User blog:Robin Patterson/Thank you, Dick Eastman

Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter describes itself as "the most popular online genealogy magazine in the world, as measured by Alexa".

Its seventeen-paragraph review of Familypedia in November 2010 (symbolically on Remembrance Day) helped to bring over fifty new registrations in 24 hours (the same number as in the previous 30 days), resulting in a 3-hour cut-off of Semantic MediaWiki because Wikia's Apache and MySQL servers could not handle what they were being asked to process.

Clearly the rising popularity of Familypedia, with our aim to make it at least fifty thousand times bigger than it is, requires more thought to be given to how a website can properly use Semantic MediaWiki for cleverly connecting many hundreds of millions of individuals and upwards of half a dozen facts, potentially hundreds, about each one.

Ancestry.com has six billion records, but they are probably mostly single data items about individuals and are not very cleverly connected. Related company Rootsweb has a family tree division, WorldConnect, claiming to have 575 million names, but millions are duplicates. RootsWeb has millions of contributors on its 30,000 email lists and over 17 million posts on more than 161,000 message boards, most of which activity should be better on a wiki - blogs, forums, and discussion pages - where in-line linking to pages about individuals and places is so much easier.

We want to be up with those numbers but to get it right first time.

Wikia experts have told us (e.g. in Forum:SMW on Familypedia) that our templates are too expensive (in terms of server load) to handle the necessary large volumes of editing. We will have to change some of them when we find out just what is expensive. Put that forum on your watchlist!