Message: 2
Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2017 08:46:43 +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?

Hm, yes, I really do see the multiple sides to this! :-) It's very
interesting. Thank you for going into it all.

I'm not sure I agree that genealogical research is *uniquely*
structured. It's no more sturctured than, say, writing histories of
companies, or political parties, or railways... I mean that there are
always requirements for strucutred data in any research, but that we
don't bother with bespoke tools for most of them. I think primarily
because the ultimate desired output is readable, linear prose, with
images, figures etc. — I think this is my usual goal with genealogy too.
Perhaps that's where I'm understanding things wrong.

Wikipedia might be a pain to edit (although, I think it's getting
easier) but it *is* easy to read. I think it's worth keeping the
audiences in mind when talking about different approaches to a genealogy
project.

We could look at setting up a demo Webtrees site too, if we want. :-)

The other thing, of WeRelate's approach of forcing Gedcom structures
into MediaWiki, I still feel is a bit clunky... I'm very open to being
convinced though! I have the beginnings of some code here that was about
syncing trees off werelate into a modern WeRelate extension; it could be
resurrected.

—sam

If I understand your argument correctly, you are proposing biography articles, with or without genealogy data (possibly implicit in templates.) That would certainly be more readable, both at the wikitax and as an article.

That is not at all what I had envisioned this project would be about.

In that use case, wiki would certainly be possible. I suspect the 'clunky' model of WeRelate - however implemented (see Familypedia) - is pretty much inevitable.

Amgine