Help talk:Loading Gedcoms

(Initial material was copied from Watercooler in September 2006.)

Weary of manually converting my html pages into pages for this site, I have taken an easier, if somewhat less elegant solution of writing a program. As I only started it two days ago, it is still somewhat crude and is not picking up all of the gedcom details. If anyone else is interested I can supply the program. I really should publish it properly on sourceforge, but at the moment that seems like a lot of effort. If any of you are interested in the program, with somewhat limited support, you can contact me. Yewenyi 11:01, 12 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * Could be very useful for some people. My family stuff, however, is on Family Tree Maker v 3.4 at home and uploaded to WorldConnect now and again, so I just paste or type from the latter for my new entries here after using the person's nearest relative as a starter for the page. Robin Patterson 22:24, 12 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * Ok, I'm convinced. The vast quantity you just slammed up here was quite impressive. I'd be interested in seeing this code. We went from ~600 legit pages to almost 1,000 more than that in no time at all. Very nice. Jtc 07:38, 18 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * Might have a bug. Check out http://genealogy.wikicities.com/index.php?title=Category:Minty_Surname&rcid=5201. It's a surname page about Minty, but contains a link to Bagnall instead of Minty. Jtc 08:02, 18 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * You are right about this one. As I use copy and paste, perhaps I accidentally pasted in the wrong one. Early on I was copying and editing. Only later did I write some code.


 * Too many entries? Ok, I know it's probably bad to suggest this, but this may be able to create more entries per day than is good. This 'Recent Changes' list only allows 500 entries to be seen, but this swamps that. There's no way now to see all the recent changes because there were so many. I'm not sure about the right solution. Jtc 08:02, 18 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * His program is marvellous: a new page every 25 seconds or so, for the half-hour I counted. But Jerrod, if you want to be good with that program it may pay to get really proficient in manipulating the address bar. Next time you reach that "500", look up and change the "500" near the end of the address bar to something bigger. (I thought you got a "Next 500" option anyway, but I see that you don't. Wikipedia doesn't either. Probably because, for that page in particular, it's a bit of a drain on the server, so the managers want to make it available only for people who are so keen that they go to the trouble of editing the address bar.) (8-D  Robin Patterson 12:38, 18 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * Loading Gedcoms is a page I have created to show more than perhaps belongs on this page. I will include some screen shots and the code. It is still a prototype and I cannot convice it to run stand alone. I need to get out that Java manual to work out what I am doing wrong.


 * GEDCOM importing is a must if you want the volume of data you are looking for (for technical-oriented people not familiar with GEDCOM, think of it as the XML for genealogy – in fact, GEDCOM 6, the XML version, is in draft mode). People interested in contributing the family trees of “ordinary” people most likely already have that data in a genealogy program and will be unwilling to manually copy it elsewhere (not to mention the transcription errors likely to creep in if they do). GEDCOM 5.5 (pre-XML) is the current standard that most or all genealogy packages support.


 * However, if you let contributors submit vast quantities of data using GEDCOMs, you might end up with a bunch of unlinked family trees – and there are other web sites (such as RootsWeb) that already do this. Adding a few links to Wikipedia articles will not really add much value over RootsWeb. So the only value would be if you would strongly encourage people to match their contributions to existing ones (merging all information about one person onto a single page), so that the family trees are inter-linked. This is, in fact, where Wiki technology adds benefit – by allowing people to link their family trees together, and include reasoning for why they believe that one John Doe is the same person as another John Doe (or split them apart again if they have evidence to the contrary).


 * I plan to send an e-mail to I Faqeer with more suggestions around this.