New subject: Is the delivery of software fundamental to this project?

7 Sep 2017


      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:
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Sorry about the digest response. Footnotes at bottom of msg.
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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.
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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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Re: [Wikimedia-genealogy] Is the delivery of software fundamental to this project?