WeRelate talk:Mergers with other sites?/archive

This page is for discussing the various merge proposals and possibilities.

Possible merger with Rodovid

(Starting with slightly edited copy of Bjwebb's comment on Watercooler)

See Wikitree and Rodovid for information on the WikiTree/Rodovid merger.

There have been some discussions between Dallan (creator of this site) and the creator of Rodovid about the possiblility of a merge or partnership. Dallan decided to delay discussions till Fall, because of the time they were taking. I just wondered what the WeRelate community thought about the possibility of a merge, because I do not personally know them very well.--Bjwebb 14:49, 23 May 2006 (MDT)

(The following comments dated 18 June to 20 August were first made on the Watercooler but have been copied here for completeness. Please continue HERE, not on the Watercooler.)

I like the idea of a merge - makes sense to me. I must say I like the layout of WeRelate better, though... -- Trish 18:07, 18 June 2006 (CDT)

I would prefer not to merge at this time. You could leave the possibility open for, say, a year from now. cheryl Aug 14, 2006

Overall view

From my somewhat superficial look at both sites, I think a merger would produce an unbeatable combination. However, some disadvantages. Robin Patterson 01:21, 24 May 2006 (MDT)

Admittedly, there are a few difficulties, but is there if they are overcome, is there any reason not to have a merge?

Possible problems

Licences/licenses

They are on different licences, which may be an almost insuperable problem unless every contributor to one of them agrees to move his or her work to the other. Robin Patterson 01:21, 24 May 2006 (MDT)

Rodovid is under CC-BY, which requires simply attribution, which the GFDL also provides, so edits under CC-BY can be relicensed under the GFDL.--Bjwebb 09:33, 24 May 2006 (MDT)

Probably. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/. Robin Patterson 13:55, 24 May 2006 (MDT)

Different namespaces

The different namespaces would be a complication, though probably not a real barrier. Robin Patterson 01:21, 24 May 2006 (MDT)

Language links

Rodovid's language-linking would be a complication too, but I haven't looked hard at how it works. Robin Patterson 01:21, 24 May 2006 (MDT)

It might be a problem, but personally I think it is one of the features that you would want to have.--Bjwebb 09:33, 24 May 2006 (MDT)

Definitely! Robin Patterson 13:55, 24 May 2006 (MDT)

I like the foreign language option at the other site. Other than that, I like the layout here better. Thanks for asking.
--Grandmakr 18:13, 19 August 2006 (MDT)

I like Rodovid's foreign language option as well. I'd like to start foreign-language wiki's on this site eventually, but for now I think I need to focus on getting the functionality working in English, especially since I don't know any other languages well enough to do the message translation.--Dallan 22:28, 20 August 2006 (MDT)

Reasons Against?

Are there any real reasons against a Rodovid-WeRelate, other than the difficulties involved, that anyone would like to voice. If not, I think (certainly hope) that the merge will go ahead, as soon as Dallan and Yaroslav/Baya get a suitable oportunity.--Bjwebb 08:56, 17 November 2006 (MST)

Now see heading "Next steps..." below

Possible merger with WikiTree

What do people think of having a merge with WikiTree. I can't really think of any objections.--Bjwebb 08:31, 20 November 2006 (MST)

Wikitree is now license compatible with WeRelate after a community backed license change implemented by Tomas this afternoon. All material is now licensed under the GFDL.--Bjwebb 12:59, 21 November 2006 (MST)

I don't think you can change the license of existing material because a majority of your current users vote to use a new license. What about the existing material? Has every contributor to WikiTree (past and present) agreed to the new license, or is material from non-agreeing contributors being deleted? Also, Person and Family pages on WeRelate are dual-licensed under GFDL and CC-BY-SA, which is probably an issue. We could drop CC-BY-SA, but we added it so that people could print family history books including textual/biographical information from Person/Family pages without needing to include the contents of the GFDL in each copy of the book.--Dallan 20:44, 21 November 2006 (MST)

I know, it is a bit legally unsound, but it was Tomas' decision. I did raise some issues and he said he believes he acted with due diligence, and I must agree to some extent - there was much else he could have done other than wipe the database. If you want to have a stronger legal footing for after a merge with WikiTree, you could just use a bot to extract the non-copyrightable information, and the rest would have to be rewritten.--Bjwebb 01:00, 22 November 2006 (MST)

Possible merger with Genealogy Wikia

This possibility is being discussed on the Genealogy Wikia also: [1]

One site that we haven't talked much about merging with is the Genealogy Wikia. Due to the nature of the project (created as a dependent part of Wikia) a merge may difficult, but should help prevent people duplicating our efforts needlessly elsewhere.--Bjwebb 10:20, 17 November 2006 (MST)

I've been in contact with one of the Wikia funders. A merger is a possibility. There are a number of things that would need to be worked out: One issue is that we've made changes to the underlying MediaWiki software. Also, when ancestry recently allowed their users to create web-pages for people, they had 50M names added in 3 months. I believe that anything close to this level of activity would dwarf all other activity on Wikia, and I'm not sure I want to be responsible for that. I need to get a better sense of scalability and maintainability issues before a merger could be considered.--Dallan 10:48, 18 November 2006 (MST)

Indeed. The other thing with the site, is that we would become affiliated with Wikia as a result of a merger. Do we want to be affiliated with Wikia? - or would we rather try to become a Wikimedia project, a member of the same elite group as Wikipedia. Discuss. Personally, I'd rather be in Wikimedia (but this will be more difficult to achieve); however I doubt eveybody will share this view.--Bjwebb 15:12, 18 November 2006 (MST)

I agree a merger with the Wikimedia Foundation would be interesting. I listened to one of their board members at the last Wikimania conference. She said they were starting to consider partnerships with similarly-aligned organizations, but they're not there yet. I think it would be interesting to approach them when we (and they) are further along, possibly next Spring.--Dallan 23:47, 18 November 2006 (MST)

Yes. Solvieg only recently made me aware, but we're still in beta apparently (See Talk:Main Page). Spring would be an ideal time to aproach them. This site should be fully up and running.--Bjwebb 02:39, 19 November 2006 (MST)

What to merge

The first question to ask in a merger is what to merge.

• Content: I believe the Wikitree content is made available under a CC-BY-NC license. Is that correct? If so, this license is incompatible with the dual GFDL/CC-BY-SA license at WeRelate, so we could not import Wikitree content. I believe Rodovid content is licensed under CC-BY, which is probably compatible with GFDL/CC-BY-SA, but I'd want to have a lawyer verify that. Another thing though: I don't want to import content unless the authors/maintainers of that content come over as well. At this early point I don't want to import wiki pages for people and families into WeRelate unless there are active users willing to respond to other users' questions about them.--Dallan 10:48, 18 November 2006 (MST)

• Software: I don't think we'd need to merge any software. We'll be done with gedcom upload in the next couple of months, and regarding Rodovid's tree viewer page, which displays data in an hourglass format, I'd like to put that functionality in a Flash app so as to reduce server load.--Dallan 10:48, 18 November 2006 (MST)

• Organization: The Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, which develops WeRelate, currently has two employees, people who work part-time, volunteers, an executive board, and a board of advisors. We would need to understand what the merged organization would look like.

--Dallan 10:48, 18 November 2006 (MST)

I think your suggestions are what to merge are very good ones. One point of note though, is that there was a license vote at Wikitree.Org and most users would prefer a less restrictive license - we thought it might be possible to rescue some of the content, facts and figures (information in the leaf syntax) about people, but everything else would need to be rewritten (it would be good to have a static version of the CC-BY-NC WeRelate). Perhaps you could have the same laywer as with the CC-BY and GFDL question verify what we could extract from Wikitree.--Bjwebb 14:53, 18 November 2006 (MST)

It seems that we could add WikiTree content into the search results, and let people import pages from WikiTree if they were the author.--Dallan 23:47, 18 November 2006 (MST)

That sounds a good idea. Only, you would need to verify that they were the author.--Bjwebb 02:51, 19 November 2006 (MST)

Wikitree is now licensed under GFDL (which could be changed to CC-BY-SA aswell). Would you be happy with merging this content, which is possibly legally unsound, or would you rather do what was suggested above?--Bjwebb 07:19, 29 December 2006 (MST)

Wikitree changed its license after the current users of the website voted to change the license. I don't believe they ensured that every contributor agreed to the license change. This puts their content in a difficult situation: new contributions are coming in under GFDL, but old contributions by people who have not agreed to the license change are still under the old license (CC-BY-NC I believe). I believe Wikitree will need to remove contributions by people who have not explicitly agreed to the new license before their content can be included in other GFDL-licensed sites.--Dallan 13:38, 29 December 2006 (MST)

Okay, that makes sense.--Bjwebb 04:10, 30 December 2006 (MST)

Maybe a partnership or virtual merger?

A virtual merger could be possible just by massive reciprocal linking (preferably with at least one reciprocal link to the homepage, and maybe others, as a standard part of each sidebar so that people who got lost could easily jump back to the other site even if no matching page). It should be easy enough for us to devise templates (something we don't yet have too many of) that would make it easy to link manually, and it might be possible for experts to create bots that could automate it. Robin Patterson 01:21, 24 May 2006 (MDT)

I just re-read Robin Patterson's idea of a virtual merger. I really like this idea -- creating bi-directional links between pages on the various sites. The links could be created manually at first, and automatically later on.--Dallan 10:53, 18 November 2006 (MST)

I don't think a virtual merger is a paticularly good idea, definately not as a final goal. Ultimaltely we should strive for one site with the best from Rodovid, WeRelate and Wikitree, rather than two or three interlinked ones, which would just be confusing, especially for new users (which I hope there will be many of).--Bjwebb 14:58, 18 November 2006 (MST)

The idea of just one site is not often achieved in distributed systems. I'm not saying it's not worthwhile, but consider the Web domain name (DNS) infrastructure: there isn't one single site that contains all DNS information. The information is cached on many sites. The last component of each domain's name (.com, .edu, .uk, etc.) identifies who has the authoritative copy of the information. I wonder if it would be possible to do something similar for genealogical information - where a number of different websites would share access to the same data, caching it locally as needed. Page titles ending in "WR" would be known to originate from WeRelate, "RV" from Rodovid, "WT" from WikiTree, "AN" from Ancestry, "FS" from FamilySearch, etc. Although I think we can (and should) attempt to merge WeRelate, WikiTree, Rodovid, and Wikia, both Ancestry and FamilySearch are also heading in the direction of allowing people to create and edit web pages from uploaded GEDCOM's, and I doubt we'll be able to do a front-end merge with them anytime soon. It seems that we'll have to figure out how to do "virtual" merges eventually (although maybe not right away).--Dallan 23:47, 18 November 2006 (MST)

The motivation for the DNS infrastructure being a distributed system is primarily for reliability and secondly because of server loading. It isn't really necessary for a genealogical wiki site as it would be on a vastly smaller scale in terms of server load compared with the DNS system which handles several hundred million transactions per day. I think it would be unnecessary to use a distributed architecture for a successful genealogical wiki site. The site would probably be self financing if it served some sort of unobtrusive ads like google ads.-- Derek 28 Nov 2006

Derek could be talking about the Genealogy Wikia, which does exactly that! See "Possible_merger_with_Genealogy_Wikia" above. But the world has 6 thousand million people, all of whom have some interest in their parentage, so - as hinted in an earlier comment below this - size may become a significant factor if "several hundred million" of them get active here or on the Wikia. Robin Patterson 19:34, 27 November 2006 (MST)

In addition to scalability, another nice thing about DNS is that it doesn't force everyone to run the same software package. There's a standard data interchange format. It may be that not everyone wants to use the same wiki site, although I think it would be ideal if they did and if that site were WeRelate! :-) In the event that some people decide to use other websites, I think it would be helpful if we could figure out how to share data between sites.--Dallan 22:28, 27 November 2006 (MST)

Persumeably those sites are not under GFDL. Would we just have to extract facts and figures, similar to how we would for a merge with WikiTree. Just checking though, isn't Ancestry a commercial website, would any kind of merge be possible? As for familysearch, I know that it is not for profit. It would be interesting to approach them to see what they think of our project here.

I think it depends upon how popular the notion of using wiki's for your genealogy gets. If you were Ancestry/FamilySearch, and a large segment of your customer base said that they wanted to post their genealogy not only at your site but also at WeRelate, it seems like you'd be motivated to find a way to keep their genealogy in sync easily. Long-term, I believe either the major genealogy websites will come up with a way to keep family trees posted on multiple servers in sync. The current approach is too cumbersome for people active in multiple communities, and over time I think we'll see more and more genealogists becoming active on-line.--Dallan 00:40, 21 November 2006 (MST)

Right, I understand. Still out of the sites out there, familysearch is the most likely one to agree to some sort of partnership.--Bjwebb 09:08, 21 November 2006 (MST)

Talking about GFDL incompatibility, have you recieved any input from that laywer about whether CC-BY and GFDL are one way compatible.--Bjwebb 09:29, 20 November 2006 (MST)

I said I'd have to talk with a lawyer, not that I have a specific one already on call. :-). Actually, my wife User:Solveig used to practice, but not that kind of law. I'll contact a lawyer when a merger is closer.--Dallan 00:40, 21 November 2006 (MST)

I understand that you haven't one on call. I was just asking if you'd made any progress towards getting the help of one. It probably is better to wait as you say.--Bjwebb 09:08, 21 November 2006 (MST)

Next steps with Wikitree and/or Rodovid

I think the next step would be for the owners of Wikitree and/or Rodovid to outline a framework under which they would like to see a merger. That is, how much time and/or money would they be willing to put into the merged organization, what kind of responsibilities and rights they would like to have, and a timeline and milestones under which they would like to see the merger proceed. They could put their proposal on this page.--Dallan 10:48, 18 November 2006 (MST)