Forum:Unfinished projects

This is a page where developers and anyone else can write a couple of lines about things that are or should be in progress (with links to relevant pages), so that others can see what's going on and:
 * avoid the duplication that comes from ignorance of something's existence
 * join in if interested
 * continue if original promoter has very long absence

GEDCOM upload
Brian Yap (User:Yewenyi) devised a java program that he used to create most of the first 3,000 articles on this wiki (four or five per minute when in full flight). Other people have looked at it. User:Phlox believes that anything doing that job should be based on the Py... whateveritis bot system. Progress is desirable. One hurdle is to decide on the format of our individuals' page names, still under discussion on User talk:Phlox in early December 2007.

Page names
See above. Summary of progress: we want page names that Google will rank reasonably highly so that millions of people find us when looking up relatives. The insertion of middle names goes against that. The addition of birth dates and anything else after the surname may also lower the ranking a little (and causes trouble if it is used for /info pages then changed). A solution may be in two parts: starting with a Google-friendly page that we call a disambiguation page but has more on it than purely links to detailed pages with minimal distinction (per Wikipedia style); see Barack Obama for an example. Not unlike the two-to-three-line boxes you get with hits when searching Rootsweb: http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?surname=Obama&given=barack. Each detailed page could then include middle names, and for further distinction could add a birth date as we do now or could add just a decade (thus doing away with lots of "c/circa" notes and being less likely to get changed).