Proposal talk:Wikigenealogy

I agree with this idea because it would be cool if you wrote down a little about your family and other people could link their ancestors with yours. GVnayR 03:34, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:19, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Support/Suggestions

I think this is an excellent idea, but the proposal needs to be fleshed out more.

For example, what would individual pages look like? Would they merely be a web of names linked in a family tree? Or would the pages of individuals look more a wikipedia biographical page?

Another thing to consider is how to verify information. It would be next to impossible to have citations for most individuals, though obituaries would be very useful.

One significant difference that I would like to see between a wikigenealogy and wikipedia is to rethink the notion of "notability" of individuals. Notability makes perfect sense in an encyclopedic environment such as wikipedia, but it should not be the primary focus of a genealogy. At least it should not be the decisive factor in deciding the worthiness of an article. While I do think that there could be special pages on let's say the genealogy of monarchs, I don't think that the primary focus of such a project should be to focus on the famous at the expense of everyone else. Under this scheme I could foresee an article written about a housewife who lived in the late 1800s appear on the front page as often as a president or famous author. It would be more about the quality of the article than about the accomplishments of the individual Also, what would happen when people are listed on a wikigenealogy, but don’t want to be. Can they some how have themselves deleted? I think a way to deal with this would be again to see if an article is cited. If there is already something written about someone in the public domain, then individual privacy has already been exposed. David Straub 20:43, 18 December 2009 (UTC) ~

I can imagine some pictures in a tree (or a family picture with some hyperlinks), which each are pointing on a normal user page. JackPotte 22:08, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

I like the tree idea. It sounds like something that could be a symbol for the site. One other issue that could be a little difficult to resolve is in terms of page id. For example, how many John Smiths and Robert Johnsons are there out there. In wikipedia there is rarely more than a handful of people with the identical same name, but in a wikigenealogy, there could be thousands of people. Inserting middle names could partially solve this, but often middle names are unknown. One option could be to issue each individual listed a unique alphanumeric id. So there could be someone named Robert Johnson and their id is ad9756791 and another Bob Johnson is ad16381658 and so one. For the sake of simplicity when editing, these ids would have to be auto-generated. David Straub 04:24, 20 December 2009 (UTC)