? What income is there from other sources, such as groups or individuals paying directly for personalised support?

At the moment, we’re all running blind without knowing what the facts are.

Mark, you have "FHUG accounts" in inverted commas and I hope they are significant. For the setup that we are (relying on the goodwill of a few) I don't want to see time put aside to "prepare accounts" with all the attendant potential red-tape. The intention is that we donate to spread the burden of costs not to make surpluses or profits (which then attract bureaucratic interest!)

I suspect a very simple statement of the major costs ( Hosting £X, Licencing £Y, Bandwith £Z Other ?) set against major sources of income (via Donations Page £A, Other £B ) is sufficient to prod us to reach for the credit card and then pay an appropriate amount - bearing in mind that a lot of users are very occasional and will not donate (we don't want new or occasional users to feel obliged to donate or to feel financially constrained in what they can ask) and some regulars just won't or can't.

[Mark1834]

Fair enough- if somebody chooses to do such things privately and donate the proceeds to FHUG, there’s no reason to separate that out. But you can’t complain about folks not supporting FHUG while at the same time not disclosing what the ballpark costs and income are (that’s all I had in mind, David - we certainly don’t need audited accounts!).

[davidf]

What income is there from other sources, such as groups or individuals paying directly for personalised support?

What on earth makes you think there's any of this? All support given under the FHUG banner is free and always has been.
Unless Mike has a thriving side-line in secret plugins? (Just joking, Mike). And even if he did, that would be his own business and nothing to do with FHUG. Ditto for anyone running FH courses, like the ones detailed here.

I think Mark may be pointing to an issue that to the newcomer may appear odd and go against rules of internet caution. Those of us who have been around a while may have a level of trust that negates that issue.

I first met Jane at the NEC (Who do You Think You Are Live) giving advice on the use of FH and pre-pandemic I know she ran courses on FH. I have no experience of her courses, but have found her advice valuable - comprehensive appropriate and reliable. The very cynical (or ignorant) might, seeing other items in her online shop front, wonder if she "uses FHUG" to attract commercial business - but I strongly suspect that the contribution (time money goodwill) flows the other way (from her into FHUG) - her contribution to FHUG would otherwise be a very inefficient way of "attracting business"! I think it is called altruism - possibly an out-of-date concept in the time of our leaders' lockdown parties.

To move the donation function to within the FHUG requires the FHUG to take on a much higher level of security due to handling credit cards etc. Jane already has that functionality and makes it available - I confidently suspect gratis.

Unofficial organisations run on trust and I did not expect this topic to raise the issue. So to be clear, when I talk about wanting to know about costs it is not through a desire for any form of accountability (I trust those that run FHUG), it is so that I can appreciate the sort of level of burden I should be sharing.

[Mark1834]

Agree completely. Absolutely no suggestion of any impropriety whatsoever. Support given to FHUG in term of time spent is very visible. Financial support is not, and it would be completely unacceptable if that fell disproportionately on one or two users. If we know roughly how big the burden is, we can share it more appropriately. That is all I am trying to achieve.