As a PhD student & hstorian, this looks like a really useful idea.
I'm not entirely clear how it would work: is it a GUI for are there any screen mock-ups or such like? Is it a sort of front end for databases like Wikidata?
And the strapline on the site "Towards a history of almost anything" is kinda scary. That's applying a single tool to a huge number of things. Is history that similar to genealogy, and then to biology as well?
John
On 24/05/2017 15:58, Michael Maggs wrote:
There has been quite bit of discussion over the years about how the Wikimedia movement could engage with those who have research interests in family history or genealogy, and a centralised discussion page [1] has been set up on Meta.
I am posting to ask whether there would be Wikimedian developers who would be interested in joining an open source project to create a free platform independent application called History Research Environment [2] (‘HRE’) for the serious genealogist or historical researcher. Considerable effort has been put into high-level planning over several years, and we are now ready to start writing code.
While the proposed software is not currently an official Wikimedia project, if there is enough interest we are open to it becoming integrated or affiliated in some way. The plan is, in any event, that the software should be interoperable with Wikidata to allow (subject to the agreement of the Wikidata community) the exchange of a variety of structured data including verified and fully sourced family trees.
I'd be happy to answer queries.
Michael Maggs
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_genealogy_project
[2] https://historyresearchenvironment.org
(please excuse cross-posting for greater visibility, as the [wikimedia-genealogy] mailing list still has very few subscribers)
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