WeRelate:Suggestions/Scraping of FindAGrave cemetery pages

As I have gone through and sourced my pages, I have tried to add burial/cemetery information, with links to Find A Grave, as they are known. In some cases, birth/death information is only known because of dates on a tombstone, so I view this as sometimes vital.

One thing that has been a hassle in this regard is that for nearly every cemetery, even some large ones, I have had to make a place for all of them, even though this information is already out there on Find A Grave. Since it appears place names for countries/states/cities/counties was already scraped for WR from other sites, I wonder if it would be possible to scrape cemeteries from Find A Grave ?

See WeRelate:Suggestions/Cemetery pages only on burial location. I never have been particularly fond of cemetery pages, thinking it would be better to add {{fgravecem|CRID|cemetery name}} to the description field and let Find A Grave be the documentor of cemeteries. What point being a mirror? But if cemeteries are to be made into Places, it seems like pre-populating the Place pages might be a good idea. All the more reason for limiting their appearance to selection of Burial Location. --Jrich 10:33, 11 November 2012 (EST)

I actually agree with you, though the problem with having FindAGrave handle them is that the very nature of that site is not very wiki friendly. Corrections, updates, etc are at the mercy of whoever 'owns' the cemetery page on FindaGrave. In the past Ive had trouble getting the admins there to force corrections on MIA users. I had a dispute with one user over the name of two cemeteries that were across the street for another, I showed him proof that they were considered two different cemeteries but he wouldnt budge, and since he owned several of the pages in question I couldnt do much about it despite having proof that he was wrong. I cant say what WR's founders had in their heads when they added cemeteries as places here but thats my thinking as to a possible 'why'. For the record, I support your suggestion above.

I agree with the first poster that creating all these cemetery pages before one can finish an upload is a hassle we could do without if possible! This is one feature that currently turns off new users. If info could be taken from Find-a-Grave for the initial creation of place pages, then users could add or edit the pages as they see fit. I don't see the need to have a permanent link to cover corrections or edits; just give us a head start with the initial creation of these cemetery place pages. --janiejac 11:52, 28 November 2012 (EST)

Thank you, but I think this suggestion should be implemented with Jrich's suggestion of limiting Cemetery places to 'burial location' field. Right now the suggestion box, when youre in the middle of entering a birth place, suggests that your person may have been born in a cemetery! User:DMaxwell

Also would prefer to have Cemeteries in a different category (or subcategory). It's getting to be a real nuisance to have to fight through cemetery listings when trying to enter place names. As for Find A Grave, I use it because it's there, but it's not the most reliable source, whether we're talking about cemetery names, who's buried where (I've found several people buried in two different cemeteries), or other information. Probably not a good foundation for WeRelate. --GayelKnott 14:50, 30 November 2012 (EST)

1. Yes, you will find errors in the memorials, but the idea here is to capture the names and locations of the Cemeteries as Places so that we at least have those initial pages created that we can further edit as needed. The idea is to remove the need to create cemetery pages before uploading a GEDCOM.
2. Now whether these Cemeteries should have their own type is a different question. But it is a question that should be answered before any such scraping is done, if it is even possible to do. And if Cemetery places were limited to the burial location field, that would solve the problem of sifting through cemetery listings while trying to enter birth or death locations.
3. So I think before we go much further, we need to find out from Dallan if such a scraping is even possible. --janiejac 15:30, 30 November 2012 (EST)

Find A Grave is not the only source of cemetery information, particulary when families are not in the United States. In Ontario, Canada, I have three different websites bookmarked to check if a cemetery has been covered. --Goldenoldie 03:13, 2 July 2013 (EDT)

I'm hitting "Watch" on this page, not necessarily because I support the suggestion of scraping Find A Grave for cemetery names, but because I want to keep abreast of any commentary this subject and possible changes to the use of cemetery placenames. I always thought that the use of cemeteries as actual placenames was awkward, akin to adding the name of a church as an actual separate placename for baptisms and marriages, or the name of the hospital as a placename for birth and death events, so I'm not sure I support importing all cemeteries to WR as separate places. My thought is they might be better identified in the "Description" field of the actual geographical place (village, township, city, county, etc.) on the person page. So my suggestion would be to maintain the status quo for now, keeping existing cemeteries with placename pages intact and keep the functionality for users to add cemeteries manually as placenames, but not to import all cemetery names and locations to WR and create a monumental amount of blank pages nobody uses or cares about. Also I don't look as this suggestion as a "value added" improvement worthy of costly programming time compared to other improvement suggestions on the list. --BobC 14:11, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I personally no longer favor the scraping of Findagrave. There are too many fake or non existent cemeteries on the website for us to rip them unconditionally. Probably better just to maintain the status quo, like you said. Findagrave's usefulness as a source, beyond actual grave photos and locations, I have questioned lately because the website allows far too much unproven material that is not factchecked by anyone (ie putting someone in a cemetery when there is no proof they were ever buried there). Daniel Maxwell 22:36, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Given the conversation above, and the fact that the Terms of Service for Find A Grave prohibit downloading content for anything beyond a unique family history, I am going to move this to the rejected list. Users will have to continue to create cemetery pages if they want to use them (or put the cemetery name in the description instead).--DataAnalyst 02:07, 9 April 2017 (UTC)