I have to say this strikes me as re-inventing the wheel. There are already several collaborative projects out there. My personal preference is for WeRelate.org, which was the first of note. (I've been involved with them from the beginning and I'm a volunteer admin there.) They're co-sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy (a 501c3) and the Allen County Library, they're totally free (and always will be), and they currently have pages for 2.8 million people. It's one of the 20 most-visited genealogical websites. The Advisory Board incoudes people like Curt Wicher and Fick Eastman, and also Brad Patrick from the Wikimedia Foundation. Like WP, they use WikiMedia, so you all know already how to do everything there. WeRelate isn't the largest project of its kind, but we go to considerable lengths to avoid "drive-by GEDCOMs," where people register, dump a lot of junk, and disappear forever. In addition to uploading GEDCOMs, you can create and modify pages by hand. Most important, the fundamental point behind WeRelate is a single, universal shared family tree. Anything posted there is available for everyone to see and modify (though you have to register). There are no "private" trees, as at Ancestry and Geni, and no one "owns" what's posted.
Michael K. Smith
On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 5:30 PM, Amgine amgine@wikimedians.ca wrote:
I understand the interest in creating a collaborative genealogical site. The question I have is what kind of data standard would be supported? GEDCOM is widely supported, but is biased toward a specific religious viewpoint of what a family *is*, and how relationships can be described.
Are people aware of software like WebTrees[1], which allows many people to work on shared family trees? I am not sure how scalable it would be for a single world family tree. I have been running an instance of it for a few years now, and it seems reasonably stable, but there are some issues with the transportability of media assets (scans of documents, photos, etc.) requiring manual backup.
What other kinds of software and data have been used by people in the project? What kind of data product does the project envision?
Amgine
[1] https://www.webtrees.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webtrees
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