User:MorrisGF/Sandbox

This is a sandbox area. It is a experimentation area and often contains disposable content. It's a place to practice editing.

So I've been thinking about an idea regarding record collections in a Wiki environment. Here are some thoughts behind it.

People need to know:


 * Where to find the records they need. If the records are available online, are they accessible for free or not? If they are offline, where are the original copies?
 * Records are associated to geographical boundaries and parameters in time. So they have to know historical jurisdictions and modern jurisdictions. They need a tool that connects the two.
 * This can be difficult because patrons may not consider that records migrate from one archive to another through the years depending on funding, storage space, and politics.

So having worked in a Wiki environment for some time the thought came “why couldn’t this be created in a Wiki?” Here are some possible pluses:


 * A Wiki is community based
 * Wiki content is flexible to reflect historical and modern jurisdictions
 * A page could describe the record evolution. For example a tax record that started in the 1600's as a portion of milled grain that evolved to include luxury taxes in the 1700's and finally became a flat amount of money by the 1800's. The name of the tax didn't change and it looks like one set of records but the researcher does not know why the records look so different in different time periods.
 * The links in the Wiki can easily point to online access or describe offline access

Just to try out some ideas let’s take a Swedish parish for example.

Let’s say there was a page called:

Records for Arvidsjaur parish, Sweden
With some help, a template was created to try out this idea using tabs. So the main tab could be the records notes and descriptions that are associated to this Swedish parish. The tabs above would point to tables listing a variety of records that are associated to this parish (Church, Taxation, Land, and Military record pages.)

For example, if you click on the Church tab you will see a table showing what Household examination records are available for this parish.

To play around with the basic concepts I have put in a little data into the Main, Church, and Taxation tabs.

So what are the findings in trying this out?

 * 1) Although the tabs look like all the data is on one page, the reality is the tabs are just another way of linking to multiple pages. To make this work there has to be a separate page for each record type.
 * 2) It has been estimated that there are about 3000 to 4000 parishes in Sweden depending on the time period. FamilySearch has microfilmed the "basic record sets" from the total church record collection of a parish. Many other very useful records created by the church were never microfilmed. Bottom line is there are a lot more church records created by a parish that we do not have in the FamilySearch collection. Compare the FamilySearch holdings for church records of Arvidsjaur to the Swedish National Archive holdings of church records for Arvidsjaur (notice on the Swedish National Archive page you have to expand every plus symbol to get an equivalent view)

Now take it a step further, it has been estimated that the Swedish church records in general only make up approximately 6 % of the records available through the National and Regional archives.

Put 1 and 2 together and the idea of creating record pages for a locality in a Wiki presents a lot of problems such as:

a. the Wiki would end up with an insane amount of record pages that realistically would bury all other content. If a person did a keyword search for a locality the hits list would be completely unusable.

b. to create an effective database for Sweden (say nothing about the rest of the world) would require a enormous unified community force.