User:Sam Francis/Genealogy wiki

Having recently developed an interest in my family history, it has occurred to me, as I know it has many others, that a family history wiki would be an invaluable resource and probably at least as popular as wikipedia. I've given it a little thought; here are a few notes.

A short time ago, someone emailed me about this, but I didn't reply and can't find the mail... comment here!

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Structure: Namespaces

The main namespace would be reserved for people, since articles on individuals would constitute the vast majority of entries. For example, you would find an article on Jane Ann Davison at <http://wikigen.org/wiki/Jane_Ann_Davison>.

There would be an Article: namespace with advice and information on geneology. for the Article: namespace. (The last example below, for example, would be found at <http://wikigen.org/wiki/Article:Genealogy_in_Ireland>.) We could have articles on:

• genealogical sources, with information and evaluation;
• genealogical societies and federations from around the world;
• genealogy in specific countries, such as "Genealogy in Ireland".

These are just a few ideas.

There could be a Place: namespace, which would, naturally, have articles on places from a historical and genealogical point of view. For a parish in Britain, for example, a description of the area it covers, the parish records that exist and where they are held might be appropriate. In a Place: entry on a US city or state, notes about where the area's immigrant population came from might be useful. A lot of wikipedia content would be useful in this namespace, as well as in the Article: namespace.

An Index: name space would also be useful. It would consist of indexes of people by, for example, surname, occupation, place of birth, etc.

Another possible namespace would be a Source: namespaces, where details of and links to specific genealogical sources could be put. For example, Source:1901 British census would link to http://www.census.pro.gov.uk and perhaps other useful sites, and give some backround on the 1901 census, including links to Article: pages on British censuses, the British Isles, etc. However, there may be some overlap with the Article: namespace here.

Other issues

Formatting

I don't have many fixed ideas on how to format a genealogy wiki entry on a person yet, but have a look at this example for a start. It's based on this genealogy wiki experiment.

Disambiguation

This would probably be tackled very differently than the way it is on wikipedia. Dates and places of birth are a lot more important in genealogy than they are for wikipedia articles: to disambiguate two Jane Ann Davisons, we might use their years or places of birth. For example:

• Jane Ann Davison (b. 1840)
• Jane Ann Davison of Durham, England

This would all be done on a pretty much ad hoc basis; each case will be different.

Are there any other things worth considering? Comments? --Sam 20:13, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Ethics

It's important to be careful about dealing with such deeply personal information as family history. For instance, one question is how much, if any, information should be put on a genwiki about a living person without that person's explicit consent. I'd suggest none — it might be all very well just putting someone's name, but they will inevitably be linked to their ancestors. It's a privacy and a security issue: people's dates and places of birth and their mother's maiden names are particularly important to keep secret, and many people would be unhappy about their personal details appearing online.

(Yes, security is a major problem! Perhaps http://CivicEvolution.ORG provides a security model?) --GeoFan49 18:31, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Rodovid.org

A wiki of this type already exists, see Rodovid. This project has been proposed as a Wikimedia project. Your comments would be appreciated.--Bjwebb (talk) 12:47, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Whitney Research Group

The Whitney Research Group uses a wiki for their website. Included are over 2,500 documents and over 3,000 family outlines.

SharedTree

I too have researched this topic a lot. I even started a wiki genealogy site for my own family[1] a couple years ago and found it to be way too time consuming for simple tasks, too difficult for the average user, and ironically not constrained enough to get people to document things the same way. The problem with a wiki family history site are:

• no security for living individuals - I agree with your comments above that no information should be available publically on living individuals. But if you don't allow users to document themselves while connected to their grandparents, then it won't get used properly. I believe you can create the right security model based on family relationships, but you need a database that you can automatically spider to generate the security.
• no database fields for searching, sorting, and processing - the beauty of a computer database is its ability to slice, dice, and sort data in any way you need. The blank canvas that wiki provides is great for documents with few fields if any, but it doesn't work for large lists that require fields.
• poor disambiguation, matching, and merging - wikis are illsuited for this task largely due to the above problems with no database fields
• too difficult for many users - although there are a lot of people familiar with wiki syntax, most people still don't understand how to "code" a wiki page. Getting grandma to document her sisters will be impossible.

My answer to these problems is SharedTree.com. Ironically, I'm planning on bolting the a custom wiki or wikipedia itself into the back of SharedTree to handle all of the family histories (articles, photos, etc). Let databases do what they're good at and let wiki's do what they're good at. Read my Founding Principles too. --Trevorallred 00:07, 29 December 2006 (UTC)