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

[Brian]

I understand what your saying, but should note that I have seen some 
extremely large GEDCOM files floating around RootsWeb, with tens or 
hundreds of thousands of people within one family tree. There are also 
entire websites devoted to this, which connect several family trees 
together. So, it is not as far behind as people might think. It just 
requires lots of time and manpower (think Gutenberg's Distributed 
Proofreaders for censuses).

Lars Aronsson 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.
>
>
>  
>