Forum:Future of Familypedia

Hi everyone,

About a month or so ago, I started thinking about the future of Familypedia. For a whole bunch of reasons, I like the idea of open collaborative online genealogy, and Familypedia is the best site I have found on which to do this. To make the "collaborative" part work, though, I feel that we need a lot more regular users (so that there is at least one person on the site who shares ancestors with me :-) - say, a factor of 10 or even a hundred. I then started thinking that wikia might not want to keep supporting us if we got that big.... Today I came back after a hiatus, discovered that form-based pages (and the forms themselves) were acting strange, and found the discussion at Forum:SMW_on_Familypedia - it seems we are already starting to outgrow wikia, and any dedicated server would have to be supercharged.

So the question that I hate to ask (because so much work has gone into it): Is SMW sufficiently "scalable" (i.e., able to accommodate a 10-100 fold increase (or more) in people pages) as an engine for the kind of data processing we need? If not, are there reasonable alternatives out there, either as a back end to the mediawiki-driven interface we have now, or as a separate platform? (I don't know the wiki/web 2.0 world very well, so don't have any real ideas here, unfortunately.)

I don't want to be a wet dishrag, but I also don't want to invest too much of my limited genealogical time into adding content to a site that may be running into a ceiling.....

Bruce Kendall 01:02, November 27, 2010 (UTC)