On 25/03/06, 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
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
It is a few days since Tim wrote this comment, but I still have something to say in reply to it. Before I start I must remind people that it was my fellow Rodovid user Baya who wrote the software, but that doesn't make much difference to the discussion.
Tim suggested setting up Rodovid as an independent project, and although I still prefer the idea of it becoming a Wikimedia project, this is a possible alternative.
The one real issue is the matter of linking from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to Rodovid. If it did become a Wikimedia project, then nobody would object to this: we could use link boxes like we currently have for commons etc.
But what if the project is run independently, could any linking be done then. Personally as a Wikipedia contributor myself, I feel having such links would add to the quality of an article. However, I am sure others would disagree with this and delete it as spam linking.
What do subsricbers to the mailing list think about linking?
Regards, Benjamin Webb