Lars Aronsson wrote:
Benjamin Webb wrote:
The main reason I think that becoming a WIkimedia project would be a good idea is the recognisation. The 'Wikimedia project' logo would bring credebility to the site.
The software at rodovid.org is quite impressive and interesting. Genealogy is a very popular hobby.
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For a genealogic project to reach the world-wide status that Wikipedia has as an encyclopedia, it would be necessary to try to catalog every person alive and dead. This is akin to what the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) try to do. They have pioneered the microfilming of historic population records and censuses around the world, and there are now several initiatives to try to put some of these microfilms online as facsimile images. OCR just doesn't work on old hand-written records, so it would be necessary to manually transcribe the text from the images. And then you would have to question the reliability of the old written records, in a way that most amateur genealogists fail to do. This is not going to happen within the next several decades, at least not on any larger scale.
Having already been involved with several massive volunteer transcription efforts, including some that transcribe antique manuscript records for old hand-written records of the sort you are discussing, I think it is something not only possible but very likely to happen. This is really nothing different than what is happening right now with the Distributed Proofreader project, if you want to give an example of a group of complete volunteers working over the internet and skattered across many countries. Those volunteer transcription efforts I participated included the transcribing of all of the records for Ellis Island, as well as participation in transcribing the 1880 United States Census... neither one of those were exactly trivial and wasn't just microfilms but instead some very high resolution images sent electronically (for current efforts). My wife was involved with some early 19th Century church records from Lousiana... all of them hand written as well. The current standard is a monochrome TIFF images, but other data formats certainly could be used. This isn't decades from now, but something that is currently happening. Software can even be written to do some futher data processing to help clean up the image for identification purposes... like trying to get that pesky little letter you might think is an "o" but it could be an "a" or even an "e".
As far as the reilability, I've used both original records and the scanned TIFFs, and frankly I think the scanned images are even better than the original documents in terms of clarity of trying to decyper what is there. The originals are still valuable, and can be refered to by a professional researcher, but the need isn't really there for the most part.
Now it would be necessary for even more software changes to be made to a project like this, but it is possible to do some very exacting geneological research about people who are not even necessarily your ancestors. As usual, citations are very important for this kind of research, and the amount of original material that is available would amaze you that can be considered a primary source. What makes this kind of research interesting is that it has a very personal connection to the individual doing the research. You would be surprised at how many people would be willing to volunteer to help others out in getting some of this genolgical research.
One other thing to note is that geneolgists are loaded with money that they are willing to spend on worthy research projects. They tend to be people at the twilight years of their life and usually retired. Not everybody has the money, but enough do that some incredible waste of money is done.
Or more to the point, I think that starting a geneology project is actually going to be a significant source of revenue for the Wikimedia Foundation rather than being a drag on the resources. And a geneology database increases significantly in value as it grows. I can't say what the critical number would be, but having over a million names would certainly be a significant milestone to make any project, and people have paid some large amounts of money ($1,000's) for much smaller databases that might have some information they are looking for, or are even willing to do international travel just to get a few additional names and references.
With 6 billion people alive right now and one estimate of about 80 billion people who have ever lived, a few million names is going to be a very small number by comparison and there is going to be considerable room for growth.