On 6/15/2016 12:01 PM, Andrew Lancaster via wrote: > Dear Stewart > > I think the most important thing to note in this discussion is that as > far as I can tell, Charles has in fact long been struggling with ideas > about how to delegate properly to a bigger team without making the > quality worse. In other words, although the project is different in many > ways from the Henry project, it is a similar dilemma which it faces. > > To me it is interesting that the Henry project and MEDLANDS both > apparently suffer from issues to do with the time consumed by trying to > keep all the files in order, and to me this seems in both cases to be > connected to the old style media being used - essentially in both cases > just documents turned into webpages. (I can talk. That is also what my > website looks like. But then again who looks at that? For small scale > work this is ok.) Although the Henry Project has its flaws, I do not believe that this comparison to "Medieval Lands" is fair. You are certainly wrong about how the pages in the Henry Project were compiled. They are not "just documents turned into webpages" but have in every case been composed as webpages from the very beginning. Their perhaps unpolished look is due to the fact that I consider careful documentation to be more important than frills like background colors or special fonts. The one change I would seriously consider if I were starting over is numbered footnotes. Automatically numbered footnotes were not that easy to do when I started back in 2001, but I still feel that there are at least some advantages to making citations harder to ignore by placing them immediately after the statements. Every page of the Henry Project has been compiled with careful reference to both the primary sources and the scholarly literature. In some cases where I did not have access to the relevant sources, I delayed partly finished pages for more than a year until I could get access to them. This is in stark contrast to Medieval Lands, which is littered with undocumented statements (some true, some false) with no citation followed by a statement that the primary source has not yet been found. A large part of Medieval Lands has apparently been compiled with little or no reference to the scholarly literature, and there are far too many errors in interpreting the sources that have been consulted, showing an extreme lack of attention to detail. I also believe that I have given more careful thought to organization than what is shown in Medieval Lands. I compiled closely related pages at the same time, cross-referencing discussions that were relevant to more than one individual, sometimes expanding the scope of the project to individuals who were not ancestors of Henry II (for example, the page on Otto William of Burgundy) when I felt that the necessary discussions could not be made without having that information to refer to. In contrast, the file structure of Medieval Lands seems very awkward to me. For one thing, the individual files are way too large. Also, the pages seem to be indecisively ordered, with the list of office holders and genealogical segments (given awkwardly two generations at a time) strangely interspersed. If you think that I am being petty about this, then so be it. I admire the tremendous effort that Mr. Cawley has put into this work, and I wish that I could comment more positively on it than I have, but it would be dishonest of me to do so. Unfortunately, it would take a small army of qualified genealogists to turn Medieval Lands into what it claims to be. A more realistic (and more honest) goal would be to convert the format so that it is more accurately presented as a FINDING AID which helps to locate primary sources, but avoids misleading the unwary into believing that it is a finished product. By the way, I am not necessarily claiming that I would do any better than Mr. Cawley if I attempted the same project, only that I am aware enough of my own limitations not to try. > That is why I wonder if a sort of controlled wiki is the solution. That > could automate many tasks, and allow tasks to be delegated in a > controlled way using log-ins with different permissions. I know I am > getting repetitive but I repeat the point now in this interesting > context, because maybe it helps someone in the community find a way. > > A moderated medieval genealogy wiki could allow articles/pages for not > only individuals but also manors and titles. It could have projects with > it such as Henry II ancestry, Manors of Cambridgeshire, Carolingians, > Dal Riada, CP plus corrections, registering Domesday folk, Magna Carta > descents or whatever. Key profiles could be locked up and require > special permissions to change from specific people or groups even. > > I suppose someone might now say that this could all be done within an > existing wiki like wikitree, if enough good people were allowed to have > enough authority and that is also true, but I see big wikis scare > everyone off for obvious reasons of larger scale negotiation and > politics. But the good news for genealogy is also that within wikitree, > the more good sources exist online, the more it can be dragged by its > better editors to follow those leads. > > Does anyone know a university or something with a bit of server space > and interest in making a quality-controlled medieval wiki project? The problem with the wiki approach is that there are too many examples (like wikitree) where this has been a spectacular failure (viewed from quality of content, not degree of interest), which makes qualified individuals hesitate to get involved. In my opinion, any system which uses the approach of letting a lot of stuff in and then removing the bad part is doomed to fail. Ultimately, the results are going to be of acceptable quality only if the amount bad material is small from the very beginning. Also, when dealing with the uncertain situations which are so common in medieval genealogy where several alternative scenarios have been proposed, the "fill-in-the-blank" format that is so common with databases sometimes has to be abandoned. The accurate presentation of such issues has to be carefully thought out, and this is one place where it will be difficult to find enough qualified genealogists unless the project has a realistic size from the very beginning. Stewart Baldwin