Talk:Wikimedia genealogy project

There's clearly support; how do we move forward?

The other pages show that there's clear support for such a project; we don't need another signup sheet here. What we need is a way to move forward. In particular, we need to discuss the following:

1. Are we interested in making a new project, or adopting an already existing one?
2. If we adopt an existing one, which one? Or do we try to merge a few?
3. Should we gain broader input, by making a binding, Wikimedia-wide RFC?
4. Do we need input from the WMF board?

As well as policy discussions, which may be moot if we adopt an existing project, but still worth discussing:

1. Should we allow living people?
2. Should sources be optional, encouraged, or required?
3. Should any information be private (only viewable to relatives)?

If we make a new project:

1. Who will create the necessary software?
2. How long will it take to make the software?
3. What functionality is necessary, preferable, optional, and unwanted?

These are some of the issues we need to discuss. -- Ypnypn (talk) 22:03, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

I have been editing Wikipedia for a number of years now and have also more recently become active in WeRelate, which is currently the largest wiki-based genealogy project. Even if we adopt an existing project I think the policies will need changing. In particular, I think the WeRelate policies are a bit light in a number of areas. My tupp'orth in answer to the questions above:

AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

(These questions, and AndrewRT's responses, have been separated into subsections below, for organizational purposes.) --Another Believer (talk) 23:50, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Are we interested in making a new project, or adopting an already existing one?

• I would suggest a bit of both. There is significant support (although not unanimous) from the WeRelate community for becoming a Wikimedia project (see http://www.werelate.org/wiki/WeRelate_talk:Next_Steps). However, the site is still officially in "beta" and I'm not sure the site is actually fit for becoming a project just as it is. In particular, policies on inclusion, deletion, sourcing, copyright etc. would need considerable development and there is a large amount of "legacy" data that pre-dates a tightening of policies which might be worth leaving as it is. Some aspects - e.g. the use of google maps - aren't scalable. Some WeRelate community members might also prefer that we left the site at the very least to "parallel run" whilst the Wikimedia project is getting going. - AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

If we adopt an existing one, which one? Or do we try to merge a few?

• WeRelate is the obvious one, being the largest wiki based genealogy site by far. Thinking broader, it may also be a good idea to team up with the people behind FreeUKGen, an excellent project publishing free-copyright primary source material which could work very well together with a wiki site for the family tree aspect. - AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
  • But WeRelate has only English version. While Rodovid is multi-language like Wikipedia. — Dionys (talk) 08:04, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
    • Yes, but Rodovid is much smaller and appears to be largely dormant. Ideally you would want to use the best of both. AndrewRT (talk) 23:37, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Should we gain broader input, by making a binding, Wikimedia-wide RFC?

• I don't see how any RFC could be "binding" in any sense. Personally I would like to develop a firmer proposal first and then to go to the community with some specific questions (e.g. on the core policies, e.g. sourcing, living people, copyright, links with Wikimedia Commons) - AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Do we need input from the WMF board?

• Definitely. An early indication from them on support (or otherwise) in principle would be very useful. In particular, I think we should ask their counsel to look into the legal issues around privacy and whether the WeRelate approach to living people adequately addresses these legal issues. - AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Should we allow living people?

• Personally I would go down the WeRelate route of saying no living people unless notable but this really needs a paid lawyer to consider this issue. - AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
• If living people don't mind, then we can add them. — Dionys (talk) 08:21, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Agreed, but in my case that would only be of any value if my living father also consented. Getting evidence of consent could be very hard. AndrewRT (talk) 23:39, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
• A correct policy to protect privacy is a "living families" policy. This policy excludes anyone who is a member of a living family (that is, a family group with a living member). In practice, this policy forbids inclusion until up to 120 years after birth, or up to 70 years after death, rarely longer. This policy is unpopular with genealogy sites, since it means that few people one personally knew appears on them. However I have used it on my sites for years. I use a notability exception that includes parents and grandparents of the notable. Ggpauly (talk) 14:57, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Should sources be optional, encouraged, or required?

• I'm inclining towards making it required on the basis that it's not hard to do and it makes a dramatic improvement to the quality of the data. As a half-way house you could say, for instance, that GEDCOMs uploaded must have sources against, say, 50% of individuals. You could also make it easier to add sources during the upload process. - AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
• Can the project really be trustworthy without sources? Don't we need the ability to review one anothers' work? --Another Believer (talk) 03:20, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
• A non-indexed draft namespace (or something to that effect) may help in this regard. --Waldir (talk) 06:38, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
• Sources should of course be required. Beyond this question there are other considerations about sources. (1) Should every fact be sourced? Every individual? My preference is to be flexible as far as per-individual or per-fact. Sources often provide more than one fact about an individual and for most individuals there are few sources. Contentious or newly-discovered facts require specific sources. A dirty secret about genealogy on the web is that the primary fact for genealogy - relatedness (who begat whom) - is often neglected as a specific fact for source citation. (2) There is a cultural conflict between Wikipedia and genealogical sourcing practices. Wikipedia frowns on primary sources, whereas these are the "gold standard" for genealogy. Both cultures could learn from the other. In the case of genealogy, original research cannot be forbidden, and there is a wealth of misinformation in secondary and tertiary sources, so citing primary sources should be encouraged. Reliable secondary genealogical sources should be given more respect, otherwise every fact must be proven by every genealogist, an anti-scientific practice. (3) Original genealogical research may include logical calculations of arbitrary complexity. Time and location, religion, names, historical setting, occupations and other facts about individuals may be considered in these calculations. The citation infrastructure and requirements should allow and embrace a discussion of conclusions. Footnotes may be used. (4) Not every fact is equally well known. Particularly for relatedness: some relationships are well-documented and others are not. Some sort of probability indication for relatedness is needed to give a better idea of how certain a relationship is. Clearly the effect of uncertain relationships is cumulative, and this should not be an excuse to trail off into mythology. Ggpauly (talk) 15:46, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
• Obviously sourcing is important when it comes to evaluating the accuracy of genealogical data. But my experience has been that the ability to share whatever data I've got, even if some of it might actually be wrong, is an essential part of the process of getting it improved and corrected. In my own genealogical research, for example, I spent literally decades going around in circles (and then putting it aside for years at a time out of frustration) because the birthplace we knew for my great-grandfather was based on a single immigration record and didn't seem to actually exist at all. It was only within the past two or three years that the incorrect information helped me locate another relative -- I already knew she existed, but didn't know how to contact her, or even that she was actively researching, until I came across her post to a genealogy forum -- who was also asking for help with the same incorrect information I was struggling with. She had additional documents that she didn't know what to do with, but I had research contacts who did -- and upon careful examination, those documents led me down a new research path which finally landed me the correct birthplace in three days flat. So if we hadn't started out by sharing bad data, we would never have found each other in the first place -- and so we'd still be struggling with the same bad data and would never have found what we were really looking for. So when it comes to genealogy, the key isn't to ban all unsourced or "this is how grandma remembers it" data outright, because even the wrong data is still a necessary and critical part of the process of getting to the right data instead. Rather, you need to allow it in a way that sandboxes it as a different class of data than the properly sourced and verified kind. Bearcat (talk) 20:48, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Should any information be private (only viewable to relatives)?

• There seems to be a lot of support for this among genealogists, but I think it goes against the idea of a publicly-available wiki. - AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

  Agreed. Does not really resonate with the mission of WMF. Also, that seems hard to regulate. --Another Believer (talk) 03:22, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

  Yes, there are plenty of solutions for private genealogy out there already. Restricted visibility and/or editing of data doesn't fit the spirit of a wiki. --Waldir (talk) 06:41, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

• Part of the point of genealogy is the ability to locate new relatives that you didn't already know about -- that's exactly how you expand your tree, get new research leads, find out that some of your existing information is wrong, and on and so forth. If every tree is entirely walled off so that only your immediate family can see it, then the opportunity for progress disappears. Data about living people should certainly have a privacy screen on it, but locking down dead people too would defeat the whole purpose of even bothering with such a project in the first place. Bearcat (talk) 21:16, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
• Temporary privacy should be possible for living relatives. WMF is going to be around for the long haul (hopefully). Eventually, all private information would become public (120 years after their birth, or if they've been confirmed deceased, etc...) This should be no issue for the WMF, they're safeguarding information that could otherwise be lost if we just exclude it entirely. Supertrinko (talk) 20:00, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

If we make a new project, who will create the necessary software?

• WeRelate seem to have done a good job on this and have publicly sourced the code so that seems the obvious starting point (although it needs a lot of work doing on it - again somewhere where WMF support would be needed) - AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
  • The WeRelate code is a heavily-modified MediaWiki 1.7.1 and is a reasonably tricky starting point for any new project. I had a crack at porting their code to a set of MediaWiki extensions (i.e. without modifying core) and the main thing that I came up against was that the whole data structure was probably not the optimum way to go: it's based on Gedcom and stores all information in XML embedded in wikitext pages. Any new project would probably benefit from starting with a fresh approach. Sam Wilson 01:42, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
• Familypedia ditto. See http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Version. Robin Patterson (talk) 12:47, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
• Another MediaWiki genealogy extension: https://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Extension:TNG by Peter Roberts. Sam Wilson 00:21, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

If we make a new project, how long will it take to make the software?

• I'm no techie so I have no idea. - AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

If we make a new project, what functionality is necessary, preferable, optional, and unwanted?

• GEDCOM are my #1 as they are key to being able to scale. - AndrewRT (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

What now?

Assuming that there is support for a genealogy project, what do we (as a community) need to do to make this happen? -- Ypnypn (talk) 22:39, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

I think the first thing would be to find a space on Wikimedia where we could create an incubator-like project, and import/modify some test pages from potential partner wikis. I don't think it should be too difficult to start a beta (or rather, an alpha!) at genealogy.wikimedia.org or something.--Pharos (talk) 22:48, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

I do not believe there is a process to create beta projects like that. Let's make SPCom into a real thing... PiRSquared17 (talk) 22:53, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

We make the road by walking. Given that past proposals show a wide consensus for the idea of a genealogy wiki, while uncertainties remain on implementation and particular partnerships, I think the best thing is to start an incubator-like project not prejudiced to any particular implementation, and let that emerging community make its own choices, and evolve to the point where it can reach the Wikimedia-wide RFC stage for an "official" project.--Pharos (talk) 23:31, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

@Pharos: How should we start such a project? Should someone register WikimediaGenealogyProject.org, or should we ask WM to let us use genealogy.wikimedia.org? -- Ypnypn (talk) 21:40, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Who needs to be brought into this conversation so that this discussion does not become stagnant? --Another Believer (talk) 14:46, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

@Another Believer: I think an official RFC is in order now. It can be advertised on the Main Page, the Forum, the The Signpost, etc. And then, I guess, we will see if the WMF will approve this. --Jakob (talk) 17:43, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Jakob, there is already an RfC on the Main Page. :) --Another Believer (talk) 19:14, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

@Jakec: What, exactly, should we ask in the RFC? -- Ypnypn (talk) 17:56, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

@Ypnypn: Whether or not to launch a genealogy project under the Wikimedia umbrella. --Jakob (talk) 19:11, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

@Jakec:} To launch a new one, or to adopt an existing one? Or should the RFC mention both possibilities? (I, for one, am quite hesitant about creating yet another geni-site.) Ypnypn (talk) 21:03, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

@Ypnypn: Both options can be mentioned. --Jakob (talk) 03:06, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Requesting more comments

I sent talk page invitations, encouraging people to visit this page, to all contributors who made edits to the existing genealogy proposals (or associated talk pages). What other avenues are there for inviting discussion and participation? --Another Believer (talk) 23:16, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Add to Template:Main_Page/WM_News, Wikimedia Forum, enwiki Village Pump, maybe others... isn't this enough? PiRSquared17 (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, my attempt to understand how to add Template:Announce proposal to Template:Main_Page/WM_News was unsuccessful. Does someone know how to do this? --Another Believer (talk) 21:23, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Update: I attempted to add this discussion to the main page bulletin. I hope this was done correctly. Please correct if not. --Another Believer (talk) 19:43, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

It looks good to me. -- Ypnypn (talk) 19:59, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

OK, great. Thanks! --Another Believer (talk) 20:07, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

• Template:Main_Page/WM_News Done
• Wikimedia Forum Not done Done
• enwiki Village Pump Done

--Another Believer (talk) 20:45, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

• Wikimedia Forum Done --Jakob (talk) 16:34, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you! --Another Believer (talk) 16:38, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Is anyone active at one of the existing genealogy projects mentioned above and would be willing to direct traffic here for continued discussion? --Another Believer (talk) 19:41, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

The discussion on WeRelate is here, and more extensively here: http://www.werelate.org/wiki/WeRelate_talk:Next_Steps . The latter pages seems on balance to be more positive than negative about becoming a WMF project, in my reading. I've added a note about this page. — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 00:13, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Side note: You can link to pages on WeRelate using standard link syntax: WeRelate:WeRelate talk:Next Steps. -- Ypnypn (talk) 02:40, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

I also posted an FYI/invitation over at Wikidata. --Another Believer (talk) 19:51, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

I also posted a suggestion for inclusion in The Signpost, and invited members of (ENWP) WikiProject Genealogy to contribute to the discussion. Feel free to post similar invitations for genealogy projects at Wikipedias for other languages. --Another Believer (talk) 20:53, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata

Doesn't Wikidata provide genealogy tools? --NaBUru38 (talk) 23:23, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Talk:WeRelate#Wikidata. PiRSquared17 (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

No living people?

Why would we exclude living people, provided a publicly-available source can be found? --Jakob (talk) 23:34, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Because there are still privacy issues. If a local newspaper once published my date-of-birth without my permission, Wikimedia shouldn't post this permanently on one of the most visited sites on the Internet. -- Ypnypn (talk) 00:25, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

What is the reason we choose not to apply the same privacy standard to biographies at Wikipedia? Those articles are created from the same newspapers. --Another Believer (talk) 01:26, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

On the English Wikipedia, bios are not allowed for people notable for just one event, especially for low-profile individuals. See also WP:BLPNAME. (I'm not actually completely opposed to having living people on a geni-site, but it has to be very well thought-out.) -- Ypnypn (talk) 02:30, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

I see. Thanks for further explaining. --Another Believer (talk) 03:01, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Whatever is done, it must comply with wmf:BLP. So unsourced BLP info must be removed. Whether BLPs should be allowed at all is a separate but related issue, so I am posting below. PiRSquared17 (talk) 03:14, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

And even for notable people, we would only publish their own bio, without referencing other members of their family (except if they are notable by themselves). So this excludes children, parents, spouse/partner(s)... Except if these other persons participate directly in a public event or a public artwork creation or public show in their own names: we will still need to sualify the notability of these other persons for something else than a single low profile event (remember that these people also have a right to be forgotten, we should not promote them more and for longer time than what these persons initially intended in a limited participation with some limited public exposure (e.g. when participating in a collective event with many other people that are not more or lss notable than these "personnalities" for the same kind of participation).

Genealogy causes severe problems due to its nature of creating giant files about lots of people. Such databases are normally not given free access even where they exist. Wikimedia projects do not need to have a database containing personal bios of its own millions contributors with all members of their family ! And Wikimedia admins won't be able to handle millions of requests for removal via its OTRS system (we can't have tens of thousands OTRS admins without breaking completely the OTRS system itself for handling other issues such as copyvios.

Wikimedia projects in fact don't need this data because it has no educative value in any other context, it is not reusable, generally not free, and not modifiable. Supporting this project could cause severe and very costly troubles to the Foundation... Its too risky IMHO (and that's also why projects developing genealogy databases do it in closed project : they can control the access, avoid abuses and unwanted publications).

In fact I'd like to read some statement from the Legal and Community Advocacy department, but I'm confident that they will feel, with their lawyers, that this is too risky to be viable on Wikimedia as an open content project without risking long term sustainability of all other projects. verdy_p (talk) 21:18, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I would support this restriction: no living people unless they are famous enough to have their own article in Wikipedia. That should clear all potential concerns about privacy issues. Yann (talk) 12:01, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

many people would not mind though, for example personally it would be pretty interesting to be contacted by new distant relatives. It would have to be strictly opt-in though. Perhaps anyone who wants to, could be able to create a profile for themselves which could link to their Dispora/Facebook/LinkedIn/whatever pages, and link the historical tree into the modern world? It would need to be thought through how that would work though, how to authenticate users (maybe via their accounts on those other sites?) and then how to verify (via sources) that the family links they claim are also correct. Also apart from Diaposra those services are commerical and I'm not sure how that would link into WikiMedia's open source goodness? What's would be even more interesting would be finding living distant relatives in other countries and cultures, someone said this project isn't education but if I, say found some new family in India or whatever I could get in touch, talk to them, maybe even visit, and learn a whole load about another culture and contribute a little bit to world peace. If the whole world started doing that then it could have a serious impact on international relations!

I think it is important to focus on a simple target in the early steps, therefore I support the restriction to dead people if there are specific legal problems. We can always discuss further improvements/exceptions later, but let's keep it simple at the beginning (as long as we have open minds).--Alexmar983 (talk) 18:49, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

I can understand privacy issues, however I think WikiTree handles this the best. The pages of Living people are restricted to an approved list of people. Then those pages can become public once the person has a death date entered, or 120 years have elapsed since the person's date of birth. You'd contact the page's manager to get added to the list, or can create a duplicate if the manager is unresponsive, and the pages merged once the above criteria are met. I know it creates work down the line, with managing pages coming into the public, managing duplicates, and managing unresponsive managers, however the value in adding information while a person is living increases confidence in that information.

Pages "naturally graduating" to public because 120 years since birth has elapsed would be an interesting project where a lot of duplicates would emerge where multiple people have created private profiles for their family. This isn't a bad thing, just an opportunity to unify and grow information.

I think the general idea is that pages being "private" is against the wiki method. But I think it could be acceptable as a temporary thing. Genealogy is something that will last as long as the human race, it will outlast the WMF. So making pages private for a short period of 120 years isn't such a terrible thing. It's like a time capsule. Saving valuable information that would otherwise be lost in the name of privacy. Supertrinko (talk) 22:24, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Wikiversity?

Has there ever been any discussion about the use of Wikiversity for genealogical research? Original research is permitted there, and of course one could use all the normal tools for citations, templates, etc. I would imagine that the activity of compiling a family history would be fine there, as it is certainly a learning project (which is what Wikiversity is all about)... but perhaps the final product wouldn't be so welcome there? I'm not really sure. (I might have a crack at doing something, though, and see how it pans out!) — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 09:06, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

PS. There is a biographies page, with a small amount of content. — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 09:09, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

FYI: Ancestry.com Announces Retirement of Several Websites

MyFamily.com MyCanvas.com Genealogy.com Mundia.com

http://www.ancestryinsider.org/2014/06/ancestrycom-announces-retirement-of.html (via http://archiveteam.org/ ) --Nemo 19:12, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

review of WikiTrees

Here's a review of WikiTree by a knowledgeable user: WikiTree -- Kosboot (talk) 17:34, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

A suggestion for a different kind of site

I was stuck in a traffic jam today, and started thinking, what would I personally like to see in a Wikimedia genealogy project? (Long)

It's the data, not the wiki

As noted above, there are a number of existing sites using something like the MediaWiki software. They're all a bit the same, and they're all a bit unimpressive.

To me, the thing with far more exciting possibilities that WikiMedia is developing at the moment is WikiData, and the radical new technologies it opens up. So rather than thinking about how we might make Yet Another MediaWiki-like Genealogy Site (YAMGS), I'm more interested in what we could do if we had our own WikiBase database engine, also drawing on the main WikiData store.

What I would like to see is a really flexible genealogical data hosting system, using the same P-numbers as WikiData for properties, so the it would be trivial to adjust any gadgets developed to draw from one WikiBase to draw instead on data from the other, or to draw on data from both. Rather than one fixed way to view a "page", I would hope that there would be lots of different "views", widely customisable, so that even for things like presenting a table of Census data, there should be lots of ways to do it, and if one didn't like any of them, one should be able to create ones own, still accessing the same back-end WikiBase database. And rather than only being able to see the data only on a wiki, I'd like the system to be able to export views that could then be placed anywhere on one's own website. This is technology essentially already here (and when it isn't Magnus will have invented it in another half a second), for presenting data from WikiData almost however one would want, and re-mashing it into whatever context on whatever website one wants. It's a complete game-changer.

So I think the data is far more interesting than the wiki.

Private trees, plus a central public tree

Many views. As an example of this, I'd like each user to be able to present their own tree in their own way, so they can author their own view of their family's history. But it should also be easy to share.

Pulling everything from a database makes all this possible. In the same way that (say) an infobox can pull from WikiData, but locally over-ride or modify particular values, I would see each user's tree being able to pull from a central store, which would be worked on collaboratively. Much of the content in a user's individual tree would normally fall through straight to the content in the central public tree. However, the user would also be able to specify their personal assessment of items, so if for example they thought a particular John Heald wedding related to a different John Heald birth than the assessment of the rest of the crowd, they could specify that difference, so printing out "their" tree, it would connect the way they thought it should. One might imagine tools to analyse diffs between the private and the public trees, or a "flagged revisions" view - these changes have been made in the central public tree, do you accept them, or do you want to keep your personal version as it was for the moment, or indeed perhaps for ever. Similarly they could pull information to their private tree, or push information to the central tree, committing changesets. The private tree would be theirs to have full control over, to define its extent, and control its visibility, as they saw fit (including different visibilities for different parts of their private tree, or perhaps being able to grant others time-limited tickets).

The system could even simply be used just to host a private tree. And some might do this. But I think there would be a big incentive to also share, to pool resources, to try to reconcile variants, to build a common resource base. So while the system would allow people to keep private family things private -- eg sensitive stories, photographs, memories -- I think people would also come together to build central resources, including the central tree, which all could then build on. And it should also be easy to draw on Wikimedia's own central resources. So if an individual has an entry on WikiData, information should be drawn from there rather than the dedicated Genealogy project MediaBase. Similarly, everywhere should be able to draw fully on WikiData gadgets, or the central WMF historical mapping server, or images from Commons (though one could police CC-SA images not to be usable if the private trees weren't published "share alike"). Integration with Wikidata are the rest could enable us to do amazing things.

Knowledge for the world and private vanity projects -> a different kind of entity

Clearly, this wouldn't be your typical WMF wiki. It would be hard to ask resources to be diverted from supporting education in Africa to supporting a private vanity hosting service, albeit feeding a very worthwhile public core.

So a different structural model is probably appropriate. Instead, the picture above suggests to me some kind of arms-length entity, with people using the system as a platform to publish their personal tree perhaps being asked to pay a modest hosting fee, or have their private-tree viewers suffer mild advertisements. It wouldn't, I hope, be an all-out for-profit site like Wikia; but I could see instead a community-owned not-for-profit site paying an appropriate facilities rent each year to WMF, and so charging just enough for hosting private trees to raise that.

There's another reason a separate entity might make sense, and that's legal. There's big money in genealogical resources. If we do start creating a professional-quality resource compilations of transcripts or original materials in our database to source-link against, they may not be too happy. Especially if, say, our database would be automatically uncovering and reporting the variations of perhaps four different identifiable transcriptions of a 19th-century UK census, which our database would in effect have reassembled, and would be offering to the world. Sometimes it might be better to have smaller pockets.

Choosing our early adopters: a hole in the market?

Perhaps I should confess. I am actually a One-Namer, with a rather creaky old website, rather than mostly focussing on tree-like views and person and family pages as one would with a more conventional family history keeper program (though I have done a little of that), or an internet One Big Tree (to rule them all). So what I am describing above may sound suspiciously close to my own fantasy genealogical database server service, that would hold everything in a nice big specialist WikiData-like mediabase service, maintained by somebody else, with full datum-by-datum tracking of variants, reliability and sources; and the possibility of ever more new amazing scripts and ways to analyse my data every week, the spectacular creations of a whole community collaborating, rather than my own ancient flat files and endless horrible perl scripts.

But actually, I think the One Namers would be an interesting community to target (in addition of course to the usual well-known linked-record views), because there really isn't anything out there that serves them very well, which is why we have so many of us rolled our own pet creaky handmade personal systems, none of which is in any way standardised or could really inter-operate with anybody else's. It's a shame, because it makes it very difficult to secure the legacy of such a project. So I suspect there might be considerable interest in a common database server, so long as of course at the end of the day they'd all have to be able to engineer their own individual completely idiosyncratic personal views from that common database; but then see above as proposed. Plus of course One Name projects tend to gather (almost as their essential purpose) industrial quantities of highly structured data; and may be have built up quite an aptitude for scripting and databases. So they (we) might be quite an interesting consituency to talk to and accommodate.

A different kind of site?

I suspect the picture I've been trying to draw above is of rather a different thing than most !voters may have had in mind in the RfC. Nevertheless, I'd be interested to hear your serious considerations -- to build something new and radical, utterly embedded in WMF's key technology for the next decade: more than just what we have known and loved for the last decade.

All best, Jheald (talk) 00:07, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

• Addition: For the technical credibility (or not) of what I've posted above, I opened a thread at Wikidata (now archived)

Wikidata:Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2014/08#Wikibase_question:_database_branching_.3F -- Jheald (talk) 10:17, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

• Addition 2: It strikes me that a number of the existing MediaWiki based genealogy projects (eg all the ones listed on the content page) might be interested in such a project (would GenieData be a good name? Or GeniData?) as a wikibase database back-end for some of their data, in the same way that Wikipedias are going to derive from WikiData. Perhaps they could even support the technical work that is going to be needed to extend WikiBase to make it possible, especially the key new requirement of allowing data version branching? Jheald (talk) 11:19, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
• More thoughts:
  • One possible structure would be for GeniData, if we call it that, to be a formal not-for-profit collaboration between Wikimedia, various existing Wiki-based genealogy sites, and an umbrella group for single-namers (eg GOONS, if GOONS are interested; or failing that some organisation created for the purpose). This structure would avoid GeniData having to manage end-user affiliations etc. Each main wiki would be treated as a separate user, free to manage its own branch of diffs from the central tree, as would each one name project.
  • The wikibase would tightly integrated with Wikidata, sharing some namespaces, and managed by Wikimedia in return for a management fee, to cover service, maintenance, operations, software development etc
  • Four namespaces might be appropriate for the wikibase: P for properties, as per Wikidata, but with a distinct numerical range reserved for properties specific to the genealogy project; Q for items also occurring on Wikidata; R for records, which may often have a natural list format; S for information on subjects of the genealogy -- eg individuals and families.
  • Inevitably people will post material taken from commercially transcribed records. Whilst this may be copyright clear, per Feist, for full clarity it might be attractive to offer a deal to each of the major image/transcription licensees, that would release to CC0 any uploaded transcript from a single family, or single name, or single place study (perhaps), in return for automatic link-backs to their pay-walled images (which of course users would need a subscription to view) -- similar to the kind of link agreements the LDS Familysearch site has. In this way the collaboration would be a net traffic generator for the sites, more than enough to compensate for the slow leakage into the wild of their transcriptions.
  • Especially for the one-namers not affiliated through one of the wikis, middleware would be needed to support GEDCOM upload/download; reports in XML, JSON and HTML; and a batch access APIs. A category system should also exist to group particular groups of records, eg particular uploads, families, intended downloads, or any other particular sets etc. Deep integration with software like Custodian and Clooz should be possible through the batch API.
  • So, a new org to run it; and a wikibase, not a wiki. But a proposal that I think might be the best way to build bridges between the different genealogical wikis, while letting them all continue to feel independent and distinctive. Jheald (talk) 22:24, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Activity trackers and the quantified self

Genealogies have commercial value in medical research, even if they seem to contain very little health information.

If there is any wiki-geneaology, then it could be the case that it is also connected with some health information. Information like life span, places lived, and cause of death might be expected to be included along with the valuable data about family relationships. It could be the case that some people go further and add even more personal information, as is done with en:23andMe and en:PatientsLikeMe. I know that traditional genealogies are not health research records, but the two concepts mesh in so many ways that if they are not combined here, then they would be combined elsewhere.

I have heard en:Philip Bourne at the United States en:National Institutes of Health talk about a project called "A million patients for health", in which a million people make a health questionnaire and a health record about themselves publicly available. This would be very invasive of contemporary concepts of privacy, but these records will likely be available in some form some day even if it is only of deceased people. Medical research is greatly stifled by not having access to some really basic information about people's health and their relationships with others.

Lately I have been thinking more of genealogies and health information. I wrote a bit on my personal blog about these things.

• Activity trackers and the quantified self in medicine
• My current projects relating to large data sets

I thought I would share here on Wikipedia, because if there ever is a genealogy project here, I will not be the only one who imagines connecting it to medical records. The value to individual families is great and persuasive, but also, the value to research and potential for commercial exploitation is immense also. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:00, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Strong support

With over 50 users supporting this project, what is the next step to realize the plans? Dan Koehl (talk) 08:40, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Involvement from existing genealogy communities. Continued, detailed discussion about the information that would live on the wiki and its infrastructure. A designated space to design a mockup. Where the latter would take place, I am not sure. Does anyone know who to approach? -Another Believer (talk) 21:58, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

I replied below. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:35, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Potential partners

• en:FamilySearch comes to my mind as a highly-respected nonprofit, international, multilingual genealogy project. It would be an oversight to fail to contact them seeking collaboration if this project progressed.
• en:Archive Team saved en:Ancestry.com information, as described on their site. Thanks to Nemo bis above who shared this originally.
• Since this is a multilingual project, Wikidata will be involved. Probably d:Wikidata:WikiProject Wikidata for research is the proposal most likely to develop infrastructure to develop a project like this. That proposal is seeking comment now.
• en:Familypedia is a mediawiki genealogy website which uses CC-By licensing. Thanks Robin Patterson for sharing this above.

Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:35, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Jimmy Wales

Just thought I would share his comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Wikimedia_genealogy_project. -Another Believer (talk) 15:38, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

I agree with him but I also think that if you play it smart, a new project can be succesful. I wrote something similar on it.wiki months ago, IMHO the core target is to create an ifrastructure that shows clear synergy with the existing projects. If you keep it like a wikidata-like project, focusing in providing at least a clear support for existing articles at least in its early years of development, I see no reason why it should fail. I could be slower to warm up than expected, but it shouldn't fail.

If now we have a simple code to unify interlinks, in the future we will have a simple code to reproduce/access the genalogy of a biography article without local templates and so on, for example. Considering that these articles are frequent, that seems to me as useful as wikispecies. Maybe not as useful as a unified project for sources code and bibliography, for example, yet still gobally time-saving. It is still worth the time you will spend to set it up.--Alexmar983 (talk) 18:28, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Signpost?

In February this discussion will pass a one-year mark, and so far more than 100 distinct authors have contributed to the page. I am glad to see the conversation continue. Over the past two days, I pinged the Top 100 most active contributors and invited them to contribute to this discussion. I wonder if it might also bring attention to this debate if there were a writeup re: a potential WMF genealogy for The Signpost. Perhaps someone arguing in support of the project and other in opposition? Just a thought. Other ideas, or volunteers? -Another Believer (talk) 17:53, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

When the The Signpost does WikiProject reviews, they ask any WikiProject members to respond to a set of questions. If here someone posted 3-4 questions and asked for responses, then that might summarize the discussion well enough to be a Signpost article. For my own part, I would volunteer to give a medical research perspective if other people gave other perspectives. A perspective on implementation and another one on family use might be expected. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:15, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Positive notes and marketing

I just read a few lines on Wikispecies, which I was thinking could easily apply on this project:

What will Wikispecies become eventually? As said before, this will widely depend on the users of this resource and on the will to share knowledge. Right now, there is an enormous pool of information online, which can be found on a variety of websites. One of these is www.itis.gov, which is something like an official resource. Another very good source is www.biolib.cz/en/main. Most other sources are protected by copyrights, often not very user-friendly, or limited to a select group of species. This is very similar to the situation on general encyclopedias before 2001. Then, Wikipedia was released and became an instant success. Wikipedia has proved that the concept of self-administered information can work excellently. There is no reason to believe that Wikispecies should not become a valuable source of information.

I believe those lines could be equally used for this project, just switching the word Wikispecies and some names of websites.?

Dan Koehl (talk) 23:59, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

I think we are at a point where we have confirmed interest in a genealogy project, but also collected many concerns, some of which are easier to address than others. The primary question is really, "where do we go from here"? How can we get other genealogy communities to collaborate? Where can we stage and experiment with possible project entries? Where we can discuss in detail concerns re: BLP, living vs. dead, original research, software, etc.? I am not sure how other Wikimedia projects have entered larger community discussions or where they were tested in an incubator setting. Here?: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Main_Page -Another Believer (talk) 00:56, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

I just stumbled upon New project process. -Another Believer (talk) 22:10, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

It sure looks like the proper place to take the second step! Dan Koehl (talk) 22:55, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Note that page is still a draft, so it's not a real policy or guideline. -- Ypnypn (talk) 23:27, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

I have a question: do we have on the wikimedia community the same incubation procedure for "language" projects and "coordination-multicultural" project? --Alexmar983 (talk) 15:55, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Development on Wikidata

Wikidata is for entries which meet notability criteria, so most people cannot have their biographical information there, but there is still software development to track the genealogy of royalty, for example.

On Histropedia there is a tutorial on how to make a descendants timeline in Wikidata. Anyone interested in seeing how a genealogy in a Wikimedia project might look should check this out. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:17, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

I've just had a look. One option was to skip the tutorial and see only the timeline of Queen Victoria's descendants. But I reached http://histropedia.com/Home.aspx?fqy5jlqdjs and could not see any data on it - impressive zoomable display of dates etc though. Robin Patterson (talk) 04:04, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata presumably has concepts in common with Semantic MediaWiki, which Familypedia uses (currently using over 900 properties). (No notablity requirement, and sources are not compulsory but are encouraged. - there may be a better place on this page for some of that info, but it's a big page!) Robin Patterson (talk) 04:04, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Template:New sister project proposal

It might be worth considering this template and/or Proposals for new projects. What do page watchers think, and are there any who would be interested in working on a draft? -Another Believer (talk) 03:04, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Minimally functioning MediaWiki extension

I've been playing with some tiny ideas about what a MediaWiki genealogy extension could look like. See mw:Extension:Genealogy. Be warned: it doesn't do much yet! :-) Sam Wilson 05:09, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Exciting! I tried to download the files and so on, but the documentation was not so easy to understand, and I couldn't perform everything in order to download/upload/create extensions etc. Dan Koehl (talk) 08:27, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

@Dan Koehl: Hm, sorry to hear it! :-( What was confusing? Did you get any particular errors? You should be able to download and install like all other extensions. Was the template set-up too complicated? (Sorry for the slow reply, by the way; the {{ping}} template is useful on Meta!) Sam Wilson 07:33, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

You may not need a new extension. Familypedia works well with three existing semantic extensions. See its Version list and http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Special:SemanticStatistics. Robin Patterson (talk) 04:13, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject Genealogy - newsletter No.1

The newsletter below may be of interest to users fallowing this talk page:

Newsletter Nr 1 for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta) Participation: This is the very first newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise. (To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, see below) Progress report: Since the Projects very first edit 9 december 2002 by User:Dan Koehl, which eventually became the WikiProject Genealogy, different templates were developed, and the portal en:Portal:Genealogy was founded by User:Michael A. White in 2008. Over the years a number of articles has been written, with more or less association to genealogy. And, very exciting, there is a proposal made on Meta by User:Another Believer to found a new Wikimedia Genealogy Project, read more at Meta; Wikimedia genealogy project where you also can support the creation with your vote, in case you havnt done so already. Future: The future of the Genealogy project on the English Wikipedia, and a potential creation of a new Wikimedia Genealogy Project, is something where you can make a an input. You can discuss on the projects talk page how the project should be developed sign as member or supporter at the projects member list Check the goal, tasks and see if something interest you. put the User box on your user page by inserting the en:Template:User WikiProject Genealogy with the following code: {{User WikiProject Genealogy}}. develop or update the en:Portal:Genealogy? in case you havnt read Wikimedia genealogy project take a look support that project with your vote. Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy founder and coordinator user:Dan Koehl To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery Dan Koehl (talk) 22:28, 6 February 2017 (UTC) Dan Koehl (talk) 01:16, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for creating and distributing this newsletter, and for pushing the genealogy conversation forward, User:Dan Koehl.. -Another Believer (talk) 02:14, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Yes, hear hear. Good to see this progressing. Maybe we should look at setting up a demo genealogy wiki somewhere? Sam Wilson 03:16, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Yes, why not? In that case we could alreadybegin working a little bit with the layout, will make us better prepared? Dan Koehl (talk) 03:28, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia user group

A couple editors have expressed interest in creating a Wikimedia user group related to genealogy. This group could push forward the conversation about the Wikimedia Foundation hosting a genealogy sister project, maintain WikiProject Genealogy (English Wikipedia), and support other genealogy-related Wikimedia efforts. As a reminder, here at the eligibility requirements for becoming a user group. Are there editors who would be interested in joining/supporting this group's efforts? To comply with eligibility requirements, we need a group of active editors (preferably 10+), a wiki page where we outline our goals and scope, and a user name, before applying for user group status. I invite interested editors to share their thoughts below. -Another Believer (talk) 01:42, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Interested Participants

• -Another Believer (talk) 01:42, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
• Sam Wilson 02:14, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
• Dan Koehl (talk) 10:04, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
•  Klaas `Z4␟` V:  08:11, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Name?

What might the user group be called? Here are some ideas:

• Wikimedia Genealogy User Group
  •  Support (also support WikiProject Genealogy User Group) -Another Believer (talk) 00:01, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support This is nice and clear, even to people outside the movement probably. Sam Wilson 06:01, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support This is more general and fitting the goal of support of use of Wikimedia for Genealogy. Carsrac (talk) 12:22, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support Dan Koehl (talk) 12:35, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support  Klaas `Z4␟` V:  08:12, 25 March 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support The most appropriate of the list, in my opinion. Robin Patterson (talk) 23:25, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
• WikiProject Genealogy User Group
  •  Support Initially, WikiProject Genealogy User Group can be an umbrella project for the coordination of different language projects, and the creation of Wikimedia Genealogy User Group. Dan Koehl (talk) 10:09, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support (also support Wikimedia Genealogy User Group) -Another Believer (talk) 00:01, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
  •  Oppose "WikiProject" is not specifically Wikimedia, is it? Robin Patterson (talk) 23:25, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
• Genealogy Community User Group
  •  Oppose Too general. Robin Patterson (talk) 23:25, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
• One of: Familypedia, GlobalFamilyTree, Rodovid, WeRelate, Wikimorial, Wikipeople, WikiTree, FamilyWiki, GeneaWiki, Wikicestry, WikiGenea, Wikigenes, Wikiplanet, or Wikitree — followed by "User Group" (list taken from the project page)
  •  Oppose None of these names are related to the Wikimedia community/movement. -Another Believer (talk) 00:01, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
    • I agree, but the general idea of the user group name matching the name of the proposed project could have merit I think — if we could but think of a good name for the project! :-) Then it would follow the form of e.g. Wikisource Community User Group etc. and it'd be clearer that it's aiming to set up a project. So something like Wikibio Community User Group etc. Sam Wilson 06:01, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
  •  Oppose All of those names are the end-result of the discussion not the starting point, maybe later if a choice is made it would good to set it up, but for now too soon and too quick. Carsrac (talk) 12:15, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Other ideas? -Another Believer (talk) 01:42, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

• Wiki Genealogy User Group
  •  Support Since it will be about both a Wikimedia project and how to combine the existing wiki genealogy projects [which are all literally wikis, in addition to whatever genalogy data formats they support]. –SJ talk  05:30, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support This would be inclusive of the wide wiki world outside of Wikimedia (if that's a good idea; I think it could be). Sam Wilson 06:12, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support, you both have a point there. Dan Koehl (talk) 08:02, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support I would be fine with this name as well. Thanks for the suggestion, User:Sj. -Another Believer (talk) 02:53, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
  •  Oppose Too general. If the project is to be linked to WM eventually, the name should include that. If it isn't, it shouldn't be on Meta. Robin Patterson (talk) 23:25, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

Goals and Scope

Thoughts? -Another Believer (talk) 01:42, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

• To settle on a name
• To document the workings of genealogical matters across the Wikimedia projects
• To support the use of MediaWiki as a platform for genealogical research and publication
• To aim at setting up a project wiki

Propose new project or support adoption?

On the page Proposals for new projects a proposal for a new project can be done. I was thinking that this is the right place to make a suggestion, so it makes its way to open proposals and new projects.

Further down on that page, there is a section with suggestions reg adoption of existing projects at Proposed project adoption, of which some are genealogy projects. Would it make sense to support such an adoption of an existing project, or do we wish to create our own? Dan Koehl (talk) 13:16, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

Three of the genealogy proposals are listed there for adoption: WeRelate, Rodovid, and WikiTree. I think the WikiTree proposal can be closed because that project appears to be a closed-source commercial service now. And of the other two, I'd say adopting either could make sense. I'd lean in favour of working with WeRelate, but that's probably because I've got most experience with that project and software. Either way, I think there's lots to be gained from sticking with an existing proposal (unless a new proposal is going to be significantly different). Sam Wilson 00:13, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

You have a good point there, Sam, and that means the project would begin with a site already having content, which would mean a lot in regard to get users to the site, rather than starting from scratch. Dan Koehl (talk) 00:17, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

@Dan Koehl: The approach I was working on for WeRelate was to create a set of MediaWiki extensions that replicate the current site's operation, as well as a system for synchronising the data from the current site, so that independent genealogy wikis could be set up and kept up to date. This would mean that the transition to more modern software could be done gradually, and also that long-term there would be one central wiki for all the public data and many other wikis for private data. The main problems I found were related to the ways in which werelate does a bunch of things (such as citations) differently, and imposes much more structure on an editor than base-MediaWiki does, and so there were various conflicts... I'm sure it could be figured out though! —Sam Wilson 04:14, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

As a fairly new (though barely active) member of WikiTree, I can't understand how anyone could say it's commercial. Home page https://www.wikitree.com/ says "Everything on WikiTree is free ...". More to the point, perhaps, is its privacy policy, which does not sit well with WikiMedia principles. Despite my devotion to Familypedia (having made 50,000 edits since 2005), I'm also impressed with WikiTree, especially its display options. A merger of the two, with access to Wikidata's expertise and data etc, would be marvellous. Any chance we could combine their existing software? (Familypedia's data, including 90 million semantic facts about 60,000 people, is all CC-BY-SA. WikiTree has over 13 million individuals but doubtless has different ways of relating them.) Robin Patterson (talk) 04:53, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

WikiTree runs ads. Those ads make money for the people hosting the website. Or more precise for the company INTERESTING.COM, INC. But that isn't the main problem. The license simply isn't CC-BY-SA. Their policy is rather: "Permissions are granted on an individual basis since we have not developed a standard license yet. Do not access or use the data without permission."

They follow up by saying 'The website says: Generally speaking, usage should be non-commercial, but commercial purposes may be allowed. We need to make sure they are consistent with the WikiTree Pledge, i.e. "we will never knowingly and willingly sell or transfer the worldwide family tree to any individual or organization that intends to charge for access to it."'

That pledge is not compatible with CC-BY-SA. ChristianKl (talk) 15:39, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Let's find a way to combine those projects whose founders are willing, the result being freely licensed, highly visible, and integrated with Wikidata. A family tree is the canonical example of a project for which there should be a central shared data store, even if there are many different flavors and sites that use that data. [Each of the participating projects can continue to run their own site, even choose just a subset of the whole global tree, host ads on that site, &c. But we should be using the same knowledge store on the backend :) ] –SJ talk  23:00, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Each of the different genealogy wiki projects out there, WikiTree, Rodovid, WeRelate, FamilySearch, all handle things differently. Some allow the living, some do not, some are more database focused, others biographical. It makes sense that instead of picking one, a WMF project would wish to cherry pick the best features of them all. Therefore I think a new project would be best, however with extensive involvement from all these projects is the right way forward. Some may wish to merge, some may wish to remain but provide advice or work together. All of this would be beneficial to WMF. Supertrinko (talk) 02:14, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

WikiProject Genealogy - newsletter No.2

The newsletter below may be of interest to users following this talk page:

Newsletter Nr 2 for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta) Participation: This is the second newsletter sent by mass mail to members in w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise. (To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below) Progress report: In order to improve communication between genealogy interested wikipedians, as well talking in chat mode about the potential new wiki, a new irc channel has been setup, and you are welcome to visit and try it out at: #wikimedia-genealogyconnect (In case you are not familiar with IRC, or would prefer some info and intro, please see Wikipedias IRC tutorial) At Talk:Wikimedia_genealogy_project#Wikimedia_user_group is discussed the possibility of creating a genealogy-related Wikimedia user group: please submit comments and suggestions, and whether you would like to be a member in such a group. Prime goal for the group is the creation of a new, free, genealogy wiki, but there is also a discussion weather we should propose a new project or support the adoption of an existing project? Read more at Meta; Wikimedia genealogy project where you also can support the creation with your vote, in case you haven't done so already. Future: The future of the Genealogy project, and creation of a new Wikimedia Genealogy Project, is something where you can make a an input. You can discuss on the projects talk page how the project should be developed sign as member or supporter at the projects member list put the User box on your user page by inserting the en:Template:User WikiProject Genealogy with the following code: {{User WikiProject Genealogy}}. develop or update the en:Portal:Genealogy? in case you haven't read Wikimedia genealogy project take a look support that project with your vote. Don't want newsletters? If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add en:Category:Opted-out of message delivery to your user talk page. Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator User:Dan Koehl To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

Dan Koehl (talk) 15:53, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Mail list?

Would it benefit the project with an email list, (like genealogy-l@@lists.wikimedia.org) where interested users could discuss, exchange ideas and suggestions,etc? I think in order to request such a list, we need to have some sort of consensus, indicating a group wish to have such a list created. Dan Koehl (talk) 00:25, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support Sounds like a good plan! I think the new-style naming guidelines would be for e.g. [email protected]. But whatever it's called, I'll subscribe. :-)

And for those that missed it, there's also now the #wikimedia-genealogy^connect IRC channel. Sam Wilson 04:32, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support I'd subscribe. -Another Believer (talk) 18:10, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support I would subscribe (and probably respond from time to time). Robin Patterson (talk) 11:10, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support, I will also subscribe. Dan Koehl (talk) 13:08, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 18:55, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support The faster we can get this project moving, the better! Quibilia (talk) 19:27, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support. I'll subscribe.--Arbnos (talk) 21:23, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support. I'll subscribe. -JohnAlbertRigali (talk) 23:34, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support. Do not know yet if I'll subscribe  Klaas `Z4␟` V:  07:42, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support. I would subscribe. MTC (talk) 08:09, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support Gap9551 (talk) 20:30, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support. I would also subscribe Wikiacc (§) 00:32, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support. I'll participate. CsikosLo (talk) 17:57, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

---

• List has been created at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T160843
• List info page is at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-genealogy
• Archives will be at https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-genealogy/

Mutante (talk) 20:47, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Dear @Mutante:, thank you, and best greetings to Cologne! Dan Koehl (talk) 20:54, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Launching project on Wikidata

I'd highly encourage folks here to develop further the WikiProject Genealogy on Wikidata. Essentially all types of genealogical data can already be stored on Wikidata, even "image of grave" (basically a mini-Find a Grave). What Wikidata lacks is a friendly way to view the data and draw trees, etc. This can be provided by the new WMF project when it is created and approved, but that doesn't mean we have to wait for that step. Even before then, there are a lot of third-party sites that display Wikidata content in interesting ways, including the excellent Histropedia.--Pharos (talk) 01:29, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

@Pharos:, Updating Wikidata has made me think about this, but I thought that even Wikidata has rules as to whom, and what is OK to submit into the Wikidata database. Do you mean, that we actually could start submitting personal records and ancestors into Wikidata, without anyone getting annoyed? On, the other hand, Wikidata is the natural place to store the records once the project gets realized.? Dan Koehl (talk) 01:49, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I think the guidelines for genealogical data on Wikidata are roughly: must be notable, or linked to a notable item, or required in order to 'complete a set'. So it's certainly not a sure thing that the great mass of genealogy could be included there. I suspect if we were to start doing any large numbers of non-notable people, we'd get a talking-to. That said, there's still a huge number of people that do belong in Wikidata. Sam Wilson 04:27, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't think you can add large numbers of non-notable people at this stage, but there is already a huge number and there is room for many more under existing scope, and we'll want to think about building out the types of data about all of them. For example, are there new types of genealogy-related properties that should be added to Wikidata? In any case, Wikidata would ultimately be where the records are stored for a new project, so it would be best to make genealogy infrastructure as good as possible on there, and also develop external tools in the style of Histropedia that can draw trees from Wikidata records, etc.--Pharos (talk) 05:09, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata notability criteria are intentionally quite large - you can fit any item in if it fills a structural purpose, or can be externally verified. See d:WD:N for a pretty succinct summary. There is the potential for this idea to work there, I think. – Ajraddatz (talk) 06:00, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata's notability requirement needs serious public sources. If a person uploads information about one of his ancestors for which only private sources exist, the data doesn't fit on Wikidata unless it's first uploaded to another serious public source that Wikidata can cite.

I think it would be useful to have a new namespace on Wikidata that allows information for which only private sources are available like some genealogical data to be hosted. Wikidata currently also doesn't allow any private data and the ability to host private data would be desirable for a Genealogy project. ChristianKl (talk) 15:46, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

• Couldn't a national census count as a "serious public source"? The US Census, for example, is released up to 1940.--Pharos (talk) 16:47, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
• I think non-public sources could easily be used to validate genealogical data if we use the OTRS system that's already in place for similar uses. That way the sources are not made publicly available (which may be a requirement in many cases), but the project will have records of them that trusted contributors could access to validate the public genealogical data that they support (see Template:PermissionOTRS). One open question would be how to integrate such information into Wikidata -- we'd probably need an additional property for sources, e.g. "OTRS ticket number" or something like that. --Waldir (talk) 19:18, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

• @Pharos:I think items for people that are sourced with US Census data are fine for Wikidata. On the other hand, if a person has an unpublished piece of paper of their family tree, that data isn't fit for Wikidata. ChristianKl (talk) 22:12, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Dear @Ajraddatz, Another Believer, Bluerasberry, Dallan, Jakec, Pharos, PiRSquared17, Robin Patterson, Samwilson, and Ypnypn:, for such a purpose, maybe it would be good to startup a project page on Wikidata, where intentions and limits with this experimental project could be outlined and structured, and where an efficient communication with the Wikidata community could be straight forward executed already from the beginning? On such a page, a wish list as well as some sort of log of progress could be recorded as well?

It could be jointed to this page, or a new project page here on meta, developed based on New_project_process and Template:New sister project proposal and coordinated through the proposed Wikimedia Genealogy User Group and the enwiki en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy by means of the new IRC channel #wikimedia-genealogy^connect and a proposed mail list [email protected] (not yet existing).

The page on Wikidata could look something like wikidata:Wikidata:Wikispecies and either be incorporated into wikidata:Wikidata:WikiProject Genealogy or would it be better with a complete new one, where the name can be independently chosen?

I think, theoretically, that such a project platform could be developed within the end of this week. What do you think ? Dan Koehl (talk) 14:08, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

• Check out Magnus' 2014 blog post about biographies in Wikidata.

  Manske, Magnus (31 January 2014). "The Reason For It All". magnusmanske.de. 

There has been planning for years to make Wikidata a genealogical database. The build out will be from "notable" people but already in that there are efforts to connect non-notable people to them in Wikidata. Eventually I think the system will accept all kinds of records. See especially a sample biography on marked up on the Reasonator prototype and on Wikidata. I think for now it is fine to look at other ways of keeping records, because Wikidata is not ready. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:25, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I have just looked at those two links. Two things stand out immediately for me:

1. no indication of whether the siblings were full or half siblings (Familypedia tabulates the children of each coupling of each parent so that readers can see who's really who)
2. ambiguous person-names, obvious particularly on the family tree chart, where a father and son had identical names. Individuals should have, at least for display purposes in lists and charts, some distinguishing feature as for Wikipedia pages. Familypedia is not alone in using "year of birth " and "year of death" joined by a hyphen and all enclosed in round parentheses; where necessary, "approximations", such as "aft", "bef", and "c", precede the years.

Robin Patterson (talk) 02:43, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

On that point of page names: I think one of the great things about using MediaWiki page names as identifiers for individuals is that they're unique, and so disambiguation can be used where required (as you say, with dates, or whatever else is useful). It's hard to extract anything like that from Wikidata, because you'd have to check somehow for the uniqueness of anything you construct with names and dates; on the other hand, if Wikidata is just the repository of the data, and we use the familiar system of having biographies on a separate wiki, then the page names of that wiki can be the unique names. Sam Wilson 04:42, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

@Robin Patterson: It's just a question of code to write a display that shows additional data. It wouldn't need any change in Wikidata itself. For Family tree's there's currently : https://tools.wmflabs.org/family/ancestors.php?q=Q937&lang=en . That tool was created in a Hackerton and it would be easy to improve on it. The fact that tools like that can be created easily is what makes Wikidata great. ChristianKl (talk) 22:21, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

I am finding WeRelate to be quite effective for creating genealogical organization among Wikidata identities/humans. We can stop just talking - there is a lot we can do. Jrm03063 (talk) 02:17, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

Data about living people (also software)

My suggestion about how to deal with private data is that it not be included on any Wikimedia project (i.e. the status quo for existing projects should be carried over to a new genealogy project) and that the software not have any provision (beyond the normal MediaWiki functionality) for making any particular bits of data restricted-access.

Instead, I think that we should aim at a 'federation' of genealogy wikis, with one big central public wiki and a plethora of small private wikis in which people can store their families' private data. (These could be self-hosted or as part of a commercial wiki-farm.) The important thing is that all the wikis would work together: that an individual would have a record on only one wiki, and be easily referenced from the others (i.e. from the public wiki to the private, and vice-versa).

I think the software (which I'm envisaging to be a single relatively simple MediaWiki extension; I'm made a start at mw:Extension:Genealogy) should do as little as possible, and basically just take care of linking between individuals' records and avoiding having to enter data in more than one place. It shouldn't, for example, follow WeRelate's lead and handle citation database stuff, or mimic the GEDCOM data model. There are lots of parts of "genealogical research" that are actually just parts of "research", and the wiki-way currently handles that pretty well I think. We should avoid a system that is too prescriptive.

tldr: private data should be in separate wikis, all running the same MediaWiki extension.

—Sam Wilson 01:06, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation blog post?

Just brainstorming here. I wonder if anyone would be interested in drafting a guest WMF blog post to encourage a community discussion about the possibility of a genealogy sister project. Thoughts? Maybe this would be somewhere down the line, once our collective thoughts are a bit more fleshed out and we can present the pros/cons, areas of concern, etc. -Another Believer (talk) 02:58, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

I think it's a great idea, but yes maybe in a month or two after we've got an idea of some solid action that can be taken? Maybe once we have a working prototype? Sam Wilson 21:47, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

 Support - Good idea. Will be a good place to summarize discussions, put down the visions in writing, and just log the work being done step by step. Dan Koehl (talk) 23:00, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Application for mail list

Now the application for [email protected] is on the Phabricator waiting list, located at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T160843

Dan Koehl (talk) 22:59, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the update! -Another Believer (talk) 15:50, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Mail list ready for subscribtion

Dear @Robin Patterson, Pbsouthwood, Quibilia, Arbnos, JohnAlbertRigali, KlaasZ4usV, MTC, Gap9551, Wikiacc, and CsikosLo: and everybody else intersted in this project, You can now subscribe to the mail list at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-genealogy

Dan Koehl (talk) 20:55, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia movement: Strategy: Cycle 1

There is ongoing strategic planning for the future of the Wikimedia movement. See this links for more information:

• Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017
  • Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Cycle 1

I suggested the establishment of a new Wikimedia genealogy project, and linked to this page. Feel free to share your thoughts here:

• Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Cycle_1#New_Wikimedia_project:_Genealogy

Thanks! -Another Believer (talk) 01:59, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

@Dan Koehl: I wonder if this is the sort of thing you might want to mention in your next newsletter. Cycle 1 ends in 3 days, but that doesn't mean people interested in discussing a genealogy project can't contribute to other ongoing discussions, or submit other ideas. -Another Believer (talk) 02:50, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Seems the Strategy Coordinator didn't really find my suggestion too helpful, but at least contributing to the discussion might bring some additional attention to this page. -Another Believer (talk) 01:15, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

This leaves me very confused @Another Believer:, is it me you refer to as "Strategy Coordinator"? Not really sure what yu mean, or what you are speaking about above. Although English is widely spoken, there will always exist those last 10% of information that may get lost in communication with anyone that hasnt English as mother tounge. Slang, local terms, Irony, sarcasm and similair may totally loose its value, and only lead to confusion, while a simple, straight and informative communication makes everything easier? Dan Koehl (talk) 11:24, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

@Dan Koehl: No problem, thanks for asking for clarification. I was referring to User:SGrabarczuk (WMF), who responded to my comment here. -Another Believer (talk) 14:16, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, I was actually not sure how to interpret, and now I know I misunderstood. Ive been sick for some time, and presently have a tendency to be a little confused, my brain is not working as normal. But I have hope for improvement once I start to get treatment. Sorry, if I did any mistake. Dan Koehl (talk) 15:26, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

History Research Environment (HRE) - a proposal

I am posting to ask whether there would be Wikimedian developers who would be interested in joining an open source project to create a free platform independent application called History Research Environment (‘HRE’) for the serious genealogist or historical researcher. Considerable effort has been put into high-level planning over several years, and we are now ready to start writing code.

While the proposed software is not currently an official Wikimedia project, if there is enough interest we are open to it becoming integrated or affiliated in some way. The plan is, in any event, that the software should be interoperable with Wikidata to allow (subject to the agreement of the Wikidata community) the exchange of a variety of structured data including verified and fully sourced family trees.

I'd be happy to answer queries. MichaelMaggs (talk) 15:02, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Dear@MichaelMaggs:, sorry for delay in the answer, and thanks for adding this interesting request.

Personally, I have had some health issues, and wasnt active for about a month, now slowly returning. And other members of this group may have been just busy. I noticed that you posted to the mail list as well, and I will start discussion in that end, and then return here, in order to keep transparency, and possibilities for everyone interested and involved, to share their opinion. So please be patient, and watch your mail box, and I hope within a week or two that your question will get an answer. Meanwhile, I hope other members here share their thoughts regarding this issue.

Dan Koehl (talk) 22:58, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

HRE discussion

I'm reposting here for reference an email sent to [wikimedia-genealogy], in reply to a query from Dan Koehl.

History Research Environment (HRE) is a community project to create a free platform-independent application for the serious amateur or professional historical researcher. The proposed software will be primarily focused on genealogical research, including researchers who are currently reliant upon the now-discontinued program The Master Genealogist (TMG). In addition, HRE is planned to handle a very wide range of other historical and cultural research needs.

With the demise of TMG in 2014 the genealogical community lost its last high-end product for the serious researcher. Stand-alone genealogical software packages are no longer commercially viable, and the commercial market has moved almost entirely to online products sold as part of a subscription to large family history websites. This is advantageous for the service provider, as it allows them to monetise your family history data, but many serious researchers lament the loss of the control, feature richness, and personal privacy that a stand-alone product can provide.

The plan is to create a high-end product that can be run on a user's own computer, with its own integrated database. This allows the user to retain full control over their own research data without interference from outside commercial organisations. The features to be provided will be decided collaboratively by the community, and they will certainly include comprehensive mechanisms for recording the sources of each item of data within the database, and for documenting the researcher’s conclusions about data items and linkages between data items. The ability to record reliable sources and conclusions for both data items and linkages is, we believe, a central component of any serious genealogy database, a component that is missing from most of the commercial online systems that are now available.

As a Wikimedian myself for many years (and currently chair of Wikimedia UK) I do see quite a few similarities in approach between the HRE project and the approach of the wiki communities. How any connections might work would be a matter of discussion, but I can say that the HRE community would be more than open to collaboration. Obvious possibilities would be for the HRE database to store Wikidata IDs to allow unambiguous matching of data items – not only for the people within a family tree but also for such things as location data, time periods, titles, occupations, relationships, and so on.

Armed with such matches, HRE researchers could leverage the power of Wikidata to download or perhaps merely to view a whole range of historical information about the primary individuals within the database. Similarly, with appropriate agreement from the Wikidata community, HRE researchers could have the possibility of uploading to Wikidata those portions of their research which are sufficiently interesting (“notable”?), along with full details of the sources relied upon.

We would clearly need to discuss how to handle data relating to living individuals, which might need to be kept confidential, and also to develop rules for the reliability of sources to make it clear that users can't simply upload personal family trees based on random information they have found on the Internet or which have been copied from the unreliable family trees that are often found at places such as Ancestry.com.

I hope that provides useful information for further discussions. MichaelMaggs (talk) 12:41, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Dan Koehl (talk) 14:40, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

@MichaelMaggs: Wikidata notability criteria are essentially that there are serious and public sources for data. Wikidata also wants that individual claims are sourced and if there are multiple sources for the data of a single person it should be clear which of those sources support which claims. I think it would be really great if your software would make it easy to upload well-referenced data directly to Wikidata. ChristianKl (talk) 22:34, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Next newsletter

Dear friends, I wonder if you can give me some suggestions for the content of next newsletter number 5 of the WikiProject Genealogy newsletter? I have the feeling it has been very silent for a while, and I guess its a bout time that all subscribers hear something from us? Dan Koehl (talk) 08:22, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

Good idea! WikiClubWest is hosting a talk this weekend about "Genealogy and Wikimedia", just a casual thing to go through biographies on Wikipedia, people on Wikidata, and the general state of things (such as WeRelate etc.). We'll have a write-up of some sort that you could add to the newsletter, if waiting till Sunday is okay? Sam Wilson 22:34, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

Absolutely, theres no hurry. Maybe you would be kind to put together some lines about the talk afterwards, and send me? Dan Koehl (talk) 10:15, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Next newsletter is free to edit, just consult your creativity and help develop the newsletter here! Dan Koehl (talk) 22:38, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Problems with Demo site

I can't get a list of templates. https://tools.wmflabs.org/genealogy/wiki/Special:AllPages?from=&to=&namespace=10 should do it but it just reverts to "(Main)" and lists the articles.

I have requested that a forum be set up there, so that this sort of thing can be dealt with there instead of coming to this wider "forum".

Robin Patterson (talk) 02:18, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Fixed the allpages problem! Thanks for finding it. :) And for a forum, I was wondering if we might want to use https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ what do you think? It's pretty good as far as email notifications etc. goes and it allows for discrete threads so we could sort of stay on topic(s). I'm sure we could have our own category there, if we ask nicely. Sam Wilson 09:29, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Focus energies on making genealogy better on Wikidata

I don't think that's really necessary to start a new project at this point in time. On Wikidata we do have Wikidata:WikiProject Genealogy. On way to move forward would be creating a tool to import GEDCOM files into Wikidata. With more uploaded GEDCOMs there will be further interest for more tools and adding more data. ChristianKl (talk) 16:23, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

@ChristianKl: Are general non-notable people well accepted on Wikidata though? I've been adding a few (e.g.), but I'm never quite sure if they're within scope or not. Sam Wilson 01:50, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Notability in Wikidata comes from being able to be described with sources (and the Western Australian Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages is a serious source). Given that Q42333974 can, I see it having a place. If another item would like it as relative it would be additionally notable for providing a structural need. ChristianKl (talk) 09:57, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

I would like to see the "structural need" broken down into "notability clauses" whereby a clause could be "direct relation", which applies to this project, but also "creator" (of a notable work on Wikidata) or "founder" (of a notable institution or business on Wikidata) or "sitter" (of notable painting(s) on Wikidata), or "fill in other notable thing here". Jane023 (talk) 11:22, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Example of project proposal

Just FYI, WikiJournal is currently being proposed and I think the framework might be helpful if we ever make plans to move forward with a more formal proposal. -Another Believer (talk) 14:16, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Cemeteries User Group

Please take a look at Wiki Cemeteries User Group, some images of graves and cemeteries can be useful.--Alexmar983 (talk) 01:57, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Sources, Verifiability, and Oral Histories

A lot of the main opposition I see to this and other open genealogy projects is around the fear that it will become a free for all, with the average user adding "My grandma told me" as their source, or just adding information from an unsourced, inherited family tree that their Uncle put together in a few years off the internet. Which is about as useful as a made up story in terms of verifiability.

But "verifiable" shouldn't be the standard in genealogy for information you add.

Stories from your grandma are actually an invaluable source. I have stories from my late uncle, who told me stories of his grandfather telling him stories of his own grandfather. Five generations past, and a story that is in no way verifiable, but we can be reasonably confident has some basis in truth. It's just a basic story of what his accent was like, and what he remembers from his childhood homeland, the rivers nearby, that sort of thing.

My mother's marriage certificate states she was married at her home. But from her personal story told to me directly (which I got her to write down and sign/date), too many people turned up on the day so at the last minute they all moved to the local church. A fact that if I didn't write down before she passes, would be an unverifiable fact that many genealogists would reject because they've got more substantial evidence in the form of her marriage certificate.

While that information is not verifiable, that doesn't mean it has no place here, we'd just need a system of reliability and confidence.

Reliability

Reliability could have a scale, extremely low, very low, low, medium, high, very high, extremely high (As an example, could be expanded to something like scale of 1-100%)

When you add a new date of death for a distant ancestor, it might have four sources.

• Parish Record that states 16 April 1603, reliability is ranked high, because it was noted down at the time of the death.
• Gravestone that states death date 15 April 1603, reliability is ranked high.
• Newsletter, that states death date 15 April 1603, reliability is ranked medium, since it's just stated by a family member, but was stated shortly after the death.
• Family bible written by the ancestors great grand-child, that states 12 April 1603. Reliability is ranked low since it was written so long after the event.

We can be pretty confidence the person died on the 15th, but extremely confident they died within a day or so of 15 April 1603. Doesn't mean we get rid of the Parish Record nor the Family Bible, all add credibility to the year and month, just the Family Bible writer got the day a bit off, it's still valuable information and increases our confidence in the fact of their death date.

The community can give guidelines on common sources. How much credence is given to things like Parish Records, to newsletters, to family bibles and oral histories. All should be recorded, but it would give those more scrupulous genealogists the tools they need to ignore sources they don't trust. While also saving that information as an ever so slight increase in our confidence level based on number of sources.

Confidence

Confidence in facts, like a date of death, is usually determined by the number and reliability of specific sources, and whether there are contradictory sources. In the above example, we've got two high, one medium, and one low ranked source all supporting the same week of death. We can have extremely high confidence in this fact. To the day however, we have one high, and one medium supporting the 15th, one high supporting the 16th, and one low supporting the 12th. A user might by themselves put the 15th as their primary date with "reasonably high confidence", with the others ranked lower, or they might discuss with the community if others are interested in this ancestor, and they can come to an agreement of which date they'll use and the confidence level that will be applied.

Removing low/zero reliability sources

I think there would be very few circumstances that we would actually get rid of a low confidence source. The point of marking it low confidence means it'll have low impact. We can even make pages only display facts that are supported above a certain confidence level (the user can change this, but our default can be decided by the community). Or we can display warnings when a fact has low confidence.

In fact, I would argue that to get rid of a source, the burden would be on the user to give confidence that the source is wrong, and unworthy of being kept. The Family Bible example above is partially wrong, but still worthy of being kept, since it was written close to the time the ancestor lived. An oral history isn't very reliable (culture dependent, some culture's oral histories have proven track records), but is still interesting information from the past.

Even guessed information can be a good clue. I think the only instance I would delete information, is if it's proven the user is a troll and is putting misleading information in profiles.

Supertrinko (talk) 22:16, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Demo wiki closed?

@Carsrac: You mentioned that the demo wiki isn't working. Are you not able to create an account via [1]? What error do you get? —Sam Wilson 08:09, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Historical Records and Hints

One of the key advantages of using Ancestry is their immense database of records. They have a massive collection of archived documents that you can research. They invest in digitising records, and crowdsource transcription of these records into a database that can be searched, which helps their hints and searching features work. This has massively benefited the genealogy community and made studying your family history accessible to anyone at home.

Religious organisations (FamilySearch) and profitable organisations (Ancestry) all have this advantage. Other services like WikiTree rely on these other websites for such information.

There was another proposed project, Wikirecords, which hasn't been contributed to in some time. I hope to see it come back to life at some point, but I think it would link in well with this project.

If there were a wikimedia project aimed at the digitisation and transcribing of historical records (census data, birth records, &c.) then the genealogy project would be a natural sister project of this. Genealogists are well known for contributing their time to digitising and transcribing records. Many contribute to FamilySearch and Ancestry's efforts, efforts that get locked behind a pay wall.

Wikirecords stands as its own project, as historical records speak to more than just people.

If that project ever came to fruition. We'd have a place for historical records to be accessible by all. Tools could be developed to identify records that appear on Wikirecords that match a profile on the genealogy project, and ping that profile's watchlist. Very much like a "Hint" system.

This would mean pushing two projects over the line, but I think if it made it, it would be an incredibly powerful combination of projects. A documented history of humanity. That sounds entirely in Wikimedia's purview. Supertrinko (talk) 00:24, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey proposal

There's a proposal in this year's CWS that is of interest to this project: Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Wikidata/Genealogy database. Sam Wilson 12:56, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah I think the survey in general should be of interest to he Genealogy Project. If there are feature changes that would help enable more genealogical work on wikimedia. Supertrinko (talk) 09:50, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Demo wiki

I just upgraded the genealogy demo wiki to MediaWiki 1.38. Let me know if anything's broken. :-) Sam Wilson 11:22, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

Couldn't seem to make an account (can't see a captcha image).

I'd suggest taking inspiration from FamilySearch, which takes a very object-oriented approach.

Requires three name spaces:

1. Person: Name space that holds all people just as it currently does.
2. Source: Name space that holds sources
3. Relationship: Name space that holds relationships between two people.

The advantage being that you can attach information and sources to the relationship itself. Like:

• Relationship between John Smith and Jacob Smith
• Relationship type: Biological parental relationship
• Relationship start date: (Jacob's birth date)
• Source details: (Attach source pages).

Then, on both John's and Jacob's person pages, you can just transclude the relationship information, and have a single location on where it can be updated.

Sources too, can be a page of their own, so when you add say, Jacob's birth certificate, the page would hold all the facts that it is a source to, and where that source is from, and all the people mentioned in the source. Then on all the person pages the source can again be either linked or transcluded, and simply updated once.

Workflow would be something like:

1. Create a person page for John Smith
2. Create a person page for Mary Williams
3. Create a relationship page for John and Mary detailing their marriage.
4. Create a person page for Jacob Smith.
5. Create a relationship page for John Smith and Jacob Smith detailing their paternal relationship
6. Create a relationship page for Mary and Jacob Smith detailing their maternal relationship
7. Create a Source page for Jacob's birth certificate that mentions him and his two parents.
8. Transclude/Attach Source page to all three people, and the paternal and maternal relationship pages.

It requires more initial work, but it creates more solid data, with less repetition, less opportunities for error, and more opportunities for catching any errors.

You don't add siblings, those are implied where you share parents, and could potentially be automated via an extension.

It also allows relationships to be very flexible. Full siblings vs. Half-siblings are easily recognisable. You can add as many parents as you want (biological vs adoptive), as many types of romantic relationships as you like (Married, civil union, de facto). Supertrinko (talk) 04:02, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

New here - is there a project roadmap?

Hi all, completely new here, but I think this project is a fantastic idea.

Is there some kind of road map (even without dates) that outlines what has happened/ what needs to happen? I'd happily help contribute to creating one! There is so much disource and ideas throughout these pages (which is great!) that makes it a little difficult to see what has been suggested, what has been created from this, what still needs to happen, and where this project will go.

This is itself a big task, but starting even with a top-level visual of this would be extremely helpful. Jamzze (talk) 14:32, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

@Jamzze: I don't think there is a current plan! Personally, I've lately been experimenting with a way to pull Wikidata data into a non-Wikimedia wiki, the idea being that lots of info does belong in Wikidata but some stuff isn't valid there. I think the main 'wiki' sort of genealogy project is WikiTree (sadly a proprietary codebase and peculiarly licensed data). Sam Wilson 10:15, 3 August 2022 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2023

So far there have been two proposals in this year's Community Wishlist Survey 2023. They've been merged, and are in the Larger suggestions category: Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Larger suggestions/Wiki-ancestry. —SWilson (WMF) (talk) 10:36, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Proposed closure: make anything meaningful from this proposal a part of Wikidata

d is an appropriate place for structured genealogical data and creating a new project that duplicates its functionality and scope is unwise. I suggest that anyone interested in furthering this proposal work on it at Wikidata. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:51, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf: I generally agree, but I think there are a couple of issues still. Is Wikidata ready to include an item for every person? I get the impression that ad hoc inclusion of a whole family tree is okay, but large scale creation of (for example) an entire civic registration dataset would not be welcomed. The other aspect of a genealogy project is prose information about people and places (these should obviously go on Wikipedias when they're notable, but most of them are not, but still a fair bit needs to be written about them. Sam Wilson 03:22, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Seems a good question to as at d:Wikidata:Project chat. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:23, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf: True. I've also wondered about uploading historical records to Wikisource and linking to Wikidata items where it's worth creating them. Not sure how that'd work where there aren't scans available of the originals (although, come to think of it, those are often secondary sources anyway and derived from things that could probably have scans). What do you think about the other part, the biographies? Sam Wilson 09:02, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

It seems like mini bios could more-or-less be assembled or stored via this weird Abstract Wikipedia idea that I guess is somehow related to f: or something, but as you can imagine out of the 100 billion or so human beings who have been born, only 1% or so will have any record of their lives and only 1% of or so of them could constitute a biography of anything more than a few paragraphs even for the most interested person, so most of these biographies would be nothing or just "[Person] was born [date] in [place] and [went to school, had job, had kids] and died on [date] of [cause]", which is something an AI can generate from the records. Thoughts on that? Am I off base? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:07, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf: Abstract Wikipedia will do lots to make Wikidata data more browsable/readable, but I don't think it solves the issue of how to express knowledge that is not represented on Wikidata at all. I think a Wikimedia genealogy project still needs an additional place to keep the biographies. Sam Wilson 01:07, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

But this kind of data would be stored on Wikidata. To be clear, literally 99% of humanity would not even be able to have a biography outside of "born [place and time], died [place and time], related to [persons]". What would be these biographical details that are 1.) not storable in Wikidata and 2.) don't merit a proper biography in Wikipedia? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:52, 6 September 2023 (UTC)