Ray Saintonge wrote:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
All of these are aspects that are derived from Wikimedia users' experience with developing other on-line content. The current internal push for this sort of development is where users like myself have been so used to how things are done with Wiki software that we wonder why this isn't be done for geneological research, where these ideas of free access to information and the ability to freely edit the information havn't yet caught on.
Being able to freely edit is an important feature, but that opens up a wide range of other problems like our policies on original research.
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I think in this situation the term "original research" is not really applicable. By definition all geneological research is all secondary research in terms of relying on other original source material to prove if a particular fact is true or not. The closest that anybody is going to get to a traditional definition of original research with a project of this nature is going to be those who seek oral histories for groups of people who traditionally did not keep written records. I have a brother-in-law with Ga ancestry (one of the tribal groups in Ghana) where this is the only source of that sort of knowledge. This is an area of human knowledge, BTW, that is as fragile as linguistic preservation efforts, and a key part of the transmission of human culture.
I think this can be kept in check considerably with this sort of proposal for a geneoligical project, where research projects that have absolutely nothing to do with geneology would be prohibited. Another point to make is perhaps the prohibition of fictional geneologies, such as the geneology of the Baggins Family from the works of J.R.R. Tolkein. Even the use of ancient ancestral records such as those from classical religious texts like the Bible might be at least a point of discussion among participants. I think this is going to be the grey area that would have to be in check, not the prohibition on original research to keep publication of crackpot ideas off of Wikipedia. That is the main purpose of the no original research policy anyway... to politely tell people with these wild theories that Wikipedia is not a forum for primary publication of these concepts. A UFO researcher adding genological information about the ancestral history of "the greys" would be justifiably laughed off any serious geneological forum.