Wiki software for genealogy (long)
- From: SteveW <steve.m.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2008 02:47:55 -0700 (PDT)
Background
==========
I believe that genalogy software should ideally do three things.
Firstly it should be able to store information about people and their
relationships, including some data which can be in a standardised form
(such as birth dates) and others which can be free-form (biography
etc). Secondly it should be able to store source material:
photographs, document scans, transcripts, emails, etc. Thirdly, it
needs to allow connections to be made flexibly between the people data
and the source data so that, for example, a person's birth date can be
linked in some way to a record such as a scan of their birth
certificate. Most genealogical software is excellent at the first of
these three requirements (except that it may not be able to express
degrees of certainty about relationships between people). Such
software can also cope adequately with the third requirement but is
usually weak at the second, particularly in a case such as a one-name
study (which is part of my own interest in genealogy) where one
collects a lot of source data that is not (yet) linked directly to any
known people. There are some packages, such as "Custodian" which have
been written specifically to address that second area, but they tend
to be weaker in the other areas. This current deficiency of genealogy
software led me to look for alternatives.
A second motivation is that I am always looking for new possibilities
for exploiting technology for genealogy: I began experimenting with
using a computer for genealogy in 1981, I was (as far as I know) one
of the first UK one-namers to put their information on-line on a
website, and for the last 7 years have been generating the complete
site from a database. So, yes I love to try out new technology!
Enter the wiki
==============
Wikis are websites which allow multiple authors to collaborate on
online projects, of which the best-known is probably Wikipedia.
However, although it is the collaborative nature of wikis that is most
discussed, there is nothing to stop them being used as a stand-alone
application for organising information about a family history. And
this is what I have been doing! I chose to use Mediawiki, the same
software, as it happens, that is used for Wikipedia, and it seemed to
me that its strengths are:
- You can load all kinds of "media" into it: images (in lots of
formats), video, pdf documents, word documents and use it like an
electronic filing system.
- It is good at linking information together: take a look at Wikipedia
and the way that everything is linked to everything else.
- It is very good for editing the free-format (eg biographical)
information about people.
- It allows the creation of templates which could be applicable to
such things as recording information from certificates or censuses.
- The software is free
I also recognised the potential disadvantages:
- There are no built-in specifics for genealogy: no direct way to
express relationships between people or to identify a particular
fragment of data as being a birth date, for example.
- It seems like overkill to have to install Mediawiki plus a database
plus a webserver.
Experience so far
==================
This is an ongoing experiment and I haven't reached any "final
conclusions" yet, but here are a few observations.
I installed the software on a Linux machine (I also have a Windows
computer and it should work on that, too, but I haven't tried). The
installation was very straightforward and, although Mediawiki +
database (MySQL in this case) + webserver (Apache) seems like a lot to
install, it's small compared with something like Microsoft office!
With regards to the use of the wiki as a "genealogy filing system", it
excels at this and is much superior to a paper filing system. I have
often found myself holding, say, the marriage certificate of a
Sharratt to a Smith and wondering: so do I file it with the Sharratts
or the Smiths, or does it go in a separate folder for certificates? By
scanning it and loading it into the wiki, I can tag it with
categories. In this case, I can choose to tag it with categories
"Sharratt family", "Smith family", "Certificates", "Marriage records"
and "Documents from the 19th century". Automatically, a link to it
will appear in the wiki's indexes for each of those categories.
The area that is completely missing from the wiki is the ability for
it to understand that particular data items represent, say, dates of
birth. I have got over this, to some extent, through the use of
templates: each page about a person, for example, includes a template
with basic birth, death, baptism, etc information. I have also written
some simple scripts to allow me to populate all this information from
my existing database.
I am currently trying to use the wiki in two slightly different ways.
Firstly I am using it for my own ancestors. Over the years I have
accumulated quite a lot of biographical information for many of them,
and the wiki is quite successful for writing up this information,
whilst providing links to scans and transcripts of source documents.
Secondly, I have just started experimenting with it for storing the
information about my one-name study. This is much more daunting
because it includes an order of magnitude more people and a lot more
"templated data" such as birth indexes.
The experiment continues!
Regards
Steve West
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Wiki software for genealogy (long)
- From: Tony Proctor
- Re: Wiki software for genealogy (long)
- Prev by Date: Re: Devon placename - Katness?
- Next by Date: Re: Wildy OT Cassandra - William Connor
- Previous by thread: Devon placename - Katness?
- Next by thread: Re: Wiki software for genealogy (long)
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
