Hello, I just launched a website for genealogy - www.werelate.org. It is part search engine and part wiki. The overall goal is to help people discover and share information about their ancestors online. The website is in what I would call an "alpha" state right now, meaning there is some fine tuning needed on the look and feel and I'm sure there are a number of bugs, but it is to the point where I'm interested in criticisms of the ideas, suggestions for new features, bug reports, etc. It's sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, a not-for-profit organization I co-founded earlier this year. It's all open source, both content and software.
If you decide to look at it, please don't edit any pages yet (or more specifically, don't expect your edits to "stick"). I'm soliciting feedback during the coming weeks on systemic problems with the data, at which point I'll fix them and reload. If anyone is interested, I'd love to get feedback on how the website could be improved. Help on creating/editing content or development and administration would also be appreciated. I started working on this at the beginning of last year because I wanted to do something interesting and help out in the area of genealogy. I don't expect to ever get a salary from it. The website is composed of four major sections: (1) Search: search genealogy-relevant web pages for names, places, and keywords. You can elect to include related names in your search, which causes searches on John Smith for example to return pages containing Jonathan Smythe. The index currently includes about 5M pages, but that number will increase over time. The ultimate goal for search is to point people to information regardless of its location, whether on static web pages, behind forms, or in offline books and microfilms. (2) Names: this section lists related names and possible misspellings for given and surnames. It has been created using a combination of manual data entry and a weighted-edit-distance algorithm. As far as I know it is the largest such list publically available. (3) Places: this section contains what I believe is the largest database of historic places currently available online. It integrates data from Wikipedia, the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and the Family History Library Catalog. It currently has places for North and South America, Europe, and Australia/NZ. Africa, Asia, and the rest of Oceania should be up soon. (4) Resources: this section lists websites and microfilms that are relevant to genealogy. Currently it includes about 400K websites and online message boards that we've come across and roughly 1M microfilms from the LDS Church. Search (section 1) performs searches over the pages on these resources. Sections 2-4 are wiki's, with the idea that people can improve them over time. I'm hoping to get feedback over the next several months on how to make the website more helpful. -dallan _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
