User talk:Zephyrinus/Original request

- Bill 16:42, 10 March 2007 (UTC) I'm going to assume that you originally suggested the creation of a Cemetery Transcription Wiki through the usual channel, and that their response was that it would make more sense to include such an effort within th Genealogy Wiki.

That would be a conclusion I'd agree with, which is not to say a separate wiki wouldn't be in order either. An explanation of your objectives on the Genealogy Wiki would help us understand how we can best support your effort. I might also add that a certral location where cemetery transcriptions could be found would be an excellent tool for genealogists. Hence setting up such a project on this wiki, if done properly, is something I could easily support. There are, however, some things that need to be considered in more detail, and I'd like to know more about what you are proposing.

Setting up a special project area for cemetery transcriptions would be relatively straight forward. We have several "special projects" underway, and more would make sense. We've played with various "Data Port" ideas for recording county level records, etc., and this may be carried forward more systematically in the future. However, such efforts can be very consumptive of time. There's a lot of such data out there, and getting it transcribed, organzied and incorporated into the the wiki would be a major undertaking if it were done systematically. The same could be said for a "Cemetery Transcription" Project. There are an awful lot of cemeteries records that could be incorporated.

Would the records presented be original transciptions, or abstracts from existing transcriptions? One suspects you are not planning on going into the field and transcribing bunches of cemeteries. If you were, you'd probably not get very far, as the task would be huge, and very localized.

Rather, I suspect your intent is to use existing transcriptions, either published in book form, and transcribed by you into electronic format, or extracted from existing transcription projects on the net. If that's the case then you need to think about things like copyright. That's a complex subject, and one about which I would offer no guidance, other to say---you have to be careful about doing things like this. It can be done under some circumstances, but its something that can create problems if not done careful and with due consideration to existing "copy rights".

If the material you expect to transcribe/abstract/extract is "out of copyright", then its not a problem to make use of it. However, if your plan is to extract existing transcriptions from the net, even if its "out of copyright" material, you may still have a problem of one sort or another. People do not take kindly to having their material usurpted by others, particularly when its done whole sale (as in copying entire pages verbatim from someone elses' site. Before you launch a project of this type, you need to take things like that into consideration.

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