Thanks Dan for starting this!
I think you're right, the first thing is to set up the User Group. To do that, we need a few more supporters and a name. At the moment the leading contenders for the latter seem to be "Wikimedia Genealogy User Group" and Wiki Genealogy User Group".
After that, I reckon one of the first things we want to aim for is a place for people to start putting content — Wikidata, if we figure out that that is a suitable home for general non-notable people, or somewhere else. Not that it'd be a finished final project, of course! But it can be easier to have discussions about what we need in terms of software and systems when there's a concrete working platform on which to explore.
Personally, I think Wikidata would be great, and on top of that we could build tools for more easily working with the data. Of course, it's not the place to store biographies or other prose research material, but it may be a good step to take before setting up a separate wiki for that (into which Wikidata data could be pulled with Lua).
—Sam
On Sun, 2 Apr 2017, at 05:13 AM, Dan Koehl wrote:
Dear members of Wikimedia Genealogy, first I want to greet you all welcome to this email list. We are so far only ten members, which is not a very impressing number, but instead of passively waiting for more users to join us, I thought that we may just as well start using the mail list.
I hope it may serve as an effective communication tool for us, to discuss the next step, which I think is establishing a user group on Meta, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_genealogy_project#Wikimedia_u...
I would be very interested to get everyone's viewpoint and suggestion for some sort of strategy action plan in how you think we should progress, and how we can attract more users involved already from the beginning.
With those words of introduction, I look forward to feedback from everyone, even just a couple of words would be great, just to get a start where everyone feels involved. If someone wants to share more in-deep thoughts, that may be even more important, so we can get an insight in each others expectations, visions and so on. One important question when we should take the step and create the user group?
And an important issue, there are Genealogy interested users on dewiki and frwiki. Im afraid we haven't reached those users with the meta page, and the newsletters Is anyone engaged in those language wikis, and have an idea how we can invite them to get involved and organize all different projects under one umbrella, or at least establish an organized communication bridge? I believe that a large number of those users never take any part in enwiki and meta.
Once again, warmly welcome to the mail list, which, from the moment you write a reply, becomes YOUR mail list.
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