User:Sam Francis/Genealogy wiki
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Having recently developed an interest in my family history, it has occurred to me, as I know it has many others, that a family history wiki would be an invaluable resource and probably at least as popular as wikipedia. I've given it a little thought; here are a few notes.
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Structure: Namespaces
The main namespace would be reserved for people, since articles on individuals would constitute the vast majority of entries. For example, you would find an article on Jane Ann Davison at <http://wikigen.org/wiki/Jane_Ann_Davison>.
There would be an Article: namespace with advice and information on geneology. for the Article: namespace. (The last example below, for example, would be found at <http://wikigen.org/wiki/Article:Genealogy_in_Ireland>.) We could have articles on:
- genealogical sources, with information and evaluation;
- genealogical societies and federations from around the world;
- genealogy in specific countries, such as "Genealogy in Ireland".
These are just a few ideas.
There could be a Place: namespace, which would, naturally, have articles on places from a historical and genealogical point of view. For a parish in Britain, for example, a description of the area it covers, the parish records that exist and where they are held might be appropriate. In a Place: entry on a US city or state, notes about where the area's immigrant population came from might be useful. A lot of wikipedia content would be useful in this namespace, as well as in the Article: namespace.
An Index: name space would also be useful. It would consist of indexes of people by, for example, surname, occupation, place of birth, etc.
Another possible namespace would be a Source: namespaces, where details of and links to specific genealogical sources could be put. For example, Source:1901 British census would link to http://www.census.pro.gov.uk and perhaps other useful sites, and giev some backround on the 1901 census, including links to Article: pages on British censuses, the British Isles, etc. However, there may be some overlap with the Article: namespace here.
Other issues
Formatting
I don't have many fixed ideas on how to format a genealogy wiki entry on a person yet, but have a look at this example for a start. It's based on this (http://www.mountainsmoke.com/wiki/wiki.pl?Genealogy) genealogy wiki experiment.
Disambiguation
This would probably be tackled very differently than the way it is on wikipedia. Dates and places of birth are a lot more important in genealogy than they are for wikipedia articles: to disambiguate two Jane Ann Davisons, we might use their years or places of birth. For example:
This would all be done on a pretty much ad hoc basis; each case will be different.
Are there any other things worth considering? Comments? --Sam 20:13, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)