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

[Lars Aronsson]

Benjamin Webb wrote:

> 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.

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 at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se