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I would like to use your service but I have 7888 people in my trees and you have a limit of 5000. --User:Mheffler 2012-01-04 09:55:53.
- You are undoubtedly talking about the limit on the size of GEDCOMs. My opinion is that 5000 is too big by a factor of about 100. I am serious. Uploading a GEDCOM means you just want to transfer data written for another purpose into a community database and have it stored verbatim. The reality of loading a GEDCOM is that it is difficult to remove features and preferences that you have adopted over the years which are inappropriate in a public environment that you share with collaborators unknown to you (things such as email addresses of correspondents, notes made to yourself, personal stories that really are not of interest to a wide audience, marks to distinguish ancestors, personal naming conventions, etc.) Further, the GEDCOM upload still requires you to convert or match your sources, place names and people to existing pages in WeRelate. Only if there is no overlap will the pages go straight in. Where there is overlap, you must read the existing page, decide what can be added and what part of your data shouldn't. This matching process is easier when done by editing each page by hand one by one because you have finer control to get the result just right.
- "You have to be kidding?" I can hear you saying that right now. No, I'm not. My family tree was 10,000. It took just over a year to enter it by hand. In the process, I ended up reinvestigating many people I would otherwise never have looked at again because I thought they were "done". In the process I discovered my evidence was weak, it didn't address issues I found on the WeRelate page, or it was so poorly documented that I was embarrassed to share it. So in that year plus, I greatly improved my ownprivate family tree, while merging my data into WeRelate so that the final page was appropriate for public consumption by people that might have had different conclusions than me, with appropriate weight given to the existing data submitted by previous users.
- I also like the idea that people make a long-term commitment to WeRelate, so that they will be notified of changes by others, acquiescing and learning from some, or starting discussions for the others that may be questionable. The community review process is on-going and is a significant part of what makes WeRelate so different.
- In other words, I argue against raising the limit. Further, there are tools in most genealogy software for generating GEDCOMs that contain just parts of your database, so you can still load your whole tree in pieces, without raising the limit. Start with a small piece and avoid starting a task that is probably a lot bigger and harder than you expect. --Jrich 23:40, 3 January 2012 (EST)
- I agree with Jrich. GEDCOM import is great, but there's so much more to research, especially collaborative wiki-based public research, than it can hold or make sense of. In my experience, people are constrained too much by GEDCOM because it gives this wonderfully complete structure for out data... which the data doesn't actually have! :-)
- However, that said, it looks like Mheffler found WeRelate, tried to import a big GEDCOM, was refused, and has now decided against using this site at all. Which is a great shame! I guess we just need to be positive about helping newcomers, and make plain that this is a wiki community first and a GEDCOM browser second (or eighth or something...).
- In short, I don't think the GEDCOM import limit needs to be raised.
- — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 22:03, 8 March 2012 (EST)
- Adding my voice against this option. Both here and on another genie wiki that allows GEDCOM uploads (there limited to 200 or 300), GEDCOM uploads have led to a mess. I have a 15,000-person GEDCOM that I would ultimately like to share via a wiki (it's currently over at WorldConnect), but I'd rather see exceptions made on a case-by-case basis than raise the limit for everyone. There's just too much cr*% out there. Jillaine 08:33, 11 November 2012 (EST)
I took a different approach from JRich and spent a significant amount of time researching and enhancing my personal tree before uploading it to WeRelate. When I was ready to upload it, I split it into small chunks (100 to 500 persons each upload). This made the upload much more manageable when there was a significant amount of overlap with other trees. I also agree that the limit of 5000 is reasonable. I am moving this suggestion to the rejected list.--DataAnalyst 22:09, 8 April 2017 (UTC)
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