Translation for my own convenience:
Hello everyone.
For a long time I have been thinking about creating a new section, similar to the STORIES (or Frequently Asked Questions) section. In that section I would like to add advice and opinions on the study of genealogy. Many people become interested in genealogy by chance. Then they learn little by little, out of personal interest and pleasure. Some people who visit my website tell me that they find the idea interesting. However, they also tell me that they get discouraged because they see the topic as something difficult and complicated.
To me it sounds like the current FAQ is reasonably adequate for that goal.
If you want to write larger articles, then I think that's the job for a CMS like Joomla or Wordpress.
But it can be done differently: I have some static content on my website for which the text is written in Markdown but the styling is done with .css. The technology I use to power it is
Eleventy
but there are many alternatives such as
Jekyll
Additionally, webtrees is not always easy to use. For this reason, some visitors do not explore the website in detail and abandon it soon. They know that the web exists, but they use it very little. There is a “Frequently Asked Questions” section, but I would like to know how I could add a small manual of tips and curiosities about genealogy and related topics. Maybe there is a good way to start, but I don't know it. That's why I ask you this question. For me it would be enough to have a module or a section similar to the “Stories” section. What do you think?
Thanks for your opinion and help.
I think my FAQ should suffice to tickle the interest. It gives some pointers on exactly the things you mention.
My list of FAQ articles:
- Who owns this website?
- Why did you start it?
- Where have you obtained all this data?
- What about privacy?
- Data of my own tree is incomplete. Can you do some research?
- How can I report additions or changes? (answer: if you have a lot of data then I can promote you to Editor)
- Can I supply photos?
I know that this is not very effective, the numbers of reactions I get speak for themselves. After 14 years I have 31 registered users: about half of them have never bothered logging in despite being granted full member access, most don't log in again after only having browsed around (I presume, because I do not look in the access log what they do in detail). Two I have promoted to become editor, but they never really contributed.
So I am a bit sceptical:
You can lead a horse to water, but you can not make it drink.
Regarding documenting how to use webtrees: A decade ago webtrees still had a wiki, but whatever was written would be outdated a year later. Barely anyone felt responsible to keep it up to date. So I understand why (and sympathise with) it was deleted.
Writing technical documentation is really hard. This matches my professional experience, I am a computer programmer / software engineer. The first user manual I wrote for a program was nearly 100 pages. That program had a relatively simple function, only a few screens. I thought I was pretty complete. Yet the first real question I got from a user, there was no answer to that in my manual. Since then I am sceptical about writing documentation.
There is a German 'handbuch', which is again a wiki, so open to essentially anyone to contribute. But I have my reservations about it. A couple of times I was curious whether it had descriptions of procedures (eg Adoption) or screenprints I could reuse for a post here, but at that time: alas.
I personally think that if web pages are too complicated to use, then that is a sign of a failed design. I don't think this is a problem we can fix easily by throwing words at it.
But don't let that stop you from trying, OK?
