Mergers with other sites?/Old

Proposal

This is a proposal for a merge of Rodovid with WeRelate, put forward by Baya, the creator, maintainer and main developer of Rodovid.org. (It is being posted by me User:Bjwebb, due to the fact that he is not a native English speaker). If a merge between WeRelate and Rodovid were to take place, he would be able to offer the following to the resultant project:

• Hosting: unlimited data transfer at bandwidth of 2 Mb to Ukraine and 1 Mb to the rest of the world. This will be upgraded after the New Year to 100 Mb to Ukraine and 5 Mb to the rest of the world.

• Large amounts of his time as a developer. This will be around two to five hours a day. (All of his available free time).

In return he would like:

• Bureaucrat status on the wiki.

• A vote in the project board and a right to veto.

• 45% of the income after expenses as his wage/salary as a developer. The idea being, he takes 45% and Dallan takes 45% if he wants it, leaving 10% to be saved by WeRelate for future use. If Tomas is to join the project this would be 30% each, again with 10% saved by WeRelate.

If the income that Baya receives becomes large enough, he will be able to spend more time on WeRelate, a minimum of 8 hours per day.

Please Discuss--Bjwebb on behalf of Baya 10:28, 20 November 2006 (MST)

Response

Baya/Bjwebb, thank-you for your proposal. Here is my response.

• Hosting: I appreciate your offer of hosting but I don't think we can use it. Starting next year we hope to be crawling much faster, at about 30-40 pages/second, which works out to 4-5Mbits / second for the crawl. Also, having the site hosted outside of the US increases latency for US users by around .5 seconds per request. Most of our current users are located in the US, so I think the site needs to remain hosted in the US.

• Bureaucrat status on the wiki - no problem.

• A vote in the project board and right to veto - I would be happy (and in fact would expect) you to be on the advisory board for the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, the foundation that sponsors WeRelate. However, nobody on the advisory board has veto power.

• 45% of the income - the Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. As far as I know it is not possible to share profits with employees. Revenues from the website (which are currently negligible), go toward hardware, bandwidth, and employee salaries. I do not collect a salary, but we do have one full-time developer and several other people who work part-time. It might be possible for you to collect a part-time salary if you were interested.

• Ukraine version - you could be the primary adminstrator of a Ukranian-language version of the website if you wish.

--Dallan 20:25, 20 November 2006 (MST)

I have Spoken with Baya and he is quite happy to be paid a salary as a developer rather than a percentage of the income, as long as he still remained a partner in the project. (Actual amounts can be discussed at a later point). He also might be willing to accept not having a veto right, but first would like to know who the board will/does comprises of.--Bjwebb on behalf Baya 09:46, 21 November 2006 (MST)

That's good to hear. The members of the board of advisors can be found at Help:FAQ#Who_is_behind_WeRelate?.

I've not had chance to speak with Baya about this yet, but could he be on the Executive Board - I think this would make up for not having a veto right.--Bjwebb 11:45, 22 November 2006 (MST)

The executive board is a possibility if Baya is willing to commit significant resources (time and money) to the project.--Dallan 16:41, 22 November 2006 (MST)

As we have mentioned in the proposal, Baya is able to support WeRelate with his time, and (although from what you say above, it is unlikely) possibly his hosting. He can not afford to commit any significant amount of money, especially is he is going to be spending a lot of time on here as a developer. Does the offer of a place on the executive board still stand?--Bjwebb 09:11, 23 November 2006 (MST)

I thought he wanted to be paid for his time? If he's willing to donate say 20 hours/week of his time (without being paid), then he should certainly be on the executive board.--Dallan 11:27, 24 November 2006 (MST)

I think it is probably my fault for putting across his views incorrectly. I think he Baya be willing to spend around 20 hours/week on the project, without being paid, in order to be on the executive board - he currently spends 2-5 hours per day on Rodovid, and makes no profit on it (in fact the reverse), so he should be prepared to do the same for a merged project. However, I will confirm with him.--Bjwebb 13:06, 24 November 2006 (MST)

I have spoken to Baya and he is indeed willing to donate around 20 hours/week of his time to the project. He could then be paid a developer salary/wage (how much can be discussed in private) for any work he does above a certain number of hours.

Sounds great.--Dallan 11:24, 28 November 2006 (MST)

He know would like to know how he would be able to control the project, both as a member of the executive board, and also, as a developer (how he would be able to work on code).--Bjwebb 09:20, 27 November 2006 (MST)

The executive board meets quarterly. Baya would replace one of the other executive board members. He could add things to the agenda and have a vote. He could also have commit access to the source-code repository for the MediaWiki modifications and extensions, and an account on the web server machine. How does that sound?--Dallan 11:24, 28 November 2006 (MST)

Technical aspect of a merge

As it seems likely that we are going to use WeRelate hosting, all of the following is talking about incorporating Rodovid into WeRelate so that we have one project instead of two:

If Rodovid and WeRelate were to have a merge, we have to consider the mechanics of how we would actually combine the two databases. For content pages (as opposed to family and person) the databases can be combined quite simply. If there is a page with a title on one Wiki but not the other, it will appear simply as that on the merged wiki. However, if there is a page of that title on both wikis, pages Title (WeRelate) and Title (Rodovid) would be created, with a disambigutation page at Title.

That sounds like a good idea.--Dallan 11:27, 24 November 2006 (MST)

For person pages however, it is slighly more difficult. Information on the two sites is stored in two different strucutres. We would have to pick one and convert all data on one of the sites to the format of the other.

I have heard off Dallan that the WeRelate format is closer to GEDCOM or uses XML better or something (can you confirm), so it may be better to use this.If we did use WeRelate structure, as I am suggesting, we would automatically have WeRelate trees configured, but as it is, Rodovid trees are, in my opinion, more complex and better (being an hourglass), so they could be rewritten for the different format, but I don't think it would be too difficult. (From my limited knowledge of programming I expect you would just change where you get the variables from).

In GEDCOM, each event can have sources, images, and notes attached to it. In addition, sources and source-citations have a variety of specific pieces of information attached to them. What we're trying to do is capture as much information from a GEDCOM as possible so if someone imports and then exports a GEDCOM, it will retain as much of the original structure as possible. It's easy to do this for data elements that follow the standard. The challenge is figuring out how to handle all of the non-standard tags that the various desktop genealogy software programs have added. That's what takes time.--Dallan 11:27, 24 November 2006 (MST)

However, there is also the matter of GEDCOM import to consider - Rodovid currently has GEDCOM import, but Dallan is planning to develop a more complex Flash based GEDCOM editer/importer/exporter. I guess we have three options. Rewrite Baya's code for the WeRelate structure (I don't think this would inovlve too much as with the trees) until the Flash one comes out; not have any GEDCOM import until the Flash ap is developed; or wait until the Flash ap is developed before having a merge.

We should have gedcom import working within the next two months. I think we can wait until then. During that time Baya can write a program to export his pages into our format.--Dallan 11:27, 24 November 2006 (MST)

Sounds like a good idea. I thought it could have been slighly longer than two months.--Bjwebb 13:10, 24 November 2006 (MST)

Another major thing is multiple language versions, which only use one Database at Rodovid. This is something that we would definitely want in a merged project. All normal articles from different language versions of WeRelate could be moved straight into the different language versions of the new site. It may take some time to set up the new site to have multiple languages using one database, but I think it shouldn't be too long, as Baya already knows exactly how to go about it.--Bjwebb 10:02, 23 November 2006 (MST)

Yes, this sounds like a good idea. I haven't spent any time on this because I've been concerned with getting the English-lanaguage functionality working first. If Baya wanted to spend time making the site handle multiple languages, that would be terrific.--Dallan 11:27, 24 November 2006 (MST)

Other Details

One thing is that we would have to decide what name we would use - Rodovid or WeRelate. My suggestion would be that this would vary for different language versions. I think it would definately be WeRelate for English (as they are English) and Rodovid for Ukraine (as it is a Ukranian word). Other languages could be Rodovid until they choose on a word in their own language (because there have been foreign Rodovids for a while, but WeRelate is only in English). Despite different lanuage versions having different names, they would be accesible at both URLs: so en.werelate.org and en.rodovid.org would be the same and uk.werelate.org and uk.rodovid.org would be the same. What do people think of this idea? --Bjwebb 09:38, 23 November 2006 (MST)

What does Wikipedia do? Does it use a different domain name for each language? Or do they all use NN.wikipedia.org?--Dallan 11:27, 24 November 2006 (MST)

I think all the different language Wikipedias are called Wikipedia, and every Wikipedia does use NN.wikipedia.org, but there are also domain names that redirect. For example, wikipedia.co.uk redirects to en.wikipedia.org and wikipedia.fr redirects to fr.wikipedia.org.

Anyway, does different names for different languages sound a reasonable idea to you?--Bjwebb 13:15, 24 November 2006 (MST)

Sounds very reasonable, especially if the domain names redirect as with Wikipedia.--23:47, 24 November 2006 (MST)

Another thing that needs to be decided, is how MediaWiki would appear. WeRelate currently has a custom skin and Rodovid has had one designed for it [1] (but not implemented). My suggestion is to have the current WeRelate skin as default for the English WeRelate site and the Rodovid design for the Ukranian version (and possibly others). Baya says that his design will appeal more to a slavic audience, so I think this makes sense. Registered users should be able to select which skin they want to use.--Bjwebb 10:08, 23 November 2006 (MST)

I'm making significant changes to the skin during the next two weeks. At a techincal level that means that I'm rewriting "Monobook.php" and "Main.css". If Baya wants to create his own skin by modifying Monobook.php and/or Main.css and make his skin the default for the Ukrainian version, that sounds fine.--Dallan 11:27, 24 November 2006 (MST)

Would you also approve of the idea of registered users being able to choose which one they prefer, including possibly the default MediaWiki skin (or something that looks similar), for people used to Wikipedia etc.--Bjwebb 13:15, 24 November 2006 (MST)

Absolutely. Eventually I'd hope to have 3-5 skins that people could choose from. In fact one of our goals is to come up with a couple of better-looking skins in the next 2-3 weeks.--Dallan 23:47, 24 November 2006 (MST)