I certainly agree with you about the NIH syndrome within the Wikimedia world. (I think it's getting better though, and I think a lot of it is part of the general PHP/web-dev community too, and not specific to MediaWiki.) I really don't think we need yet another software solution for genealogy! However... :-) I think I basically take as my starting point "base MediaWiki". As in: there's a great flexibility in a website that is basically just freeform text boxes into which you can put whatever. At its heart, a wiki is free and open and really easy to just jump into and start putting content up. That's why we love 'em! And I think it's a good platform for genealogy: we can write whatever we need to, and collaborate with others, and it's not constrained by any software-imposed structure. Certainly, I see the attraction with software like Webtrees that provides lots of structure, but I guess it feels a bit different to the open wiki way of things. I think WeRelate tries to walk the line between fully-wiki and fully-structured, and does it pretty well. I've attempted a couple of times to work on its code and bring it up to date, but decided it would take more time than I've got, and there isn't a community of developers working on it. Anyway, that's all stuff we need to talk about more I'm sure! In the meantime I've set up a demo wiki:https://tools.wmflabs.org/genealogy/wiki/Main_Page that we can install various things on if we want to talk about them in more concrete terms. — Sam.
On Sat, 2 Sep 2017, at 09:31 PM, Amgine wrote:
Sorry about the digest response. Footnotes at bottom of msg.
Message: 1 Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 13:50:29 -0400 From: James Mason jrm@slashmail.org To: "Discussion about the Wikimedia genealogy project." wikimedia-genealogy@lists.wikimedia.org 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.
... In the WMF-sphere there is a strong opposition to NMH/NFH (Not Made Here/Not From Here) solutions, even standing the middle of a wheel graveyard. Witness Flow when there are literally hundreds of drop- in forum/communication systems which can be implemented modularly such as PHPBB. My personal choice of using WebTrees[1] was specifically to allow an unlimited number of contributors to work on a single GED, and allow an unlimited number of GEDs to be hosted/displayed. It is not a wiki. It has some wiki-like characteristics. It could become a wiki. I doubt it is currently ready to scale. On the other hand, it would work extremely well as an interim, and is able to import/export standard and non-standard GED.
Message: 2 Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2017 08:15:04 +0800 From: Sam Wilson sam@samwilson.id.au To: wikimedia-genealogy@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-genealogy] Is the delivery of software fundamental to this project? ... WeRelate ... Wikidata as a central repository ... My personal approach these days is ...
To painfully refactor: WeRelate has content and community, and other good/bad things. Wikidata, if possible, requires creating a new genealogy data standard [mandatory reference to https://xkcd.com/927/]. Federation seems a good approach. I am less- keen on thinking about forking a community, although forking their content has some interesting possibilities. Wikidata has been pretty much useless or a disaster for sister projects other than interwiki links - and even that has semantic issues. (imo: this is due a lack of interest/resources in supporting non-wikipedia efforts, not that Wikidata cannot do a stellar job.) So, much against my philosophy, I can agree there is a need for software development: a decentralized federation for node searching/sharing/indexing, self-healing? Preferably with a platform agnostic api, so multiple GUI and engines can be built. But I would rather work with the very large pile of genealogy wheels than start something entirely new. Amgine [1] On Github: https://github.com/fisharebest/webtrees Official: https://www.webtrees.net/ Wiki: https://wiki.webtrees.net/
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