I recently discovered "Mundia", a service of Ancestry.com. www.mundia.com It is in a beta testing stage, and while in beta testing it appears to give access to trees hosted on Ancestry.com but warns that this will probably be withdrawn in future when beta testing is complete. It has potential to be quite a useful service, but it also has the potential to do an immense amount of harm by encouraging bad genealogy practices, like copy and paste genealogy. For this reason I would like to encourage serious genealogists to visit the site and give them feedback during the bets-testing period, and also to discuss their findings here, so that suggestions we send to the developers can carry more weight. I posted something about it in soc.genealogy.computing, but there was little rersponse, and I got the impression that not many people had visited the site, or were interested in it. That would be a pity, because I think the site needs input from serious genealogists who know some of the pitfalls. It seems at first sight, to be similar to semi-scam sites like MyHeritage and Geni..com, where people are encouraged to goin (or coopted without consultation, in the case of MyHeritage, and then told that they must pay in order to be able to use their annexed data, A few people have given me access to their family trees on Ancestry,com and it seems a remarkably cumbersome way of organising one's family history. Some people seem to only keep their family history information on such sites, and when I ask if we can share and compare information, they offer access to their online tree, where there seems to be no possibility of sharing GEDCOM files. Is it really as bad as it looks, or am I missing something important? Here is a copy of my feedback to them - I would be interested in seeing what others have to say: Here's what I said: The whole experience of Mundia is a bit like feeling one's way in the dark, and very frustrating. You are directed (in the dark) to a group of objects. You can feel them, and chose one and turn on the light to look at it, but when you put it back on the shelf the light goes off again, and there is no way you can know whether you have picked up the same object, or one of the others. There is no way of comparing two objects to know which is the original or which is the copy. The objects are "trees". You enter a person to search for, and are shown a list of "trees" with that person. About five of them have exactly 10542 people in them. So which is the original and which are the copies? There's no point in contacting the owner if they have just copied everything from somewhere else. There is no identifying informatrion in the list to show which is which, so once you put a "tree" back on the shelf the light goes off, and you might pick up the same one five times. The "home" page for each user is singularly uninformative. There's nothing to say which families you are interested in and how you connect to them. There isn't even a list of links to web pages where the person can give more details. The whole thing seems to be designed to encourage bad "copy and paste" genealogy. As a bare minimum of improvements I suggest the following: 1. On the user profile, allow an explanation of the main familties being researched, or that the person links to, and a space for a link to the person's web page or blog. 2. When a list of "trees" is shown, provide enough identifying information so that you can know whether you have already looked at it -- even the owner's user name. 3. Provide an easy way of GEDCOM import and export, with the export clearly showing which "tree" the information came from in the source tag. -- Steve Hayes E-mail: shayes@dunelm.org.uk Web: http://hayesstw.tumblr.com/ (follow me on Tumblr) Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com Phone: 083-342-3563 or 012-333-6727 Fax: 086-548-2525

Hi Steve I looked at Mundia when it first came out but was not impressed then, and have the same opinion now Painfully awkward to move around and all those I came across were on known Ancestry trees (as I supplied some of the data now found linked on Mundia so I know its source) For the life of me I can't see a serious researcher using it What can it do that is not already available on Ancestry and other sites Summed up in a word "tedious" I do not think the tree owners on Ancestry realise their information is on this other site It shows what may happen when publishing all your data online, you have no control and don't know where it might end up Nivard Ovington in Cornwall (UK) >I recently discovered "Mundia", a service of Ancestry.com. > > www.mundia.com > > It is in a beta testing stage, and while in beta testing it appears to give > access to trees hosted on Ancestry.com but warns that this will probably be > withdrawn in future when beta testing is complete. > > It has potential to be quite a useful service, but it also has the potential > to do an immense amount of harm by encouraging bad genealogy practices, like > copy and paste genealogy.