21-10-2015, 05:38 AM
Tracy Riddle Wrote:Brian, many years ago I might have been up to working on a project like that, but I've got too many other things in my life now, and not enough energy these days.
Okay.
Just to attach numbers to some of these concepts, the number of names currently in the basic who's who is 4,000 (give or take a few hundred). At one point I estimated that the total number of People records in a finished product would be somewhere just south of 20,000. What's there already, are the "common" names in the literature, and for about six months before I got sick (I've been out of commission for about six months, just coming back on line) I was doing a "background task" of loading names. I personally loaded about a thousand names, to add to the several thousand that were already there.
So, here's how it worked for me in practice. Initially, I'd be reading some article I found on Google (or equivalently, I'd come across a book). Suddenly I'd encounter a name I never heard before (to use a concrete example, Igor Vaganov was one of those names, it wasn't in the initial list and at one point I didn't know who this fellow was). So, the first thing I did, is create a "placeholder", an empty record with only the name and nothing else. The record is fine in this form, and I'll explain why in a moment (it has to do with a "status" attached to records), and the name as is will show up in search results.
Then, at some point, I'd finish the article (or the book), and then I'd decide what I wanted to say about this person. Usually I tried to get about two or three paragraphs' worth of description, in the first round. Sometimes that was impossible (like in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, three paragraphs is nowhere near enough), and sometimes there wasn't even a full paragraph's worth of information available on a particular person. So, once I decided on the content, I'd update the record. And I could do this iteratively, so if I changed my mind later, or came across new information, I'd simply update the record again.
This is easy work, right? You can sort of tell when you encounter a new name, whether it's likely to already be on the list or not. Right now, the list is already pretty extensive, so names like Igor Vaganov are on it, but names like IB Hale are not. So if you run into "Thyraud de Vosjoli", it's probably worth checking whether it's on the list or not. If it's not, put in the placeholder, all you have to do is enter the name and press the ok button. This is a "background task", yes? It's something you can do while you're doing whatever else you're doing. It takes maybe 15 seconds out of every 60 minutes, or something like that.
Look, let me be serious about this. I can set this up in one week, with automatic peer review. AND user roles, AND user groups, so it'll accommodate everything from lone wolf researchers, to small research teams, to big research groups. You can turn each feature on or off, so if you don't want any peer review just turn it off. You can configure the site to enforce or not enforce rules, or enforce them "gradually" or "with latitude".
If a random web user without a user ID surfs to the Who's Who page, they can only do simple things, like print out the list, or search alphabetically.
If one of you researchers with a user ID surfs to the same page, you can see additional details in each record, including a full audit trail of who modified the record, when it was modified, and any notes or comments as to why it may have been modified (in other words, the history of the record). Ordinary web surfers can not modify data, but researchers can, and the rules for how that's done are easily configurable, they include features like peer review and so on.
Initially, I would turn peer review off, for the purpose of loading data. (Because I imagine there could be some data-loading in volume, just based on some of the threads I'm reading around here I've already encountered dozens of name that should be in the Who's Who, like that whole bit about the Connally in-laws and etc). However at some point it might be useful to turn the automatic peer review on, and what happens in that case is, whenever a record gets modified, whichever group or person is responsible for that record gets notified. They get a little "to-do list" when they log in, showing what's been changed since the last login, and each user can choose whether to process the items on the list or ignore them (it's just a notification, however you can turn on the enforcement if you wish to "strictly enforce" peer review). That kind of thing.
So maybe, I should just show you, instead of typing all these words. Maybe build a "prototype", and then y'all could comment on it?
I would like to repeat though, that in terms of making this a real research tool, it's nothing something I can do myself. I can do the computer programming part of it, and I can even be a webmaster of sorts, but when it comes to JFK research I'm just a n00b, and the success of a good Who's Who would depend heavily on people such as yourselves who are much more advanced than I am. You know who these people are, I don't. I could browse through the historical threads here, looking for names, but I'm not savvy enough to know (yet) which names are important and which are just fluff. I don't want to load up a great research tool with fluff, I'd like some expert sets of eyes on this, some experienced researchers who can say, "this part was disproven by so-and-so in 1989", or, "you left out this piece of vital information".
And, I don't want to build an encyclopedia on the first pass, either. For instance - take a name like "Jack Ruby". You could writes books and books about the guy, but really, a short biography would be nice (with references to longer biographies, of which there are many), and then some bullet points with references. Jack Ruby owned the Carousel Club (reference). Jack Ruby is though to have been associated with the Mafia (reference). Jack Ruby shot Oswald (reference). Jack Ruby died of cancer while in jail awaiting a new trial (reference). It seems to me, that much is quite sufficient for a first pass. It could be approximately at the level of a Spartacus page, maybe with less text and more references.
Later on, as this thing grows, we can deal with the issue of content. The problem with links is they change, they go dead. At some point when enough people are thinking this is a useful research tool, then we could maybe discuss copying some content, with permissions as needed, and in cases where that's not possible we could annotate why.
Now - here is another helpful feature which I can toss into the mix. "Grouping" people. For instance - the Dallas Police Department, consists of... Curry, and Fritz, and Gannaway, and etc etc. Here's the list of all the people who witnessed the assassination. Here's a list of the people who saw the shooter. Here's a list of the cops at the TSBD. That kind of thing - arbitrary hierarchical and non-hierarchical groupings of people. (Not to worry, we can automatically check for circular groupings). It's a freebie, comes with the territory.
Aliases, are also included.
All this, I could prototype in a week, and I'm willing to do that, IF I can get a few of you to start using the tool. Which means, entering names that aren't already there - and of course updating existing records to your heart's content.
There's a lot of names already there - thousands. Most of the people commonly referenced in the literature are there, I'm pretty sure "all" the Warren Commission people are there, I had to enter Kenneth Croy myself so the reserve officers weren't there, but most of the rest of the DPD was already there... it's "not bad" in its existing state, but it's not ready for prime time either. But it COULD easily be ready for prime time in... say... three months? With a dozen people looking at the data and entering whatever names are missing?
There's some people here on this site who are very good with names! Peter Lemkin, you're one of them, you posted two posts in a row with about half a dozen names I'd never heard of before. Would you be willing to type a few of those names into the Who's Who, and briefly state why they're important?
If credit is important to you, for the work that you're doing, that can easily happen. I'll be more than happy to credit everyone who works on this, and I'll leave those credits in place and not make them disappear after a month. I'll fund and administer a web site if enough people think it's a good idea, but if no one's going to use the thing then it's hardly worth the effort. I'm trying to gauge interest... and it's totally okay if you don't want to participate in the data entry, in that case I'm still very interested in your opinion as to the concept, and whether you think such a free publicly accessible research site would be a helpful thing. The vision is specific: I'd like all 20,000 names under one roof, in one place, with a common method for searching and printing results. Then once that's done, we can talk about all the wonderful presentation graphics and how to lay out a Wiki and all that - but I would not wish to attempt a Wiki without something like this behind it - without a database you're looking at maintaining thousands of individual pages with individual references and tens of thousands of cross references and every time you want to alter a format you need to do it across all 20,000 pages. The better way is to have an engine that generates the Wiki page from the database record. It's easy, really it is. This way whenever you want to change the layout of the Wiki page, you can make one change in one place and it'll automatically ripple out to every Wiki page as it's being visited.
If I can get half a dozen people to say "okay, I'll add a few names", then I'll make the effort to bring up the web site. I'll fund it and administer it through the trial phase, until enough of you either say "this is good" or "this sucks, get rid of it". And then YOU can decide if you want me to keep administering it or if you want to turn the whole thing over to an "expert committee" or something. Is that fair enough?