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

[Benjamin Webb]

On 25/03/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
> Angela wrote:
> > On 3/25/06, Benjamin Webb <bjwebb67 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>I'd noticed that you'd menationed the specialised software on
> wikitree.org,
> >>I'd just be intereseted to know what you think about the specialised
> >>software of Rodovid <http://rodovid.org> and what you, as someone high
> up
> >>the the foundation, think about it becoming a foundation project.
> >
> >
> > That looks good too, and I've no opinion on whether Rodovid or
> > Wikitree is using a better approach. Perhaps there are aspects of each
> > that should be included. I'm also wondering whether Wikidata will fit
> > into this somehow, or whether the structure you're using on Rodovid
> > replaces that.
> >
> > The last time a genealogy wiki was seriously proposed as a Wikimedia
> > project, there was little interest, and few answers to the questions I
> > asked at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikipeople>.  What
> > software to use and what to do with the Sep11 wiki still need to be
> > addressed. However, it is one of the proposals that comes up most
> > often, so perhaps there is interest there, certainly from editors, but
> > is there enough interest from developers to give this project the
> > software changes it would need?
>
> The software Benjamin has written himself looks quite solid and reasonably
> feature complete to me. I
> don't see why he would need to attract interest from developers when he's
> obviously quite a
> proficient one himself. Wikimedia could certainly benefit from Benjamin's
> expertise, if we could win
> him over, but I'm not sure what benefit Benjamin expects to derive from
> Wikimedia. Whether or not
> this is a Wikimedia project, Benjamin will have to do most of the
> development and promotion himself.
> Hosting costs should be small during startup, easily covered by donations.
> If he can avoid
> Wikimedia's bureaucracy and run the project himself, why not do so?
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
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It is a few days since Tim wrote this comment, but I still have something to
say in reply to it. Before I start I must remind people that it was my
fellow Rodovid user Baya who wrote the software, but that doesn't make much
difference to the discussion.

Tim suggested setting up Rodovid as an independent project, and although I
still prefer the idea of it becoming a Wikimedia project, this is a possible
alternative.

The one real issue is the matter of linking from Wikipedia and other
Wikimedia projects to Rodovid. If it did become a Wikimedia project, then
nobody would object to this: we could use link boxes like we currently have
for commons etc.

But what if the project is run independently, could any linking be done
then. Personally as a Wikipedia contributor myself, I feel having such links
would add to the quality of an article. However, I am sure others would
disagree with this and delete it as spam linking.

What do subsricbers to the mailing list think about linking?

Regards,
Benjamin Webb