Dear all,
I'm forwarding this email from
Léa Lacroix to the list about the WikidataCon.
Best,
Shani.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Léa Lacroix <lea.lacroix(a)wikimedia.de>
Date: 20 June 2017 at 14:34
Subject: Join the WikidataCon, 28-29 October in Berlin
To: wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hello everybody,
Here's a general update about the WikidataCon, that will take place in
Berlin on October 28th and 29th :)
General information
The WikidataCon <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2017>
is a conference organized for and by the Wikidata community, and supported
by Wikimedia Deutschland.
If you edit Wikidata, make queries with SPARQL, build scripts, gadgets or
external tools, reuse data from Wikidata with your software or your
service, if you belong to an organization who wants to use or donate data,
if you're working on open data, datajournalism, datavizualisation, open
knowledge, civictech... *you're welcome to the WikidataCon*!
It will take place on October 28th-29th (+ social event on Friday 27th), in
the Tagesspiegel venue, in Berlin. Due to our international community, the
even will take place in English only. However, language/local meetups can
be added to the program.
We are expecting 150 persons from all around the world, to celebrate
Wikidata's 5th birthday and *share knowledge and experience whithin the
community*.
Program
With two days of talks, workshops, demos, meetups, and social events, the
diverse and awesome people that belong to the Wikidata community will be
able to share their experiences, their favorite tools, learn from the
others, discover new ways to create, enrich, reuse data from the free
knowledge base.
The program is currently being build via a *call for projects
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2017/Program>, running
until July 31st.* Feel free to support your favorite topics or propose a
project. A social event on the Friday evening and a birthday celebration
will also take place to bring the community together.
Attend
*Registration is now open
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2017/Attend/Register>,
until October 1st. *Registration is mandatory for everyone, including
speakers, WMF and WMDE employees, volunteers...
Important thing you need to know: the ticket is free of charge, and
includes the access to the conference, meals, drinks and goodies, but *does
not include travel and accommodation*. The attendees have to book these by
themselves.
If you plan to come, don't wait... Berlin is a touristic area :)
Scholarships
Some scholarships will be provided to help attendees to fund their travel
and accommodation for the conference. *The application is running until
July 16th
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2017/Scholarships>. *
Due to the few number of scholarships we can provide, we encourage people
to ask for support from their local chapter or user group.
How can you help?
- share this information with people, mailing-lists, wikis, who could be
interested
- if you are involved in a local chapter: ask your board if they can
provide some support for the volunteers of you country who would like to
join.
- if you want to *volunteer during the event*, you're more than welcome!
You can find more information here
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2017/Volunteer>.
- if you see any missing information or mistake, or you have any question,
feel free to contact me.
You can follow our updates on the wiki page
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2017>, the facebook
event <https://www.facebook.com/events/1358386070859989/> or the Twitter
account <https://twitter.com/wikidata>.
Thanks a lot for your attention, I hope I'll meet some of you during the
WikidataCon!
--
Léa Lacroix
Project Manager Community Communication for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
Hi all,
We are excited to have this opportunity to host WikiConference North America 2017<https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2017/Main_Page> (August 9th & 10th) this year ahead of Wikimania and we hope to see you there! As in 2016, the first day of WCNA is designated as our Wiki Culture Crawl Day and the second day is fully programmed.
Wednesday, August 9th will be a Culture Crawl Day! This is a day-long event where we collaborate with local museums, libraries, and cultural institutions to host free backstage tours, edit-a-thons, and more. These crawls are a fantastic opportunity for conference attendees to experience the local culture, as well as collaborate with local institutions to improve Wikipedia.
This year we have established relationships and are planning free access and events with the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) and McGill University. At the BAnQ, we plan to have an edit-a-thon, where Wikimedians utilize the Archive's resources to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Montreal's people - and ending with an evening reception. A photo drive<https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2017/Photo_Drive> will be occurring throughout the day.
Thursday, August 10th will be a day of programming. If you are interested in participating in programming at WCNA, such as a presentation, panel discussion, or an unconference session (lightning talk, open space, etc.) on Thursday, August 10th, please submit your proposal here<https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2017/Submissions>.
We are seeking volunteers to help during the conference. Please sign up as a volunteer<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfh4x1yzqiAuwbkHvy2BaIVTLAxj6UP5Db…> if you are interested.
For both days of WCNA 2017, you will need to register<https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration> through the Wikimania Eventbrite<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wikimania-2017-registration-33032011636>. Please be sure you are registering for the August 9 & 10, Wikiconference North America sessions. For those attending the August 9th Cultural Crawl, there is a promo code available (wmcon2017); note that if you use the promo code, you may not attend other pre-conference events on August 9th. Only use the promo code if you plan on only attending our Culture Crawl, as if you register for the incorrect event with the promo code, you may be barred from entry to that pre-conference event and/or session.
Best,
Kelly & the WCNA ’17 Planning Committee
/ Kelly Doyle
Wikipedian in Residence for Gender Equity
West Virginia University
(304) 293-0342
kelly.doyle(a)mail.wvu.edu
Hi Everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, June 21,
2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2jpKRwPT-Q
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
you can watch our past research showcases here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#June_2017>.
This month's presentations:
Title: Problematizing and Addressing the Article-as-Concept Assumption in
Wikipedia
By *Allen Yilun Lin*
Abstract: Wikipedia-based studies and systems frequently assume that each
article describes a separate concept. However, in this paper, we show that
this article-as-concept assumption is problematic due to editors’ tendency
to split articles into parent articles and sub-articles when articles get
too long for readers (e.g. “United States” and “American literature” in the
English Wikipedia). In this paper, we present evidence that this issue can
have significant impacts on Wikipedia-based studies and systems and
introduce the subarticle matching problem. The goal of the sub-article
matching problem is to automatically connect sub-articles to parent
articles to help Wikipedia-based studies and systems retrieve complete
information about a concept. We then describe the first system to address
the sub-article matching problem. We show that, using a diverse feature set
and standard machine learning techniques, our system can achieve good
performance on most of our ground truth datasets, significantly
outperforming baseline approaches.
Title: Understanding Wikidata Queries
By *Markus Kroetzsch*
Abstract: Wikimedia provides a public service that lets anyone answer
complex questions over the sum of all knowledge stored in Wikidata. These
questions are expressed in the query language SPARQL and range from the
most simple fact retrievals ("What is the birthday of Douglas Adams?") to
complex analytical queries ("Average lifespan of people by occupation").
The talk presents ongoing efforts to analyse the server logs of the
millions of queries that are answered each month. It is an important but
difficult challenge to draw meaningful conclusions from this dataset. One
might hope to learn relevant information about the usage of the service and
Wikidata in general, but at the same time one has to be careful not to be
misled by the data. Indeed, the dataset turned out to be highly
heterogeneous and unpredictable, with strongly varying usage patterns that
make it difficult to draw conclusions about "normal" usage. The talk will
give a status report, present preliminary results, and discuss possible
next steps.
--
Sarah R. Rodlund
Senior Project Coordinator-Product & Technology, Wikimedia Foundation
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org
This is great; thank you, Stephen. It is good to see additional transfers
to the endowment on the agenda.
Regards, SJ
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 1:24 PM, Stephen LaPorte <slaporte(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The agenda for the next Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees meeting on
> June 16, 2017 is now available on Meta Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.o
> rg/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_board_agenda_2017-06
>
> Best,
> Stephen
>
> --
> Stephen LaPorte
> Senior Legal Counsel
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> *NOTICE: As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal and
> ethical reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for,
> community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity.
> For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*
>
> _______________________________________________
> Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately
> directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia
> community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> _______________________________________________
> WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
> WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
>
>
--
Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
<(617)%20529-4266>
Dear all,
I wanted to inform you that starting today James Heilman joins the Board
Governance Committee (BGC) as a volunteer and advisory member [1]. That
means that he will be working with the BGC as a non-voting member, together
with Ira B. Matetsky, Gayle Karen Young, Tim Moritz Hector, Ido Ivry and
Kat Walsh [2].
The BGC believes that in case James is approved by the Board as a Board
member [3] it would also be a good onboarding opportunity for him.
=== James Heilman ===
James Heilman is “an active contributor to WikiProject Medicine, is a
volunteer Wikipedia administrator, was the president of Wikimedia Canada
between 2010 and 2013, and founded and was formerly the president of Wiki
Project Med Foundation. He is also the founder of WikiProject Medicine's
Medicine Translation Task Force. In June 2015, he was elected to the
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, a position which he held until he
was removed on December 28, 2015” [4]. He is among top three candidates for
the community selected seats selected by the community to be recommended to
the Board for approval, according to the results from the 2017 Wikimedia
Foundation Board of Trustees selection process [5].
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to ask me.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
Board_Governance_Committee_Charter#Volunteer_and_Advisory_Members
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
Board_Governance_Committee#Composition_2016-2017
[3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Bylaws#ARTICLE_III_-_MEMBERSHIP
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Heilman
[5] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/20/board-of-trustees-elections-2017/
Best regards,
antanana / Nataliia Tymkiv
*NOTICE: You may have received this message outside of your normal working
hours/days, as I usually can work more as a volunteer during weekend. You
should not feel obligated to answer it during your days off. Thank you in
advance!*
Hi Stephen,
Can board agendas, as well as slides and docs which are not security or
privacy sensitive, be published 2 weeks in advance of meetings, please?
This will allow community members to provide comments and ask questions
ahead of board meetings that the board can take into consideration when the
meeting occurs.
Thanks,
Pine
Pine
On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 10:24 AM, Stephen LaPorte <slaporte(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The agenda for the next Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees meeting on
> June 16, 2017 is now available on Meta Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.
> org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_board_agenda_2017-06
>
> Best,
> Stephen
>
> --
> Stephen LaPorte
> Senior Legal Counsel
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> *NOTICE: As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal and
> ethical reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for,
> community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity.
> For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*
>
> _______________________________________________
> Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately
> directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia
> community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> _______________________________________________
> WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
> WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
>
>
Hi everybody,
(With apologies for cross-posting...)
You may have seen the recent communication [1
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes>]
about the product and tech tune-up which went live the week of June 5th,
2017. In that communication, we promised an update on the future of
Discovery projects and we will talk about those in this email.
The Discovery team structure has now changed, but the new teams will still
work together to complete the goals as listed in the draft annual plan.[2]
A summary of their anticipated work, as we finalize these changes, is
below. We plan on doing a check-in at the end of the calendar year to see
how our goals are progressing with the new smaller and separated team
structure.
Here is a list of the various projects under the Discovery umbrella, along
with the goals that they will be working on:
Search Backend
Improve search capabilities:
-
Implement ‘learning to rank’ [3] and other advanced machine learning
methodologies
-
Improve support for languages using new analyzers
-
Maintain and expand power user search functionality
Search Frontend
Improve user interface of the search results page with new functionality:
-
Implement explore similar [4]
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Cross-wiki_Search_Result_Improvements/Testin…>
-
Update the completion suggester box [5]
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CirrusSearch/CompletionSuggester>
-
Investigate the usage of a Wiktionary widget for English Wikipedia [6]
Wikidata Query Service
Expand and scale:
-
Improve ability to support power features on-wiki for readers
-
Improve full text search functionality
-
Implement SPARQL federation support
Portal
Create and implement automated language statistics and translation updates
for Wikipedia.org
Analysis
Provide in-depth analytics support:
-
Perform experimental design, data collection, and data analysis
-
Perform ad-hoc analyses of Discovery-domain data
-
Maintain and augment the Discovery Dashboards,[7] which allow the teams
to track their KPIs and other metrics
Maps
Map support:
-
Implement new map style
-
Increase frequency of OSM data replication
-
As needed, assist with individual language Wikipedia’s implementation of
mapframe [8] <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps/how_to:_embedded_maps>
Note: There is a possibility that we can do more with maps in the coming
year; we are currently evaluating strategic, partnership, and resourcing
options.
Structured Data on Commons
Extend structured data search on Commons, as part of the structured data
grant [9] via:
-
Research and implement advanced search capabilities
-
Implement new elements, filters, relationships
Graphs and Tabular Data on Commons
We will be re-evaluating this functionality against other Commons
initiatives such as the structured data grant. As with maps, we will
provide updates when we know more.
We are still working out all the details with the new team structure and
there might be some turbulence; let us know if there are any concerns and
we will do our best to answer them.
Best regards,
Deborah Tankersley, Product Manager, Discovery
Erika Bjune, Engineering Manager, Search Platform
Jon Katz, Reading Product Lead
Toby Negrin, Interim Vice President of Product
Victoria Coleman, Chief Technology Officer
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/…
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_rank
[4]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Cross-wiki_Search_Result_Improvements/Testin…
[5]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CirrusSearch/CompletionSuggester
[6]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Cross-wiki_Search_Result_Improvements/Testin…
[7] https://discovery.wmflabs.org/
[8] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps/how_to:_embedded_maps
[9] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data
Hi everybody,
We have made some changes to our Product and Technology departments which
we are excited to tell you about. When Wes Moran, former Vice President of
Product, left the Wikimedia Foundation in May, we took the opportunity to
review the organization and operating principles that were guiding Product
and Technology. Our objectives were to improve our engagement with the
community during product development, develop a more audience-based
approach to building products, and create as efficient a pipeline as
possible between an idea and its deployment. We also wanted an approach
that would better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming
movement strategic direction. We have finished this process and have some
results to share with you.
Product is now known as Audiences, and other changes in that department
In order to more intentionally commit to a focus on the needs of users, we
are making changes to the names of teams and department (and will be using
these names throughout the rest of this update):
-
The Product department will be renamed the Audiences department;
-
The Editing team will now be called the Contributors team;
-
The Reading team will be renamed the Readers team.
You might be asking: what does “audience” mean in this context? We define
it as a specific group of people who will use the products we build. For
example, “readers” is one audience. “Contributors” is another. Designing
products around who will be utilizing them most, rather than what we would
like those products to do, is a best practice in product development. We
want our organizational structure to support that approach.
We are making five notable changes to the Audiences department structure.
The first is that we are migrating folks working on search and discovery
from the stand-alone Discovery team into the Readers team and Technology
department, respectively. Specifically, the team working on our search
backend infrastructure will move to Technology, where they will report to
Victoria. The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project
entry portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This
realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and
knowledge-sharing for the end user.
The second is that the Fundraising Tech team will also move to the
Technology department. This move recognizes that their core work is
primarily platform development and integration, and brings them into closer
cooperation with their peers in critical functions including MediaWiki
Platform, Security, Analytics, and Operations.
The Team Practices group (TPG) will also be undergoing some changes.
Currently, TPG supports both specific teams in Product, as well as
supporting broader organizational development. Going forward, those TPG
members directly supporting feature teams will be embedded in their
respective teams in the Audiences or Technology departments. The TPG
members who were primarily focused on organizational health and development
will move to the Talent & Culture department, where they will report to
Anna Stillwell.
These three changes lead to the fourth, which is the move from four
“audience” verticals in the department (Reading, Editing, Discovery, and
Fundraising Tech, plus Team Practices) to three: Readers, Contributors, and
Community Tech. This structure is meant to streamline our focus on the
people we serve with our feature and product development, increase team
accountability and ownership over their work, allow Community Tech to
maintain its unique, effective, and multi-audiences workflow, and better
integrate support directly where teams need it most.
One final change: in the past we have had a design director. We recognize
that design is critical to creating exceptional experiences as a
contributor or a reader, so we’re bringing that role back. The director for
design will report to the interim Vice President of Product. The Design
Research function, currently under the Research team in the Technology
department, will report to the new director once the role is filled.
Technology is increasingly “programmatic”
The Technology department is also making a series of improvements in the
way we operate so that we can better serve the movement.
The biggest change is that all of our work in fiscal year 2017-2018 will be
structured and reported in programs instead of teams (you can see how this
works in our proposed 2017-2018 Annual Plan).[2] This will help us focus on
the collective impact we want to make, rather than limiting ourselves to
the way our organization is structured. These programs will be enabled by
the platforms (MediaWiki, Fundraising Tech, Search, Wikimedia Cloud
Services, APIs, ORES, and Analytics) that the Technology department builds
and maintains, and they will be delivered by teams that provide critical
services (Operations, Performance, Security, Release Engineering, and
Research). Distinguishing the work of the Technology department into
platforms and services will also allow us to treat platforms as products,
with accountable product managers and defined roadmaps.
In addition to moving the Search subteam into Technology, we are creating a
separate ORES team. These changes mark the start of something big -
investing in building machine learning, machine translation, natural
language processing and related competencies. This is the first step
towards supporting intelligent, humanized, user interfaces for our
communities - something we’re thinking of as “human tech”. Not because we
think that machines will replace our humans, but because these tools cans
help our humans be much more productive.
Why these changes, why now?
When the Product and Technology departments were reorganized in 2015,[1]
the stated goal was establishing verticals to focus on specific groups of
users and to speed execution by reducing dependencies among teams. These
smaller changes are meant to “tune-up” that structure, by addressing some
of its weaknesses and making additional improvements to the structure of
our engineering work.
The process that brought us to these changes began informally shortly after
Victoria arrived, and took on a more formal tone once Wes announced his
departure in May. Katherine asked Anna Stillwell, the Foundation's
newly-appointed Chargée d’Affaires in the Talent & Culture department, to
facilitate a consultation with both departments to identify their pain
points, and better understand their cultural and structural needs. After
collecting feedback from 93 people across the two departments, as well as
stakeholders around the organization, she offered a draft proposal for open
comment within the Foundation. After making some changes to reflect staff
feedback, the Foundation’s leadership team decided to proceed with the
changes described above.
The leaders of some of the teams involved will be following up in the next
few days with the specifics of these organizational moves and what they
mean to our communities. If you still have questions, please ask here or on
the talk page of this announcement:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes.
Best regards,
Toby Negrin, Interim Vice President of Product
Victoria Coleman, Chief Technology Officer
PS. An on-wiki version of this message is available for translation:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Engineering_reorganiza…
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/…
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…
> Dan Koehl <mailto:dan.koehl@gmail.com>
> 30 May 2017 at 12:11 am
> Dear Michael, thanks again for your question and request. I hope that
> more members of this list will share their thoughts about this.
> I guess no one on the list were so ready for this kind of question, we
> have sort of moved slowly towards a moment when we think we are so
> many that we can start to look into next step, so far we were just
> discussing and discussing.
>
> Your question is interesting relevant, and should have had a much
> better feedback, than those weeks without even an answer.
>
> Lets bring your request a further step, so we can soon move it to the
> meta pages, and discuss openly.
>
> I have to admit, I was not totally sure about your question, and maybe
> this goes for others, would you mind tell us more about your plans
> with this and anything more you want to share. It sounds like a tool,
> connected to Wikidata, which already sounds very good for a Wikimedia
> genealogy tool. you may actually turn up with your request in the
> perfect moment, where technical issues needs to be discussed, we were
> simply not there, but I guess that the group members will just
> consider each and every step towards the vision of a wikimedia
> genealogy website as positive, why your question may actually push us
> all into next step..
>
> Please fill us in a bit more, and keep in mind, that most users on the
> list are not programmers, why technical details, may be needed to be
> presented in an easy way to understand.
>
> I will be excited to get some input from you all on this list, as well
> as weather we need to wait more, or should go to next step, and start
> to creat the user group, in order to contact the wikimedia for further
> questions to move on with the project.
>
> Dan Koehl
>
>
> Michael Maggs <mailto:Michael@maggs.name>
> 24 May 2017 at 3:58 pm
> There has been quite bit of discussion over the years about how the
> Wikimedia movement could engage with those who have research interests
> in family history or genealogy, and a centralised discussion page [1]
> has been set up on Meta.
>
> I am posting to ask whether there would be Wikimedian developers who
> would be interested in joining an open source project to create a free
> platform independent application called History Research Environment
> [2] (‘HRE’) for the serious genealogist or historical researcher.
> Considerable effort has been put into high-level planning over several
> years, and we are now ready to start writing code.
>
> While the proposed software is not currently an official Wikimedia
> project, if there is enough interest we are open to it becoming
> integrated or affiliated in some way. The plan is, in any event, that
> the software should be interoperable with Wikidata to allow (subject
> to the agreement of the Wikidata community) the exchange of a variety
> of structured data including verified and fully sourced family trees.
>
> I'd be happy to answer queries.
>
> Michael Maggs
>
>
> [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_genealogy_project
>
> [2] https://historyresearchenvironment.org
>
> (please excuse cross-posting for greater visibility, as the
> [wikimedia-genealogy] mailing list still has very few subscribers)
>
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