Wikipeople

Use the front page to lay out formal proposals and plans, and Talk:Wikipeople for general discussion.

Format

The proposed format of the content pages is that of a biography. At the end of each biography will be a table of family names that have been linked to this person or family. Possible advanced search filters are; soundex name (alternative spellings), geographical locations, names that coincide with birth, death, or marriage date, and other identifying characteristics of how this person relates to the wikitree.

Scope

Initially the scope would include people, living and dead. Organizational pages to group those people (by alma mater, by place of employment, etc) might be added.

Another possibility would be to create a database of all humans as far back as our last common ancestor, as mentioned in this Associated Press article: "Study considers single common ancestor By MATT CRENSON, Associated Press July 2, 2006" [1]. Obviously huge gaps would be unavoidable and however ambitious this would define the scope of the genealogical project to identify as far as possible each human being that has lived dating back as far as 1AD.

Language

This has not been decided. One possibility is to have all languages co-exist on the same wiki. Essentially we would need to run multiple instances of Mediawiki on a single database. How this would work with the existing software is unclear. Some changes might need to be made.

Usernames

For the purpose of this wiki we might want to have a policy of using real names.

Privacy

The issue of privacy needs to be addressed. This issue is likely to come up much more often than with biographies of famous people. The policies don't need to be decided before the wiki goes up, but efforts should be underway to define them at the time the wiki goes live. Information about living people contributed by third parties should be limited to that which is already publicly available. Much consideration should be given to the potential of identity theft given that full names, mother’s maiden name, date of birth and place of birth will likely be required and visible for thorough data matching and branch reconciliation.

License

In order to maintain compatibility with Wikipedia, the GFDL might be chosen, but this needs to be discussed.