[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki, wishes to become a wiki project

[Patrick, Brad]

To the Rodovid.org team:

I would really hope that the people who look into this don't ever
automate such a process.  One of the most compelling problems for even
life long genealogists, much less newbies, is taking a fork in the road
without knowing they missed the real turn a ways back.  Proof, sourcing,
etc. of a common ancestor, much less linking two extended genealogies
and really "advancing" a family history, should be worked out wiki-style
on a talk page of each ancestor before there is a "merge"; such an
instance may seem simple in the case of same birthdate, wives, children,
etc., but genealogy is a field where things are very often not as they
appear.

I applaud the effort to move this forward; my critique is certainly
meant as constructive.  The fundamental point of migration to such
systems is that quality is the only credential making the system worth
using.  If people upload a database of 1,000 unsourced ancestors, and
expect a program to automatically match them to what already exists, it
will be a failure.

-Brad 

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Benjamin Webb
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 2:57 PM
To: brian0918 at gmail.com; Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki,wishes to
become a wiki project

I'm glad you like it. As for similarity, when importing GEDCOMs, a
similar record warning appear, but this doesn't happen normally. I think
if you are doing it manually you are supposed to search for similar
records yourself.
Perhaps I could ask Baya, the site's creator, about the possiblity of a
similarity warning when editing manually. (I am posting to the list
rather than him because his English is not terribly good).

What do you think about the possibility of it becoming a Wikimedia
project?

Benjamin Webb

On 23/03/06, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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:
>
> >I have not yet recived any real reply about this project. I would 
> >like to hear from someone whether it could actually become a 
> >wikimedia project,
> and
> >what would need to happen before it could. Any comments would be
> apreciated.
> >
> >Benjamin Webb (User:Bjwebb on wikipedia, meta, commons, wikibooks,
> rodovid
> >and wikitree)
> >
> >P.S. It has a meta page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rodovid.org
> >_______________________________________________
> >foundation-l mailing list
> >foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> >
> >
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