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

[Robert Scott Horning]

Lars Aronsson wrote:

>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.  
>
<snip>

>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.  
>
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