User talk:Sarah Manley

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Welcome to Central Wikia, Sarah Manley!

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Enjoy! -- Avatar (Talk) 22:48, 13 October 2009

Familypedia / "Genealogy"
Our community has been fairly small since its inception in 2006, but that may change. It's a popular market segment, as evidenced by competitor sites like ancestry.com that charge $24/month and advertise on Discovery and History channels. As far as I am concerned, their days are as numbered as those of Encyclopedia Britannica when Wikipedia began. Our recent efforts since last spring have been to make it easier for novices to enter family histories. Once that work is complete, I shall be importing large amounts of information from Wikipedia biographies via "pywikipedia" bots. We may get a good spike in activity after that is complete, but otoh it may flop entirely. Who knows- at least something will be learned about how not to apply Semantic wiki concepts on Wikipedia, commons and other wikis. I'm a retired software jock, kind of slogging through the technical stuff while raising my own family (we have 4 kids and are adopting 2 more from Africa). I personally am much less interested in the genealogy side of who begat whom, and more in getting contributors to recover stories about their ancestors. It gives more credit in history to individuals who made it, deconstructing the popular fantasy that history is about the dead white guys who through their singular genius caused everything to happen the way it did. It follows along the line that Zinn started in the 1980s with his series of books that began with "A People's History of the United States". Such fine grained history is material that does not meet Wikipedia's notability requirements, but each story is extremely notable for the micro audience of their descendants. Were it not for each of these forgotten ancestors, we would have not been born. Anyway, in a few months when everything is in place you may like to take a look at it.

I hope you enjoy your new position. Regards, 19:13, October 19, 2009 (UTC)