WeRelate:History of Parliament Inclusion Project

What is this?

The key goals of this project include:

• Make the exceptional and extensive research of the History of Parliament project, easily available in the Genealogical context of WeRelate.
• Systematically create WeRelate Person pages, for every member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (and its precursors), who has a biography page on the History of Parliament Web Site.
• Make sure every Person page created has a consistent and useful citation to the appropriate page on the History of Parliament site.
• Make sure every Person page created is placed in a category that corresponds to the organization of the members, as presented on the History of Parliament web site.
• For members of Parliament who already have a Person page, be sure that their pages acquire the same citation forms and category information, as those newly created by this effort.
• Encourage use of both WeRelate and the History of Parliament, and each to best advantage.

Why are we doing this?

The History of Parliament is a remarkable collection of over 20,000 professionally created biographies. Just a couple of examples:

• COURTENAY, Sir Hugh (aft.1358-1425)
• CECIL DAVID, (c.1460-?1540)
• SEYMOUR, Sir Edward, 3rd Bt. (1610-88)

Even without a project dedicated to this specific source, there are already over 400 Person pages that cite the History of Parliament. We know of many existing Person pages where a biography exists and a source could be added, but we lack an orderly and reliable way to locate them.

Even if the existing pages, citing History of Parliament, could be reliably found, we would still face difficulties getting source(s) to be created consistently.

We don't presently have categories for members of Parliament, but it will be easy to create such categories if the syntax is generated by software.

General Approach

By direct access to the History of Parliament web site, we will mine information on the members, including names, DOB, DOD, honorifics, and titles. From that, we will directly create one or more GEDCOM files. In addition to the facts noted, the GEDCOMs will indicate the facts as sourced from the History of Parliament, the specific page on which the member is discussed and category information designating what section of the History of Parliament contains the member's biography (Tentative categories: 1386-1421, 1422-1504, 1509-1558, 1558-1603, 1604-1629, 1640-1660, 1660-1690, 1690-1715, 1715-1754, 1754-1790, 1790-1820, 1820-1832).

The GEDCOM files being created will be a little unusual, in that they will not encode any genealogical connections. The format is being used solely for the purpose of efficiently and consistently creating pages for each member of parliament. Subsequent conventional interactive work will still be required, to connect pages thus created into the existing WeRelate genealogical tree - either by addition of intervening relatives or by finding an existing duplicate Person page (which may then be merged with the member page).

The upload content will also provide help in systematic identification of initially unconnected pages, since we will create the category for each member page with a sort key of "ZZZZUNCONNECTED" (or a similar marker). In this way, the sort key of the associated category, will automatically group unconnected pages for easy identification. When someone works to connect a page, they can readily remove the distinguishing prefix.

How is this going?

• A script to read information out of the indexes on the History of Parliament site has been created.
• Tiny example GEDCOM files have been exported in order to serve as examples of the content a program needs to generate
• Work is occurring to write a script that will generate a GEDCOM containing Person page data for individuals, directly from the information found in the History of Parliament index.
• Contact has been made with Director Seward, indicating the existence of this project and its goals. He tentatively offers no objection, but wishes to see a sample before the project goes beyond prototype scale.
• Consent from the History of Parliament Trust/historyofparliamentonline.org, or at least the explicit absence of objections, is accepted as a requirement for the project to move beyond prototype scale.

Helping

Watch and participate in the discussions on the talk page!

Templates related to History of Parliament content

• Template:HistoryOfParliamentMemberCite

Create a member page citation link, based on facts/strings apt to be present even if changes are made to the current web site.

• Template:HistoryOfParliamentMember

Instead of fixing one or more categories, into which members of parliament can be ordered, create such categories by way of a template, so that they are able to be added or changed without re-editing every member page.