Genealogical wiki

From xoa

I (Andy) am the keeper of the Lester family genealogical data. Genealogy data is stored in GEDCOM format, which is very rigid, not unlike MARC data for libraries. It's good to keep in a rigid format, so that you can match up data between different family trees in different data sets.

There are free-form notes fields, but they're just text. I guess that's useful, but it's certainly not hypertext, and it's certainly not wiki text, and it's not web-based, where people can update. Most of all, it's hard to get the data that brings things alive. I can make a note that Dorothy Hollingsworth's *OCCU* field is "schoolteacher", but that's not as rich as having family members visit my site and leave notes about Dorothy's work as a schoolteacher. That's the data I want to capture.

In addition, a crucial part of genealogy is to make sure that data points are attributed. It's common to have two or three data points that disagree, and it's important to know that Source A gives Fred Smith's DOB as December 5, 1842 and Source B has it as December 15, 1842. Which is correct?

So how do we bring this all together? The two sides of the genealogy process have a great impedance mismatch. I'm thinking a kind of web app that has stringent controls on the hard data points, but also allows free-form wikified text entry for the stories and other text. Those data points would need to be regulated.

Aside: I've seen the brand-new http://geni.com, which is kinda snazzy, but is awful for any kind of real data entry.