Talk:Elizabeth Shown Mills

Content should be moved
Biographical information should only be added to the person's user page. Does Elizabeth have an account that this content can be moved to? -Fran 17:52, 23 February 2011 (UTC)


 * I've heard Wiki leadership say she's contributed, but I can't find her by username. I've noticed that Wikipedia has biographical information on prominent living genealogists, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wilson_Coldham . I've thought of starting bibliographies on prominent genealogists so that people can see what they've published. There's currently no way to identify genealogy articles a genealogist publishes (PERSI doesn't index authors). Murphynw 22:07, 23 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Taking into account the comment left on Talk:Louisiana Vital Records, I would say her user account is Eshown (contribs). --Steve 23:25, 23 February 2011 (UTC)


 * I bet that is her. Should we transfer the data (I wrote) over to her talk page? Murphynw 23:28, 23 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Good point about the need for bibliographies of prominent genealogists. The idea puts another light on the possible needs. I'm going to think about this more and reply again later. I will also find out if she already has a user page. -Fran 18:41, 24 February 2011 (UTC)


 * That sounds good Fran. Thanks for getting the conversation started. Murphynw 00:10, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Who makes the cut?
Sorry to reopen (and widen) this can of worms, but I think we're going to need a decision on this soon because I'm about to do something that will push the envelope or illustrate where the gaps in policy are. I may be moving soon to bring a whole lot (thousands?) of professional genealogists onto the wiki, with profile pages, resumes, descriptions of services offered, fees, repositories used, customer testimonials -- all the things we presented to APG folks back in 2009 and 2010. Only we'd be helping them do it this time, with serious hand holding, search engine optimization of pages, creation of directory pages where customers can find pros by research specialty (geography, ethnicity etc.) and all that. This being the case, we're going to need some planning around where these pages belong (namespaces and categories).

The potential conflict I see in including biographies of the most important genealogists in the main namespace is figuring out who is important and who is not. It's hard to find a neat, clean line. The cleanest might be "Members of FASG" but most countries don't have such a list. There are thousands of pros in the U.S. alone; I don't know anyone I'd trust who would want to be the judge of which genealogists are important enough to be listed in the wiki's main namespace and which are not. I think we should include all of them there or none of them there.

One solution which may promise less maintenance and conflict than including only some genealogists in the main namespace would be to have all pages about genealogists reside in either the User namespace or a custom namespace. I think if some of the genealogists we'd want to write about are dead or may die someday and have their account deactivated, we should use a custom namespace since most dead people won't be creating user accounts or reactivating them after a period of -- deadness. :)

Another solution would be to have pros write about themselves and their services in the main namespace. Of course, that'll add to the confusion among book vendors, database developers, and other genealogy businesses having some trouble understanding why they can't be overtly commercial when the genealogists can, but we're going to have that problem anyway as soon as we let pro researchers onto the site.... RitcheyMT 19:48, 12 April 2012 (UTC)