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