This is a really good point.
I'm certainly not keen to develop yet another software system for
genealogy (although, I've tinkered with doing so and am using such
software as one of my main research systems at the moment... oops). But
I think there's space for multiple options.
As far as existing systems go, I would say that WeRelate is the best:
it's a wiki, and so very flexible; it's big and has an active user base;
it's properly licenced. The reason I don't currently use it personally
is that its software is very out of date and so hard to work with (it's
basically a fork of MediaWiki from ten years ago), and I feel like the
software tries to do things (such as citation management) that I don't
believe should be part of genealogy software.
The other thing I feel might be possible is Wikidata as a central
repository (and I know you say it can't because of notability, but I'm
not so sure; there's more to be discussed here I think). The problem
then is that there's nowhere for the 'other' genealogy data to go, apart
from notable individuals who can go on Wikipedia.
My personal approach these days is that everyone should host their own
wikis, and pull what data they can from Wikidata and link where they can
to Wikipedia.
All up, I really do think that some software development, on some front,
is required. (Hmm... but then, I'm a software engineer, so everything
does rather look like a code-shaped nail to me!)
—Sam.
On Fri, 1 Sep 2017, at 01:50 AM, James Mason wrote:
Several different systems have been put forward as
candidates to be
"the" Wikimedia genealogy project. Of those, several have been in
existence for a number of years and are in regular use. Yet I have
seen very little on the question of why any of those may or may not
have been chosen as a starting point.> It now sounds like more effort is being
invested in a project to
develop another such system - but I wonder how it can succeed. Since
there isn't clarity about why any of the existing projects were not
selected - how can another hope to be "more" successful. I'm not
trying to throw cold water on the good intentions of people who wish
to design or implement such software - but neither would I want to see
their efforts come to naught.> I wonder if the better approach is to try to select a
reasonable
interim system? With the dual goals of beginning to accumulate a
genealogy database AND serving as an example against which new
software ideas can be compared? Or perhaps - taking the approach of
creating something rather more like Wikidata - intended more as a
centralized genealogy data repository usable by a variety of consumers
(I know LDS was working on something like this - but I don't know
where it stands at present). (FYI - I assume that Wikidata proper
really can't be such a database - on the basis of notability
requirements - however limited).> Please forgive me if my remarks are hopelessly out
of step with what
others may be thinking... :) !> -jrm
James Mason; Nashua, NH, USA
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