Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Archive/Genealogy database

Random proposal ►◄ Archive  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Genealogy database

N Outside the scope of Community Tech

• Problem: Many genealogy websites compete with each other, are chargeable and do not prove filiations.
• Who would benefit: All those interested in their genealogy will be able to benefit from the research of amateurs, and they themselves will be able to cross ascending trees and accelerate their work.
• Proposed solution: An open database in which proof of parentage must be provided by a scanned document may link all databases. A name, few informations (limited list of information : dates, job and location), links to other names and at least one scanned document for each link.
• More comments: Discussions will be about scanned documents interpretations, they will have to be re-written and a discussion page is mandatory. The biggest workload will be in the representation of family trees.
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: Bertrouf (talk) 10:01, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

• This sounds like an entire new WMF site project (wikigeneology), far outside the scope of this survey and more suited for Proposals for new projects —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:29, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
  • It is however meaningful to improve tools about genealogical data. See phab:T254082.--GZWDer (talk) 15:03, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Agreed, therefore instead of asking for a "Genealogical database", I would encourage people to log ideas to implement features that would enable a genealogical database. There's a lot of features that would help, so one step at a time. Supertrinko (talk) 19:22, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah "build something big it surely will be useful" is an easy description but unlikely to succeed in the end. See Community_Wishlist_Survey/FAQ#Pick_one_specific_problem_and_describe_it_in_detail for suggestions on scoping of a wishlist item. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:26, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

• There is various discussion and information about this topic at Wikimedia genealogy project. As it stands, this doesn't sound like a proposal that is within scope — but it does sound like there might be some particular technical tasks that the Community Tech team could undertake to improve working with genealogical data on Wikimedia sites. @Bertrouf, as the others say above, this could be targetted a bit more specifically to one problem. (For example, something about Gedcom import/export on Wikidata, or family tree diagram generation, or some other small concrete tool or task…) —SWilson (WMF) (talk) 12:44, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

  I don't think importing GEDCOM is good, as they are usually unsourced. However we may research existing functions of other genealogical websites and see what feature is missing. GZWDer (talk) 12:57, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

  @GZWDer: good point about importing. Exporting to Gedcom (along with references) could be useful though. SWilson (WMF) (talk) 23:41, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

  An advanced GEDCOM import could request sources for each "fact" that is being imported from a GEDCOM. Supertrinko (talk) 09:48, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

  However it may be a challenge to convert those reference to Wikidata-readable format. GZWDer (talk) 13:15, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

• @Bertrouf: A genealogy project would be outside of the scope of what CommTech could do. Therefore, I am archiving this. Thanks for taking part in the survey. DWalden (WMF) (talk) 15:32, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks. Bertrouf (talk) 08:45, 27 January 2022 (UTC)