I've used WebTrees, and WeRelate, and other software that takes Gedcom as its basis for structuring data (which is pretty much all genealogical software I think!), and I keep coming back to the idea that it's actually a bit of a limiting way to do things. Don't get me wrong: I see the attraction of having the software/file-format define a structure in which to work, it makes research more organised and makes it easier to share research. But it's not a good structure for publishing genealogical information. It's a bit like using EndNote or Zotero as the main output for a article: good for the writing process, but should be completely hidden by the time it reaches a reader. Genealogy should be about more than chronological lists of facts!
I used to put all my genealogical research on WeRelate (it's all still there, apart from one or two source documents I've deleted and moved to Wikisource I think). I got right into WeRelate, and wanted to help out with the software side of things — and that's basically why I'm no longer using the site. It's
running MediaWiki 1.7.1 which was released on
8 July 2006, because the genealogy parts of WeRelate were written in as modifications to MediaWiki core (rather than as extensions), and so it's very hard to upgrade. I thought it'd be possible to start the process of moving all that code out of core and into extensions, and so help get WeRelate up to the modern eara (and so get useful things such as
InstantCommons). I didn't have all that much luck with this, partly because there is just so much that needs to be changed to fit in with how MediaWiki now does things, but also because there is basically zero software development around WeRelate — there's no community of programmers, working together (as there is for MediaWiki generally).
My opinion these days is that genealogical software should
do one thing well, and so for instance not handle citation management or photo/media description; these are things that have good existing solutions and are not restricted to the world of genealogical research. (This is also why MediaWiki, rather than WebTrees, seems to me like the best platform for a genealogical website.) On top of MediaWiki, however, we do need
some sort of purpose-built software, because otherwise we'd be duplicating things like lists of siblings on multiple pages, and updating them would be a pain.
However, all that aside, if WeRelate were to be reinvigorated, and software contributions were welcomed, I'd probably head back there. :-) In the meantime, I'm (slowly) working on
Extension:Genealogy which does nothing much beyond making it easier to link genealogically-related biography articles via their infoboxes.
—Sam
On Sun, 14 May 2017, at 09:09 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
I have to say this strikes me as re-inventing the wheel. There are already several collaborative projects out there. My personal preference is for
WeRelate.org, which was the first of note. (I've been involved with them from the beginning and I'm a volunteer admin there.) They're co-sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy (a 501c3) and the Allen County Library, they're totally free (and always will be), and they currently have pages for 2.8 million people. It's one of the 20 most-visited genealogical websites. The Advisory Board incoudes people like Curt Wicher and Fick Eastman, and also Brad Patrick from the Wikimedia Foundation. Like WP, they use WikiMedia, so you all know already how to do everything there. WeRelate isn't the largest project of its kind, but we go to considerable lengths to avoid "drive-by GEDCOMs," where people register, dump a lot of junk, and disappear forever. In addition to uploading GEDCOMs, you can create and modify pages by hand. Most important, the fundamental point behind WeRelate is a single, universal shared family tree. Anything posted there is available for everyone to see and modify (though you have to register). There are no "private" trees, as at Ancestry and Geni, and no one "owns" what's posted.
Michael K. Smith
I understand the interest in creating a collaborative genealogical site.
The question I have is what kind of data standard would be supported?
GEDCOM is widely supported, but is biased toward a specific religious
viewpoint of what a family *is*, and how relationships can be described.
Are people aware of software like WebTrees[1], which allows many people
to work on shared family trees? I am not sure how scalable it would be
for a single world family tree. I have been running an instance of it
for a few years now, and it seems reasonably stable, but there are some
issues with the transportability of media assets (scans of documents,
photos, etc.) requiring manual backup.
What other kinds of software and data have been used by people in the
project? What kind of data product does the project envision?
Amgine
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