|
I've thought about working on this myself, but haven't ever found the time to do it.
I think it would be great to have a Chrome / Firefox plugin that could extract source information from Ancestry or FamilySearch (or other) pages, and add it to a WeRelate page. [09:06, 28 May 2016 Jdfoote1]
- Besides the fact that most Ancestry sources are indexes, and not the real sources, nor do they always identify the real source, I doubt Ancestry would allow you extract much real data, since that is how they make their money. The links that Ancestry generates in GEDCOMS that get loaded onto WeRelate are little more than advertising and any link into Ancestry tends to be useless to the presumed majority of WeRelate users that aren't subscribers.
- It is not that hard to cite FamilySearch items. The hardest part is probably matching their collection name with the Source name used by WeRelate, and that may be hard to program into any kind of software. Linking to the source is a single simple cut and paste. Most of the good sources are documents, and so the computer would probably be unable to do much about transcribing the document. Using the familysearch index is inviting errors, as not all the information was indexed, and many are mis-transcribed, as is plain to anybody with knowledge of the family being researched, as opposed to the volunteers that built those indices (including myself for a short while, until I decided I was unqualified to decipher handwritten German names, a language I don't know, that were so common in a Milwaukee census from the 1800's).
- Simply put, the value of this suggestion is not clear. These tasks are such a small percentage of the effort and attention one must give to determine if a source actually applies to a person, and is valid, that the payoff seems minimal. Where automation might help more would be citing census entries, and trying to use the identifying information that is input, to link to the actual page image at archive.org, or taking citations of sources and automatically linking to the page image on archive.org or books.google.com if those are listed as repositories for that source. --Jrich 17:20, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
|
