Re: [Wikimedia-genealogy] Wikimedia genealogy and historical research software - a proposal for HRE

Hi Dan, thanks your message, and apologies for the delay in replying. History Research Environment (HRE) [1] is a community project to create a free platform-independent application for the serious amateur or professional historical researcher. The proposed software will be primarily focused on genealogical research, including researchers who are currently reliant upon the now-discontinued program The Master Genealogist (TMG) [2]. In addition, HRE is planned to handle a very wide range of other historical and cultural research needs [3]. With the demise of TMG in 2014 the genealogical community lost its last high-end product for the serious researcher. Stand-alone genealogical software packages are no longer commercially viable, and the commercial market has moved almost entirely to online products sold as part of a subscription to large family history websites. This is advantageous for the service provider, as it allows them to monetise your family history data, but many serious researchers lament the loss of the control, feature richness, and personal privacy that a stand-alone product can provide. The plan is to create a high-end product that can be run on a user's own computer, with its own integrated database. This allows the user to retain full control over their own research data without interference from outside commercial organisations. The features to be provided will be decided collaboratively by the community, and they will certainly include comprehensive mechanisms for recording the sources of each item of data within the database, and for documenting the researcher’s conclusions about data items and linkages between data items. The ability to record reliable sources and conclusions for both data items and linkages is, we believe, and a central component of any serious genealogy database, a component that is missing from most of the commercial online systems that are now available. As a Wikimedian myself for many years (and currently chair of Wikimedia UK) I do see quite a few similarities in approach between the HRE project and the approach of the wiki communities. How any connections might work would be a matter of discussion, but I can say that the HRE community would be more than open to collaboration. Obvious possibilities would be for the HRE database to store Wikidata IDs to allow unambiguous matching of data items – not only for the people within a family tree but also for such things as location data, time periods, titles, occupations, relationships, and so on. Armed with such matches, HRE researchers could leverage the power of Wikidata to download or perhaps merely to view a whole range of historical information about the primary individuals within the database. Similarly, with appropriate agreement from the Wikidata community, HRE researchers could have the possibility of uploading to Wikidata those portions of their research which are sufficiently interesting (“notable”?), along with full details of the sources relied upon. We would clearly need to discuss how to handle data relating to living individuals, which might need to be kept confidential, and also to develop rules for the reliability of sources to make it clear that users can't simply upload personal family trees based on random information they have found on the Internet or which have been copied from the unreliable family trees that are often found at places such as Ancestry.com. I hope provides useful information for further discussions, either here or on wiki. All the best Michael __________ [1] https://historyresearchenvironment.org/ [2] https://historyresearchenvironment.org/hre-for-users-of-the-master-genealog… [3] https://historyresearchenvironment.org/hre-for-historical-and-social-resear…