User:Jrich

Hi,

I am new to werelate.org and am interested in the potential this has to be a useful tool. However, I think the user community, by training or by software, needs to focus on collaboration more. Just after my short tour, I would like to suggest to users to check to see if a person already exists and then collaborate, rather than re-inventing and adding noise.

Add your sources. Otherwise, it's just opinion. Let's make it more academic.

Off my soapbox. Sorry. Frustrations of an online genealogist.

--Jrich 15:08, 3 April 2008 (EDT)

Still excited about WeRelate in general. The next big advances for genealogy will all involve utilizing the network:

• more sources online (see books.google.com)
• more collaboration (e.g., WeRelate with its ability to share source citations, open editing of a common tree, and talk pages)
• meshing local data virtually with remote databases in a layered manner, providing automatic change notification (some day?)
• automated searching enabled by standard data interchange formats (Not just lists of 1000 places to be checked manually common in genealogy software)
• more publishing of old records by various agencies to free up that beleaguered town clerk who must pull out the old books for every wondering genealogist

Then, instead of spending time re-compiling what has already been compiled many times, we can all focus on uncovering the yet undiscovered stuff!

I realize that usage of WeRelate is still light, but to test if WeRelate actually encourages collaboration, I am entering some interesting individuals by hand, in the hopes people may comment on them, helping me out, and perhaps vice versa. The find/add feature that has been added is great! I find that typing in one family at a time by hand is a good mechanism to review my work, and to make sure I am merging rather than duplicating what others have done.

I think GEDcom uploading is a mistake. Admittedly there are things in my data that should not be published wholesale, which others may not feel is an issue with their data. But automated uploading results in several problems I have noticed including duplicates, dangling individuals (i.e., with no dates, no parents, no marriages, no children, just a name - the uploader probably didn't realize those people were in their file), varying quality including data with no sources, or just Ancestral File Numbers (meaning the uploader unquestioningly duplicated the data of a person on the Internet even though no sources are provided in Ancestral Files, they don't know the submitter, and for almost any Ancestral File you can find another that disagrees with it.)

--Jrich 20:29, 4 September 2008 (EDT)