Hoi, It is quite true that at the start of a project you can find the money to host the data involved. When you grow over a "certain" size, this becomes problematic. With enough people interested, you can grow REALLY big databases. Then again with enough people giving you can grow really grow .. The Wikimedia Foundation is the perfect example :)
The only question as far as I am concerned is, is this a project for the Wikimedia Foundation. Does it fit in what it aims to do. If it does .. why not.
Thanks, GerardM
On 3/25/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Angela wrote:
On 3/25/06, Benjamin Webb bjwebb67@googlemail.com wrote:
I'd noticed that you'd menationed the specialised software on wikitree.org, I'd just be intereseted to know what you think about the specialised software of Rodovid http://rodovid.org and what you, as someone high up the the foundation, think about it becoming a foundation project.
That looks good too, and I've no opinion on whether Rodovid or Wikitree is using a better approach. Perhaps there are aspects of each that should be included. I'm also wondering whether Wikidata will fit into this somehow, or whether the structure you're using on Rodovid replaces that.
The last time a genealogy wiki was seriously proposed as a Wikimedia project, there was little interest, and few answers to the questions I asked at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikipeople. What software to use and what to do with the Sep11 wiki still need to be addressed. However, it is one of the proposals that comes up most often, so perhaps there is interest there, certainly from editors, but is there enough interest from developers to give this project the software changes it would need?
The software Benjamin has written himself looks quite solid and reasonably feature complete to me. I don't see why he would need to attract interest from developers when he's obviously quite a proficient one himself. Wikimedia could certainly benefit from Benjamin's expertise, if we could win him over, but I'm not sure what benefit Benjamin expects to derive from Wikimedia. Whether or not this is a Wikimedia project, Benjamin will have to do most of the development and promotion himself. Hosting costs should be small during startup, easily covered by donations. If he can avoid Wikimedia's bureaucracy and run the project himself, why not do so?
-- Tim Starling
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