[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki, wishes to become a wiki project

Sat Mar 25 23:17:24 UTC 2006

Brian wrote:

>I understand what your saying, but should note that I have seen some
>extremely large GEDCOM files floating around RootsWeb, with tens or
>hundreds of thousands of people within one family tree. There are also
>entire websites devoted to this, which connect several family trees
>together. So, it is not as far behind as people might think. It just
>requires lots of time and manpower (think Gutenberg's Distributed
>Proofreaders for censuses).

If you want to see a genealogy-related effort similar to Distributed
Proofreaders see FreeBMD:

http://www.freebmd.org.uk

They are trying to transcribe the entire General Registry Office
register of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales. As of
9th February 2006 their database contained some 112,700,000 distinct
records. That's most of the 19th century records and most of the
records of the first decade of the 20th century. However they've still
got to cover the remainder of those periods and the remaining 90 years
of the 20th century (to say nothing about keeping up with the records
eventually).

David Newton