Monday, August 9, 2010

Uploading a GEDCOM to the WeRelate Wiki - Post 1

I demonstrated how to search the FREE http://www.werelate.org/ genealogy wiki in my posts Searching the WeRelate.org Wiki - Post 1 and Post 2.

How did all of that information get in the http://www.werelate.org/ database in a wiki format? In almost every case, the contributors uploaded a GEDCOM file to the website.

In order to make my "Wikis for Genealogy" presentation in May, I uploaded a GEDCOM to WeRelate to see how the system worked. When I click on the "Add" menu button on the Home page, I could click on the "Import GEDCOM" link, as shown below:


The "Import GEDCOM" page looks like this (Note that all screen images from now on are from May 2010, before WeRelate changed their page formats. However, the information on the pages appears to be the same as in May.):


There is a lot of helpful information on this page. for instance, the Instructions say:

"GEDCOM's containing up to 5,000 people can be uploaded."

"Pages for the people, families, and sources in your GEDCOM will be added to your tree. (Living people are
handled specially.) A message will appear on your talk page when your GEDCOM has finished importing, usually in about an hour. "

The "Important! Please read..." section says:

"Towards a Single Tree. WeRelate is different from most family tree websites. By contributing to WeRelate you are helping to create a single, unified family tree with one page for each person that combines the best information from all contributors."

"Quality of Content & Participation. Ultimately, we seek pages that are well documented with strong sources; therefore you are strongly encouraged to include source information in your
uploaded GEDCOM. "

"Uploaded GEDCOMs that contain no dates will not be accepted."

I browsed my computer files, found my GEDCOM file that I wanted to upload, created a name for my file as "richmond" and entered them into the fields on the upper left of the page above, and clicked on "Import GEDCOM."

After a few minutes, I saw this screen:


The screen said that the upload of my file was successful, and would be available in 10 to 30 minutes for importing into my "richmond" file.

Sure enough, after about 30 minutes, this screen appeared - it has nine tabs across the top. On this "Overview" tab, the text told me to click on each one tab in order, and follow the directions:



I also had the option to click on the "Return to WeRelate" button and finish my review of the imported data later, or to "Remove this GEDCOM" if I wanted to not have it included in the WeRelate database.

The "Overview" tab also provides a summary of the imported data. My "richmond" file has:

* People: 1775/0/0 : to be imported / matched / excluded
* Families: 294 / 0 /0 : to be imported / matched / excluded
* Warnings: 0 / 71 : read / unread
* Places: 465 / 107 : matched / unmatched
* Sources: 96 / 0 /0 : to be imported / matched / excluded
* Family Matches: 0 / 0 / 170 : matched / not matched / undecided
* GEDCOM updates: 0 / 0 : made / not made

This table tells me that the information in my GEDCOM has not been imported into the WeRelate.org database yet. Apparently, I have to work through the nine tabs at the top of this page. There are Warnings to be read, and Undecided family matches to be resolved.

I clicked on the second tab for "People" and saw a long list of the People in my GEDCOM file. I did not have to perform any actions for this tab.

In the next post, I will investigate some of the other tabs, and try to deal with the Warnings and the undecided Family Matches.

1 comment:

FranE said...

So, does this seem to be a better way to start discussions between researchers?