Is it time to discuss parameters for a general structure for language/regional projects/categories?

Question

We do have an increasing number of "roots" projects and expressed interest in more, a development we should encourage in my opinion as it could potentially help greatly in making WikiTree truely worldwide.

Is it desirable at this time to develop a framework for these "roots" projects, perhaps in a hierarchical way (continents, regions, countries, provinces etc.) alongside with the appropriate categories, or is this premature and it would be better to wait until sufficient interest in specific projects develops from the bottom up?

Answer 1

Oh, my - yes, Yes, YES, YESSSSSS!!!!  In fact, I'd say it was past time to organize this kind of structure.  The guidelines this would have provided would have made the effort needed to organize the Holocaust project an order of magnitude easier ... plus the added benefit of having uniform organization across projects is priceless.

Thank you immensely, Helmut, for suggesting this!!!!!

Answer 2

I think some guidance on this topic would make a lot of sense.  We have some conventions developing for creating geographical regions in individual countries, but I personally think we create confusion when we have two sets of geographic categories based on the language spoken.

Would the Categorization Project leaders take on this initiative?  I would be happy to give input if volunteers are needed.

Answer 3

Great question, Helmut. Thank you for bringing this up.

 

Abby and the team have been discussing this but we haven't made much progress, and discussing it here is better than talking about it privately.

 

I have no idea of the answer here.

 

I'm inclined to think we do need to start establishing a consistent hierarchy for regional and time-period projects, but I don't know what it should be, and I don't know how rigidly we should try to enforce it. So far, as you say, we've been trying to let things bubble up rather than be forced down from the top.

 

Some random thoughts ...

 

The members of the Categorization Project have done a fantastic job evolving a solid regional hierarchy. It is complex and duplicative, but it makes sense. For example, http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Baden%2C_Deutschland is in the Deutschland and Germany categories and could be in other categories for other names for Germany in other languages. All these are subcategories of names for Europe.

 

If members came together and wanted to start a Baden Project, it should be a sub-project, but a sub-project of what? Of a Deutschland or a Germany project? Can we have both a Deutschland and a Germany project? (Right now we have a German Roots project.)

 

I would think that Deutschland would be the right name. Using the native language and current name of a location would be the only universally-consistent rule we could apply. On the other hand, if most of the project members are English-speakers, does this just add unnecessary confusion?

 

What if instead of focusing on Baden in the 20th century the members were focused on another time period, when it was called something else? If it's Medieval, it might be better to make it a sub-project of a Medieval Europe Project and associate it with the EuroAristo Project since they're mostly Medieval. But maybe they shouldn't have English names.

 

If European-wide project don't use the English name for "Europe" what do they use? Obviously, Europe is multilingual. Same goes for other top-level regions. Even North America includes Mexico.

 

The Mexico Project is currently a top-level project, and so is the Latin America Project.

 

???

 

Other issues and factors:

 

Do we really want to force projects to be sub-projects of projects that don't exist? Do we need to create an Oceania Project to encompass the Australia Project? Or does Australia stay a top-level project until there is a New Zealand Project?

 

How many projects and sub-projects should we have? For technical reasons, we'd like to limit the number of top-level projects. One reason: we can't have an unlimited number of badges.

 

The current task on the team's to-do list is to come up with better help pages and FAQs on projects. We need better definitions for projects and sub-projects. We have also started thinking of small and/or pending projects in a new way, as a third category of projects we're calling free-space projects. We need to clarify what that means and throw it out to the community here for input.

 

Drafting these help pages has been on my to-do list for a while. I may get some time this afternoon to work on them.

 

Chris

Comments

"If you build it, he will come ..."

There are currently 193 member or observer countries in the UN and a handful of other self-proclaimed or de facto countries. The great majority of them will never generate enough interest for a "roots" project (Federation of Saint Christopher and Nevis anyone?), but there have been recent questions about French Roots, and Japan and China have been mentioned in the not too distant past. I don't think there is a need for as of yet non-existing projects just for the sake of having projects in place but I could envision a hierarchy of dormant projects already in place that could be activated as the need arises. Taking your example there would be an inactive Oceania Project in place and Australia would be the current top level project, but when New Zealand gets it's act together that could easily change.

The same principle could work the other way: Latin America could have a mechanism in place whereby a sub-project for Chile would spring into place once there is a sufficient interest for it etc.

The language issue is in my opinion a much bigger problem. It does not only affect regional or continental groupings but also multilingual countries themselves. Even Germany has areas that are officially bilingual. I don't see an easy answer there.

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Chris: Hello & thank you for such a wonderful site and for all the hard work in keeping it up-to-the-mark, you must be very proud of all the volunteers and their mammoth contributions.

It is understood that WikiTree can't be all things to all people, that 'categorisation' is virtually endless and that you can't have an unlimited number of badges.

To attain the 'truly global' aim will the addition of the major part of the world's populations'  new profiles (presumably in languages which few english-speakers will understand), mean that you will need to have multi-language pages and for which topics : "help" , " G2G " , etc., etc. ?

Has there been a change in thinking to concentrate more on 'history' (not many are concerned with, say, "Charles the Fat") or on 'events' (not every one knows, say, what a "bushranger" is), etc. -   to the detriment of genealogy ?

Guess you have more important problems to tackle but wish you success with the solutions otherwise it's not impossible that the non-english speaking rest-of- the-world will be confused by our confusion.

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Phil,

You stimulated my mind and made me think about a time (mid-90's) when the web was in its infancy and I became involved in a non-profit group's effort to get off the ground.  It was named Response International and its purpose was to provide aid - of whatever kind was needed - to victims of disasters anywhere in the world, whether man-made or natural.  The idea for it came from the participation of its founder in humanitarian efforts in Bosnia during the war there.  I donated my time and effort to create a website for them.  The website had 3 objectives -

1. to inform the public what the organization was all about
2. to solicit donations of whatever was needed at any given time - from construction materials to medicines and people with construction or teaching or nursing or whatever other skills were needed to deliver the assistance
3. to permit entities (countries, hospitals, schools, etc.) who were impacted by or on the front lines of responding to the disaster to request assistance.

All right, all right, I'll try to get to the point - sorry for the rambling here, but please stay with me - I'm almost there!

This site was built to handle a large volume of traffic and was driven by a massive database (I used Oracle for it).  Ability to enter needs or offers was under access control, but more than that was needed - the biggest need was for people who needed to use the site to be able to do so in their native language, so I set up an entirely separate website dedicated to translation (this was before there was anything like GoogleTranslate - maybe we complain about how bad that is, but it sure is a whole lot better than the absolute nothing that there used to be).  Of course, the entire website content was stored in a database for easy maintenance in a user friendly interface I provided for it.  I just expanded that interface - and the database - to include about 30 languages (the plan was to add more as volunteer translators became available).  Although the site was maintained in English, every website content record was duplicated in each language. (cont'd)

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Every time content was changed (in English), the record's duplicates in all the other languages were automatically flagged as needing update and the assigned translater was automatically notified.

Cumbersome system?  ... absolutely
Effective?  ... extremely, but that was because there was a dedicated group of volunteer translators who took their responsibility seriously.

Finally ... I've gotten to the point here - I think that our projects may need a similar system to maintain the project, category, free space, and profile pages in assorted languages - of course, on a far smaller scale than what I was doing and also with the benefit of far more advanced technological support than was available to me back then.

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Gaile: Hello & thank you for your comment above - I'm sure if I had your computer expertise and WikiTree experience I would be in a better position to make 'useful' contributions - the fact that I'm a 'new kid on the block' also gives me cause for caution for fear of inadverently 'stepping on toes' of the 'old gang'.

In this area I (and perhaps other newcomers) trust that someone may be able to expand on the 'badges' system - is this a graphic way to display membership of a project on a profile manager's own profile page or is it because such project membership is not shown on a list of a project's members ?

Of similar mystery is the application of the 'points' system. I've noticed the values (for points) - but what is the purpose ? Incentive, kudos,similar  - isn't this also marginally 'elitist' ?

If we didn' need either wouldn't this help Chris & the others ( see his comment re limits to numbers of badges - above) ?

But I do like the 'de babel' button !

Answer 4

My opinion is aligned with yours Helmut, projects should arise out of interest of minimum one persion who will push them forward, no need to create hundreds of project where no one works on (I think we have enough already).

I'd like to bring up the question again what the category of those roots project (like German roots) is for?

1) Are we putting it on profiles of all people that ever were born in Germany (wrong IMO)

2) Are we putting it on profiles of people with German descendant who weren't born in Germany (correct IMO)?

 

Following no 1 would lead (and is already) to easily couple hundred million profiles on WikiTree with this category. German is the largest ethnic background for all Americans (forgot if it was 10 or 15% of the whole population), not speaking about all those other countries Germans went to (South America, Africa, Asia, Rest of Europa). If we want to bring structure in (and a clear yes to your initiual question, we need more structure and examples/help pages) than we should also discuss this.

Comments

The Roots projects are pretty general-which is one reason we're looking at project structure right now. My hope/goal is that the projects that can cover large numbers of profiles might end up breaking into smaller sub-projects as far as categorizing profiles and making projects function at their best. German Roots has started, though only a few exist yet, to break into smaller sub-projects to focus on smaller areas and immigration movements.

Even so, being a part of a project is not the same as categorizing profiles, though projects use categories. Projects can have large numbers of profiles and still be useful, setting standards, helping source things, giving direction whereas categories are useful when we can use specifics and group people into small, useful groups to easily see what they shared in common. Projects are used to gather those folks who share a common interest so they can work together to improve the profiles that fall into that interest. We are trying to work out the best structure for them, which will take a little time, and your input is appreciated!

Also, right now, if three people are interested in a potential project and we can find a Leader to lead it, a project gets started. That isn't much, and we keep track of the suggestions for new projects on the Projects page. A lot of projects are just waiting for a WikiTree Leader to be able to lead them, as the interest level is there.

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Andreas: Hello. It's conceivable that another possibility might have been included in your list of the reason for having categories for '(German) roots projects', i.e.

3)  putting it on profiles of people with German ancestors (even correcter IMHO)?

If we want a 'global tree' it seems logical to start globally and work top-down rather than bottom-up.  This is, in itself, such a major part of the original question from Helmut, and of the resulting answers and comments from yourself & others that I will expand my further thoughts (if needed) by way of a separate answer.

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Abby, thanks a lot for your answer. I think part of it needs to be put up in some sort of FAQ or explanation as I do believe that most people new to WikiTree (and probably even a lot of the more experienced ones) aren't understanding the difference between part of a project (in our example German Roots) which is for living people (sorry for the pun, I meant profile managers) and the categories which is to put some structure and order for almost only dead people (our ancestors, obviously we can and should put in categories for us living as well).

Maybe it's just semantics and please keep in mind this isn't my mother tongue but isn't the word "Roots" implying that I'm referring to another country where my forefathers were once coming from? I remember the movie "Roots" or was it a tv series in the 80's where that African America is always referring to himself as "Kunta Kinte" (or so, memories fades) as that was his name when he was born in Africa. That is for me the correct use of "Roots".

I personally have Italian "Roots" or heritage through my Great-Grandfather who was born in Asiago, Italy and emigrated to Germany. But as someone who was born in Germany myself, I don't have German roots. We do have Russians that are now living in Germany as they had German roots, coming from settlers sometimes back to 15xx (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia,_Ukraine_and_the_Soviet_Union).

This is a direct answer to Phil's remark, hence why his solution no 3 isn't 100% correct. It would also imply that we put the category on Germans (meaning being born in Germany) as they also had German ancestors, right? Their parents where mostly Germans as well.

tl;dr
 
Abby has highlighted the difference between getting a badge for a project (like German roots) and putting a category (for German_Roots) on to a profile

I've further tried to define that the term "Roots" only applies for people where those roots are in a different country then where they were born

 

As usual your comments/feedback is very welcome

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Hi Andreas,

Roots projects are directed to those people who have ancestors from the area in question. So, I have German Roots ancestors-my second great grandparents are Prussian immigrants. I do not use the template on my own profile, but would include it on theirs, as well as their ancestors, if they, too, were born in Germany. As far as where that cut off is, for instance for those recently born in Germany, that tends to be more up to the project to determine. We're working on clarifying some of these nuances, but in general leave a lot of the parameter setting up to those willing to lead the project. Some clarity comes in the sub-projects, too.

As far as projects categorizing, I think we still want to look at specifics, like you would with any categorization. If someone fits in sub-project categories better than the category, then that would be the best place to put them rather than into the top-level project category. Sometimes someone may only know that their ancestor came from Germany, and should be part of the project, but not from where. In this case, the best application is being in the German Roots category, But, if they know that their ancestor was from Swearingen, then that is the better category to use.

Some projects use their categories for members of the project, though, too. I think the work Phil is getting started on better use and definition of categories use with help with figuring out the best approach. That's a different thread, though :-)

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I think as part of this "more structure" discussion we also need to agree on where exactly to put the cut-off point

Answer 5

Helmut: Hello & thank you for your question. In view of some of the other answers & related comments it would seem that there is a growing concensus that WikiTree has outgrown its american-centric (i.e. USA/Canada) culture by including their offshore ancestors as per the growing number of categories being introduced and in catering for 'other peoples' of the world.

To establish a structure in which to record the consequent flood of information is a task for the experts, no doubt aided by members' collaboration in general and, with this in mind I would like to suggest (on the premise that WikiTree is designed to be a 'global' tree) the following broad structure which could be appropriately divided and compartmentalised to offer the maximum chance of encouraging others to join in:

The Tree:   Is global

if it consists of 4 major, populated (in the traditional sense) geographic areas,

The Americas / Eurasia / Africa / Oceania

if these areas were classified, firstly into regions, such as Europe / Middle East / Asia / etc., etc.

then secondly into countries or nations (using today's terminology or definitions)

and subsequently (if needed) into provinces / states / counties / other / etc.

Presumably this would create sufficient compartments to enable languages to be assigned and for date-ranges to be qualified.

As to whether one has 'projects', 'sub-projects', 'mini-projects', 'other projects' relating to 'region', 'language', 'area', 'nation', 'roots', 'significant events', 'special occasions', etc., etc. probably depends on how many members want what and, ultimately, who is going to do all the hard yards to advance the cause.

Comments

Phil, I would generally agree with your hierarchical outline but I do have conceptual problems with the language issue.

Let's just stick with German for a moment: It is spoken and for the most part an official (minority) language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, France, Luxemburg, Belgium, Poland, and Namibia. Germany recognizes officially as minority first languages Sorbian, Romani, Danish, and North Frisian, not to mention the sizeable portion of immigrants (about 1.8% of the population speaks Turkish as their first language). And Germany, with respect to language, is one of the more homogeneous countries.

Of course, all of this is academic right now, as long as we are a majority English speaking community. Germany right now is of interest for the majority of users as the country of their origin, but what would happen if the sizeable genealogy community in Germany decides to plug their research into a global tree?

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Helmut,

When the teensy display screen in the cockpit of an airplane has options for a pilot to select to display this, that, and the other kind of data, the screen can have so much on it that all you see is one big brightly lit up area.  For that situation, there is a "declutter" button that the pilot can press and the screen will automatically eliminate some of the less important data (the software has a priority algorithm built in).

What we need here, in my humble opinion, is a "de-babel" button ... I would hope that most people who speak some of the minority languages you mentioned also speak one of the more widely used languages.  I don't think it will ever be possible for WikiTree to cater to every language in the world, as nice a thought as it is to do so..

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Helmut: Hello again & thank you for your comment. Your points are taken but, if you'll excuse my relatively 'new' status and probable lack of understanding of terminology and expression of goals/ideals as used by the 'old' hands, I believe there may be a couple of other aspects which may need further consideration.

Sticking with German ('Roots' ! ) for the moment, it was my understanding that it was the 'place' of birth/residence/marriage/death/etc. of the ancestor/s which was the determining factor (as to 'Roots') - (perhaps "origin' might be a suitable label) - rather than the 'language' spoken by that/those ancestor/s.

Either way there are ancillary problems arising: which 'line' do we follow to determine the ancestor's/s'  place/s of origin -  'patrilineal' , ' matrilineal' or both ? This alone, if added to by members' concerns for 'cut-off' point/s, leads to multiple 'possible' places of origin.  Perhaps we should all just show ' africa ' and keep the scientists happy !

Of course some of the more conscientious may then need to discuss if such a place of origin is 'certain' or 'uncertain'   LOL  (I just learned that !).

As to another concern - your reference to english speakers being a majority in our community (assuming you mean WikiTree) is 'academic' but a quick look at the following site - in its footnote area -infers that we comprise less than 20% of the 'global' population . The bigger tasks are yet to come for a 'truly global' WikiTree !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population

How do we cater to that other 80% +, even assuming they are interested ?

Maybe Gaile had the answer, maybe we are burying ourselves in red tape, maybe the 'task' would be easier if it was simplified, could we accept - initially - names, dates & places for each 'profile' (with the appropriate 'acceptable' source/s) to be prettied-up as WikiTree's resources permit.

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The United Nations has six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

Wiki|Tree could do the same.