Several different systems have been put forward as candidates to be "the" Wikimedia genealogy project. Of those, several have been in existence for a number of years and are in regular use. Yet I have seen very little on the question of why any of those may or may not have been chosen as a starting point.
It now sounds like more effort is being invested in a project to develop another such system - but I wonder how it can succeed. Since there isn't clarity about why any of the existing projects were not selected - how can another hope to be "more" successful. I'm not trying to throw cold water on the good intentions of people who wish to design or implement such software - but neither would I want to see their efforts come to naught.
I wonder if the better approach is to try to select a reasonable interim system? With the dual goals of beginning to accumulate a genealogy database AND serving as an example against which new software ideas can be compared? Or perhaps - taking the approach of creating something rather more like Wikidata - intended more as a centralized genealogy data repository usable by a variety of consumers (I know LDS was working on something like this - but I don't know where it stands at present). (FYI - I assume that Wikidata proper really can't be such a database - on the basis of notability requirements - however limited).
Please forgive me if my remarks are hopelessly out of step with what others may be thinking... :) !
-jrm
James Mason; Nashua, NH, USA
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