[Mediawiki-l] SMW and genealogy

[Bruce Whealton]

Hello all,
          I was inspired by the happenings on the wikia.com site,
http://familypedia.wiki.com
I had written a while back about being able to pull in external content into
a mediawiki site.  I was going to respond to that but could not find that
email.  Anyway, I had thought early on with regard to mediawiki and the
semantic web that this was a very appropriate use for such technology.  
       There are so many resources out there for genealogy research... it
would help to integrate the information in some way.  I don't know how much
of it is open source or open content. The big name that comes to mind is
Ancestry.com... of course they make money by selling subscriptions and so
they may not want to open up their content but has anyone heard of any
resource for information in this field that has made their data/information
available for a large global graph that the Semantic Web is?
          I'm somewhat new to MW and SMW, so I hope my questions don't sound
too ignorant.
1)  Is it difficult to copy some of the content from one wiki into a new
wiki that - that is to say copy some of the articles... an export of
articles and then an import elsewhere.  I know MW lets one export and then
import, so could one export a whole collection of articles or category of
articles and then bring them into a new wiki?
2)  Would there be a way to export the Semantic data as well?  Forms,
annotations, etc?
3)  Maybe some folks know more than I do about these things, such as the
reasons one might want to self-host their wiki, in addition to using
wikia.com
4)  Similarly, would this create redundant or conflicting data or is there a
way around that?  I guess one issue is about how open the data on wikia.com
is.
Thanks,
Bruce