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

Sun Apr 2 19:06:53 UTC 2006

Benjamin Webb wrote:

>What do you think of the idea of limiting information to the names of living
>people? If our database of people was large enough, then there will be quite
>a few people with the same names, but they are actually different people. If
>we do not publish extra information, such as date/place of birth etc, it
>would be impossible to find the right person, so the inclusion of his
>mothers maiden name will not pose such serious concerns.
>
At this early stage of things a conservative approach to this issue is 
warranted. There are other issues that need to be tackled before we 
refine the privacy matters.

I was looking through the rodovid file and encountered the entry

>
>         Jessie Harlan Lincoln (Beckwith, Johnson, Randolf) (* 6
>         November 1875 † 4 January 1948)
>
This is trying to put too much into a heading. The additional married 
names should not be part of the heading. It is nevertheless conceivable 
that separate redirect entries could be created for the other names.

The asterisk and dagger are indeed standard symbols for birth and death, 
but they are redundant when these events are implicit in the format. The 
dagger could be retained for cases where only the death date is known. 
The ISO date format (y-m-d) should be preferred. This will have the 
effect of causing people with the same name to be automatically sorted 
by date of birth. Thus the above example could be reduced to

>
>         Jessie Harlan Lincoln (1875-11-06 1948-01-04)
>
Ec