This is probably one of the better genealogy wikis I've seen, particularly because it supports GEDCOM import, which saves quite a bit of time. My main problem is how the software can help people figure out that two separate users' family trees are connected at some point; some sort of similarity-ranking system needs to be created (if it hasn't already) which would instruct users to merge pages that have more than N items in common (name, date of birth, location, marriage, children, etc). brian0918 Benjamin Webb wrote:

Benjamin Webb wrote: What really needs to happen now is to refine the proposal page and get it into a position that spells out in clear langauge what all of the objectives of the project are, and perhaps even what some initial policies might be. I would suggest comparing it to the following pages for a similar level of completeness before you get much further: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Modified_project_proposal http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikinews&oldid=87446 (to compare to how Wikinews did its proposal back elsewhen) After this, the proposal pages need to be translated into at least four other major Wikimedia languages like Russian, Spanish, French, Chinese, etc. The full list of suggested langauges is at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_project_policy Afterward a voting page needs to be set up and some advertisements for voting on the project need to be put on Goings-on for Meta and several Village Pumps on various projects. For the Wikiversity vote, I set up a series of ads to be translated on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Vote This really made it easy to go to the various Wikimedia websites and drop a note informing people that the vote was taking place. The idea here is that you need to involve as many Wikimedia users in the decision making process as possible, and to remember that not everybody speaks English. Indeed the non-English speaking group of Wikimedia users is so substantial that it really makes no sense to start a new major project without a major effort to get input from these other language groups. After that, you should have a legitimate answer or some solid input from Wikimedia users in general over if the idea is a good one or not. Due to the nature of this project, widespread input is especially recommended. Mind you, all of the above steps are outlined in the official New Project Policy, as approved by the Wikimedia Foundation board. The examples I cite are from successful projects that at least have the attention of the board and very substantial community support. If you want some assitance on this, feel free to e-mail me privately or hit my user talk page on Wikibooks (the best way to get ahold of me). Most members of the special projects committee (of which I'm not a part) would also be willing to help you out as well in terms of general assistance or to answer questions about this process. -- Robert Scott Horning

Robert Scott Horning wrote: So Wikiversity has received authority to proceed? http://en.wikiversity.org/ Still reports wiki as nonexistent. Unless the geneology project wishes to be in limbo for a couple of years they might better advised to ignore the advertised Foundation "policies". Has any wikimedia project ever been approved by the Board by following the advertised policies and procedures? Do they (the geneology project) have competing projects initiated at wikicities.com? Perhaps they could establish a reference book on geneology at wikibooks or an appropriate learning portal at wikiversity prototype and proceed while awaiting committee shuffling and participant selection process to gain legitimacy by grandfathering. lazyquasar

michael_irwin(a)verizon.net wrote: Based on comments from several board members (you can chime in if you want to) it looks like Wikiversity will likely be formally started as an independent project sooner or later. I don't know what the current hang-up is all about, but this is simply something that takes time. Or for that matter, if Wikiversity is shot down for reasons other than liability to the Wikimedia Foundation, I don't think that any other new project proposal could ever be initiated by ordinary users and become a full sister project. I was simply trying to point out that if you want to have a successful new project proposal, you should try to meet or exceed proposal quality standards set by some previous projects. Having an inferior proposal is only going to increase the likelyhood of its rejection and raise more questions by the board before it is accepted. -- Robert Scott Horning

Angela, 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. Thanks, Benjamin Webb On 25/03/06, Angela &lt;beesley(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Angela wrote: 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

To gain a bit more interest, you might talk to the people in this category: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedian_genealogists Angela wrote:

Hello again. Firstly, I didn't actually write the software myself. It was Baya<http://engine.rodovid.org/wiki/User:Baya>who did. I am simply publiscising the project as I am a native speaker of English, whilst he is not. 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. Also, of course is the traffic. The great benefit, that I will not get if the project is run independently is inter-wiki links. In the same way pages have a 'commons has media about the subject: x', if Rodovid became a Wikimedia project, we would be able to have 'Rodovid (or alternate name) has genealogical information about x'. Anyway, thanks for pointing me to the category Brian. Benjamin Webb On 25/03/06, Tim Starling &lt;t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au&gt; wrote:

Benjamin Webb wrote: The software at rodovid.org is quite impressive and interesting. Genealogy is a very popular hobby. However, most amateur genealogists that I know only research their own family, and within their family they are the only genealogist. While they can show their findings to interested family members, and share experience with fellow genealogists, the actual work is very lonely. There seems to be very little room for wiki-like, community-wide cooperation. It's more like a thousand bloggers, each writing their own blog, than any kind of cooperation. There could be exceptions to this. The first example I stumbled on in the English branch of rodovid.org was Charles Darwin, the biologist. Researching the genealogy of famous persons, nobelty or royals, even though they are not your own family, can be an area for wiki-style cooperation. 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. But you could try to do it for a limited area and period of time, such as a single small town or a handful of countryside parishes. So instead of just building Charles Darwin's family tree on rodovid.org, try to cover every family tree between 1750 and 1850 in the town Shrewsbury in Shropshire, England, where he was born in 1809. The town has 70,059 inhabitants today, and it should have been smaller back then. The number of people you have to map are quite within the reasonable size of a Mediawiki installation. When you're done you can expand to cover more towns or more centuries. Perhaps I'm trying to say that it would be premature to adopt rodovid.org as an official Wikimedia project. My best bet would be to market it as a software package to amateur genealogists, or perhaps provide it as a (subscriber) service like blogger.com or wikicities.com. I'm not speaking for the foundation, only for myself. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

Lars Aronsson wrote: <snip> 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. -- Robert Scott Horning

On 26/03/06, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: Surely the Wikimedia Foundation isn't going to charge fees, I thought it was non-profit. Have I misunderstood what you are saying?

Ray Saintonge wrote: The thing that the spin-offs from Wikimedia users (Rodovid.org and Wikitree.org) have in common is that the content is free to be redistributed and is not encumbered with sometimes very draconian copyright protections. And a strong spirit of cooperation among users to help each other out. The current drive to push for citation standards with Wikipedia is also going to have a strong spill-over effect for a project like this, where it would be possible to demonstrate the quality of the information. Indeed this has been a major complaint of some other massive on-line geneology projects like familysearch.org, where the quality of the data is seriously lacking in many situations. Another big advantage is the ability for people who have the correct information to be able to easily update the information and not require manuvering through bureaucratic red tape and obtaining a CS degree in order to be able to submit any changes. I'd also like to give an example of the typical licensing terms for most of these websites: http://familysearch.org/Eng/policy/FSI_terms.asp Note especially the clause: "All material found at this site is owned or licensed by us. You may view, download, and print material from this site only for your personal, noncommercial use or, if you are a professional genealogist, for use by a current client." Compare that to the GFDL, and you will see that most data has been signifcantly restricted for re-use in most cases, even if you were the person who submitted the information in the first place. GFDL (or Creative Commons type licensing) is one area where sites like what is being proposed here is going to blow all of the other geneology sites out of the water. 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. -- Robert Scott Horning

Hello Benjamin, if Rodovid (under whichever name) was to become a Wikimedia project, that would mean - It benefits from Wikimedia's fundraising drives - It is featured prominently on all of Wikimedia's portal pages - It becomes part of Wikimedia's press and publicity efforts - It becomes as integral to the thinking about external partnerships as other projects - It is maintained, to a certain extent, by our paid and volunteer administrators and developers... ..and so forth. There is always the concern that new projects distract from improving existing ones. For each of our projects, including Wikipedia, there are huge wishlists of software changes, community processes, surveys, partnerships, and so on -- we need to make sure that we grow at a manageable rate. So, from the point of view of the Foundation, accepting a new project is quite a big deal. That's why the processes to do so are rather complex. Part of the process is a community poll about whether the project should be launched within Wikimedia. Our process does not yet deal with "adopting" existing projects (this has never been done), but you could start a slightly modified poll, similar to the one at [[m:Wikinews/Vote]], and probably get away with it. Essential for your success is that you can generate not just a solid majority in support, but also excitement in the community about the idea. Such excitement was clearly visible with Wikinews and Wikiversity; I am skeptical if there is similarly broad interest in genealogical data in an experimental wiki environment. I know there are a lot of enthusiasts, of course. Even though the idea of a "World Family Tree" has some appeal, I am also not convinced that this is an experiment that needs to be taken up by the Wikimedia Foundation; given the primary mission to bring knowledge to human beings, it is natural for the organization to focus on applicable and practical knowledge. (Hence projects like Wikibooks, with its strong focus on learning materials, and Wikiversity, with its learning and research angle.) However, do not let this discourage you; if you truly want this to become a Wikimedia project, do campaign in the community for support. Only when such support is visible do I expect that the Board might get behind the project proposal in a big way. As a personal suggestion, I recommend changing the name before campaigning; something starting with "Wiki-" and reflecting the ambitious nature of your goals (such as "Wikiplanet", but that one is taken) might work better. Erik (not speaking for the Foundation, of course)

On 3/26/06, Benjamin Webb &lt;bjwebb67(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: The policy for new projects states that projects must be discussed for "at least a month" before a poll is taken: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_project_policy I see that the Rodovid.org talk page on Meta has been edited since February 22; it's not clear from the new project policy whether that would satisfy the requirements. You may want to wait until a month from your foundation-l announcement to be on the safe side. There are also other requirements, such as translations of the project description page, and the poll itself being organized by a neutral party. Erik

Benjamin Webb wrote: Are there any other intellectual property hazards in connection with GEDCOMs? Does the LDS church or anyone else hold any software patents? What verifiability standards would such a project have? What policies would such a project follow in relation to privacy? Attitudes toward including living persons in a genealogical database are not consistent. While I don't see any big copyright problems in relation to importing the GEDCOMs of others, I would be very concerned about the accuracy of these imported files. GIGO = Garbage In, Garbage Out. Ec

O.K., I'll sort out translation now. Who should I go to as a neutral party, any volunteers? On 26/03/06, Erik Moeller &lt;eloquence(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Erik Moeller wrote: How about "Wikigenes, The Family Wiki"? Ec

Concerning naming of the project, I have set up a page to add and discuss possible names: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rodovid.org/name. On 27/03/06, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote:

On 3/27/06, Erik Moeller &lt;eloquence(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Also, I would like to add such poll concerning with the Foundation level should be grobal, hence multilingual. With exceptions like Wikimedia Commons which is needed to be kept as unscattered, I have no reason to support any monolingual project as Wikimedia ones, specially after haven seen Wikispecies and its two years inactivity. Currently, I have found only English speakers showed interest to the suggestion and it brought me if our grobal community has interested in the idea now discussed. -- Aphaea(a)*.wikipedia.org email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com

Talking about multilingual MediaWiki, Rodovid already has a certain level of that implemented. You have one user account for every language and one watchlist for all languages. Also, because Genealogical data is facts, the database is shared among every language, with a different language enterface. So if you add a person in English, another person will be able to see that record in Ukranian. On 27/03/06, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Benjamin Webb wrote: Any patents or copyright claims on the GEDCOM file format itself is not really the point. This is an open international data format standard that has widespread support and usage from many geneological computer users, including many for profit and non-profit groups. Royalties have never been assessed for using the data format itself and likely won't be either. Trust me when I say that the internal politics of the LDS church would simply not allow formal royalties to be charged for it either, and there are geneological groups involved with the development of that data standard that have nothing to do with the LDS church either, although that is who has organized conferences and groups to discuss development of this standard. The copyrightability is more toward the data itself, and if databases of factual data can be copyrighted. The current political movement within the USA is to permit copyrighting such data, although traditionally common law rulings in U.S. courts is to deny such records for copyright, such as the copyrightability of names and phone numbers in a telephone directory. That in this case the information is based on facts that originated prior to the 20th Century gives an even weaker claim to the copyrightability of this data. I don't know how far the push toward copyrighting databases has gone, as that would take somebody who has really been following the concept in legal circles, nor do I know what the status of that is outside of the USA. -- Robert Scott Horning

To be honest, I don't really know either. I only really know from certain discussions on Wikipedia. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to let people import GEDCOMs from anywhere until we get some sort of complaint, and then think about what we are going to do from there. On 27/03/06, Robert Scott Horning &lt;robert_horning(a)netzero.net&gt; wrote:

This strikes me as somewhat irresponsible. Some GEDCOM files are huge. Are you suggesting that we just accept them as valid without any standards for verifiability? We also need to address the privacy issues. The copyright question may turn out to be a less critical problem. Ec Benjamin Webb wrote:

Ray Saintonge wrote: The best privacy policy I've seen regarding geneological information is to not list anybody who is currently alive, or in other words does not have a listed death date and is less than 110 years old, under the assumption that people over 110 years of age are so unusual that they deserve special mention anyway, or can be generally assumed to be dead. I think it might be safer for 120 years instead, but that is a fine point to quibble here. Some exceptions might happen for very famous people, but that is certainly something to express concern over. It is also something that can be automated directly in the software if a policy is set up, where the information can be added but not displayed if it fails the living person criteria. A good point to raise, however. -- Robert Scott Horning

Simply asking a person's permission would simply lead to chaos. The person whom you ask may agree, but his brother may not. A 110 year rule may be a little excessive. The US census, for example, is in the public domain after 72 years. BMD announcements in newspapers are all a matter of public record; telephone directories, property tax records and the Social Security Death Index are all publicly available sources of information. Ec Benjamin Webb wrote:

Ray Saintonge wrote: The point of the 110 rule is that it does fit with almost all known privacy laws throughout the world, and for geneological research purposes is generally not that big of an inconvience. Finding information for people who lived in the past century is usually fairly straight forward and can usually be done by asking a close relative that has personal knowledge and information about that person, or there are extensive public records as you have pointed out. And keep in mind that the "rule" included allowing information about people born more recently, it is just that you had to have a clear death date to do so, such as from something like the Social Security Death Index or probate records (both public domain information as well). I don't know how useful telephone directories would be for geneological purposes other than to confirm that somebody with that name lived in a certain location, and perhaps they had a close relationship (not necessarily marriage) with somebody else. -- Robert Scott Horning

On 25/03/06, Tim Starling &lt;t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au&gt; wrote: 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

Benjamin Webb wrote: You could, but if you include your brother you could be starting a family fight. What do you do about your underage children? Ec

Benjamin Webb wrote: Yourself, perhaps. I understand in part that you want to show a full family tree starting with yourself and going to your ancestors (or decendants if you are older). The problem here is that this information is all going to be publicly available for anybody to use and have access. Indeed, a very, very common "security question" used to help prevent identity theft is to ask what your mother's maiden name was. By publishing full geneological links in a public place like on a Wikimedia project, you are inviting fraud, identity theft, and violation of several personal privacy laws. With the Wikimedia Foundation so paranoid about something so insignificant as an IP address connected to a user account and the hyper paranoid (in my opinion) check user policy, this might be enough to kill this whole proposal completely in terms of violating privacy laws. More important, the suggestion here is that other living relatives may also be listed if a policy like this isn't implemented. They did not give concent to have their information posted in a public forum, even if on a technical level the information is available through public records like birth certificates and driver's license registrations. I completely agree that this is a sticky issue. I'm just suggesting that some thought needs to go into it and I'm also suggesting what other groups are doing who publish geneological information in a public forum. -- Robert Scott Horning

Benjamin Webb wrote: Of course you are publishing such information like: http://en.rodovid.org/wk/Person%3A1114 That is the kind of information that you are collecting, so having that basic information like age, place of birth, and where you likely are living would be available, which with a little bit of extra work is all you need to steal somebody's identity. I went through the process myself when I lost my identification papers and had to re-establish my identity from scratch. It was a slightly difficult task, but it shocked me at how easy it really was. All I started with was a college class schedule that I happened to have that included my name and my Social Security number on that form. From that I obtained a birth certificate, marriage certificate, a driver's license, a home mortgage, access to my bank account, and even a United States Passport. My entire identity right now is based on that one scrap of paper, which I've seen hundreds of those schedules floating around the college campus where I went to school, any one of which I could have done the same thing with had I really cared to impersonate somebody else rather than simply try to establish my own identity. BTW, I didn't even need to show my ID at the time to obtain the class schedule... just my name. Part of this is really because governments don't want to do the hard part of trying to establish identity from sources that are hard or impossible to forge, such as blood type, DNA, fingerprints, etc. The whole process of establishing an identity is something that can cause problems, and unfortunately public information such as a mother's maiden name, government ID numbers, and places of birth are treated as _passwords_ to establish that information. I think it is pure BS, but unfortunately the way that our society is currently set up. Any computer security expert would tell you a hundred different ways to set up a good password for an account like your Wikimedia user account. Using your government ID number as a password would rank right near the bottom of a suggested idea, and strongly discouraged. Why should your edit privileges on Wikipedia be harder to access and offer more security than your bank account? That is definitely a messed up proposition there and I hope it will change in the future. Until then, publication of this sort of information for people who are alive is going to be a problem. -- Robert Scott Horning

Benjamin Webb wrote: If you are using Wikimedia compatible software and/or public editing techniques I would encourage applicable sections of Wikiversity to link to your material. I would encourage you to find several other high quality similar projects online and come to Wikiversity and write some generic materials in related educational areas using links to all other applicable online resources. At the moment we are pending official approval and apparently caught up in the middle of the Wikimedia Foundations internal reorganization efforts so wikiversity.org is inactive. Try starting at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity. Some spam linkers are currently enjoying some success at Wikiversity primarily due to the scarcity of local content and scaffolding. I am confident that as our web traffic picks in a permanent URL space and our generic quality is fleshed out these links are going to begin disappearing rapidly. The large advantage I perceive to this approach is that it will allow you to keep your site focused on what you and/or your community wish it be while enhancing the experience of both Wikiversity participants and your site users. It will take a bit more work on your part initially and patience waiting for Wikiversity participants interested in geneology to get around to your few links among many but there should be no large maintenance effort as there would be if the Wikiversity participants begin to perceive your links as spam and delete them. Perhaps some of our biological or medically literate people (user:JWSurf is highly qualified and has been approachable in the past) could suggest learning portals related to genetics, biology, evolution, etc. where participants would find online detailed geneological information useful in demonstrating that science applies to human beings as well as the rest of the ecosystem. Another approach might be to publish an introduction to geneology in general at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page. Our Wikiversitians are likely to find your efforts there. If your site is referenced in the book or used for specific data illustrating various techniques then your links should be secure from most of the less militant link police. OTOH I am not familar with Wikibooks policy as I tend to use their materials in a read only or trivial correction mode at the moment. You probably will wish to review their detailed policies before investing any marketing effort there. regards, lazyquasar

Benjamin Webb wrote: At this early stage of things a conservative approach to this issue is warranted. There are other issues that need to be tackled before we refine the privacy matters. I was looking through the rodovid file and encountered the entry This is trying to put too much into a heading. The additional married names should not be part of the heading. It is nevertheless conceivable that separate redirect entries could be created for the other names. The asterisk and dagger are indeed standard symbols for birth and death, but they are redundant when these events are implicit in the format. The dagger could be retained for cases where only the death date is known. The ISO date format (y-m-d) should be preferred. This will have the effect of causing people with the same name to be automatically sorted by date of birth. Thus the above example could be reduced to Ec