This was compiled for personal use and I didn’t adhere to an academic level of verification, so verify any links before assuming they are correct.

There is also the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which does the same thing for mathematicians using their dissertation advising relationships and sometimes more tenuous links.  It has spawned clones for various other fields; see Academic genealogy on Wikipedia.

Incidentally, as I start attempting to keep a daily 750-word private diary, producing even a fraction of that output for publication* on my blog would be a smashing success.  And so, I think I will write about an idea that came to mind this morning that I have been pondering recently.

Quite simply, I find the notion of someone acceptably being a stranger fundamentally disconcerting and depressing.  We are not evolved to treat nearly every person we see with indifference because we don’t happen to know them.  In primitive societies, in the rare case in which you saw someone you didn’t know (probably a visitor from an out-group population) wouldn’t you at least introduce yourself? The dance of cognitive dissonance that every city resident does every day as they walk by thousands of strangers, perhaps awkwardly avoiding instinctual eye contact, just seems very sad to me.  That is all.

*As a total random aside, isn’t it interesting how our perception of the meaning of common words like “publication” is somewhat removed from the roots from which they derive.  Publication really just means making something public.

It is the Sixth Epoch, “The Universe Wakes Up,” that is a truly fascinating idea. Essentially, after the singularity occurs (the exponential intelligence and technology explosion after Seed AI is created and replaces organic intelligence as the dominant form of intelligence), Kurzweil predicts, the new super-intelligent civilization (machine or machine/human hybrid) will expand throughout the galaxy and eventually the universe, turning matter into computational substrates, until the entire universe is one giant computer.  Quoting Wikipedia, by 2199, “with the entire universe made into a giant, highly efficient supercomputer, A.I./human hybrids (so integrated that, in truth it is a new category of “life”) would have both supreme intelligence and physical control over the universe. Kurzweil suggests that this will open up all sorts of new possibilities such as doing the infinitely impossible and beyond.”

It is clear why some consider this brand of futurism akin to a religion.  Nonetheless, the staggering implications of this possibility are worth considering.  For instance, if consciousness is just an artifact of sufficiently complex systems, when the universe “wakes up” will it be a conscious being?  A woken up universe would surely bring a new meaning to the word pantheism.

But why has this not already happened?  Just as Fermi asked why, if intelligent life is (as we suspect) abundantly common in the universe, we have not encountered it, it seems puzzling that we are not enveloped in Kurzweil’s sixth epoch now.  This fact leads to the conclusion that at least one of the following must be true:

• We are the most advanced intelligent life in the universe.  If we are not the only intelligent life, then this is statistically highly unlikely, because if there are any other civilizations in the universe, even if they are vanishingly rare, we are only one of countless such civilizations.
• Faster-than-lightspeed travel is impossible.  Perhaps the most likely, but unless the above was true, we might expect to see astronomical evidence of civilizations that have already reached their singularities waking up their home galaxies.
• Technological civilizations which approach or reach the singularity never last long enough to start waking up the universe.

It is undeniable that Facebook offers many benefits in a time in which the network is ubiquituous, devices are always on, and people are always connected.  The benefits can mainly be categorized as features that allow us to maintain a larger social circle than we would otherwise be able to.  I have 460 Facebook friends, and probably at least 450 are people I remember, know how I know, and can put a name and face to.  I would say that having anywhere from 350 to 600 Facebook friends is about normal for most college kids I know–some high school friends and some college ones. Many of these people are people I have not interacted with much in a year, two, or more, and would probably have forgotten had I not occasionally seen their name on my Facebook newsfeed.  Sociological research indicates that the human brain is naturally limited to about 150 contacts, but this is a consequence of our ability to have only that many relationships, not our ability to remember only that many people.

My first issue with Facebook is that it favors breadth over depth in social relationships, and this leads to a reduction in quality in our relationships.  I would not argue that by having hundreds of Facebok friends we are necessarily cheapening our relationships with our true friends, but it certainly introduces a lot of noise that we have to filter out to get to what really matters.  Also, any time we spend communicating with friends online, whether it be realtime or not, is time that could be spent having real interaction with our friends, in a physical setting, which is surely much more healthy and naturally satisfying.  Online interaction tends to be much more fragmented and have much less meaningful discussion.

One example of the cheapening of real social interaction that I was reminded of today is the birthday wishes users commonly post on friends’ walls.  While there is nothing wrong with posting such a message, I think these posts are largely meaningless and I refrain from making them.  You have a list of people who have a birthday today, so you don”t have to actually remember your friend’s birthday, and it takes only seconds to post a short message on their wall.  If I want to say happy birthday in a meaningful way, I tell them personally (as many people do in addition, of course).  If they are someone who I wouldn’t have the opportunity to tell personally, then either they are someone who is a good enough friend that I would call to wish a happy birthday, or, frankly, they are someone who I don’t need to be wishing happy birthday to.

There is a lot of noise, but I think we still pretty effectively filter it out to get down to the important things.  However, it is still a major waste of time, and that is my second major issue with Facebook.  Of course, people, myself included, who spend too much time on Facebook (the sort of people who always have Facebook open in a tab), have none but themselves to blame for any wasted time.  It’s just such a perfect time sink, because it plays into our natural human desire to connect with people, but, that connection, as I said, can be somewhat superficial, and certainly Facebook rarely results in any productive output.  (Though I must say that Facebook groups and events are an amazing effective way of mobilizing committed groups of people when you have such a large pool to draw from.)  We should all consider how much we use Facebook, and if it seems that we spend an amount of time on it disproportionate to the real benefits we derive from it, we should limit our usage.  It seems to me that the most effective usage pattern is to check Facebook maybe once or twice a day, respond to messages and wall posts, and then sign off.

Perhaps the most troubling impact of Facebook is that it fosters a disregard for privacy.  I think we have seen a remarkably rapid change, mainly generational, in societal attitudes about privacy due to the large proportion of high school and college-aged kids who seem to put their entire lives on facebook.  Think about it: if you had told someone even just ten years ago that many people would be posting frequent status updates about their lives and nearly every photo they take for every one of their hundreds of “friends” on Facebook to see, I think that they’d have thought you were describing some far off future.   This is not even to mention the significant minority who make their profiles available to the thousands of people in their college network, or even in their entire geographical network.

Most people have recognized for a while that it is highly inadvisable to make their information, most importantly photos, viewable by anyone who they are not explicity friends with.  Kids are worried about stalkers, parents about child predators.  But I think by focusing on this we are overlooking the fact that there is something wrong with even just making all your photos public to your friends.  Likewise, the mere existence of a “Wall” on which your friends can write and their messages can and will be viewed by any of your other friends seems fundamentally wrong to me.  There is no reason one wouldn’t send most wall posts as private messages using that feature on Facebook, and yet people don’t.  It’s as if there’s peer pressure to make everything public, or that by making a message public you want people to be privy to all your mundane or not-so-mundane personal communications.  Doesn’t anyone value privacy any more?  We are living in an orgy of publicness, and I think we are taking the natural human tendency to tell people about ourselves too far.  It’s better to keep some parts of ourselves private.  At the moment I can’t think of a good way to expand on this sentiment, but it’s something that I feel strongly.

Lastly, Facebook is bad because it is a proprietary walled garden.  You can’t generally access your profile information, photos, or statuses from outside of Facebook.  This stifles competition and innovation when one company, as Facebook does, controls a virtual monopoly on the social network market in some demographic markets.  Facebook is the only service that everyone is on in many places in the U.S.  Many people still have MySpace profiles, and in some areas of the country, MySpace is still more dominant, but Facebook is basically ubiquitous among young people right now.

As a consequence of the walled garden, for example, it is, as far as I am aware, impossible to backup your content on Facebook in compliance with the terms of use, which are also subject to change at any time.  Facebook also owns the copyright to much of the content published on it.  This whole arrangement could lead to a very troublesome situation in the future.  If people, as they perhaps already do, come to trust a private company to control all of their social graph and content, then it could be very bad when, in the future, more important things start being digitized within the context of social networks.  It would be much preferable if everyone could host their own profile and content on their on website or on a provider of their choice, and the people in their social graph could be on any service, since there would be a universal standard.  A user’s social home page could then pull in updates from friends on multiple servers.  In the microblogging arena, this sort of thing already exists, with laconi.ca being an open-source implementation that can pull in status updates hosted on another server; the proprietary Twitter, though, is and will remain the monopoly in microblogging because users aren’t technical enough and don’t care enough, and the same will go for Facebook.

So, in summary, Facebook has undeniable benefits, but I believe that the negative effects outweigh them, and we should really think about limiting our Facebook usage.

Today, however, WebMynd has released a new version of its plugin which incorporates a sidebar into the major search engines containing information from various sites such as Wikipedia, Twitter, and YouTube.  The ability to see YouTube videos and the beginning paragraph of Wikipedia articles next to your search results is invaluable.  I had been using the Google Extra GreaseMonkey script to do this but I will probably switch to WebMynd, and I highly recommend one of the two for everyone.

I switched to Thunderbird for accessing my Gmail mail many months ago because I realized that I was willing to sacrifice some of the convenience of Gmail’s interface for offline access.  I may switch back to using Gmail now that I can have both offline access to my email and its superior interface and design.

1. Content.  Your Twitter page’s content and presentation should induce people to want to follow you.  It is important not to give the impression of being a spammer or unidirectional marketer who is not interested in their followers as anything other than an audience.
   • Have an icon – lack of an icon is a dead giveaway of a spammer.
   • Use your Twitter account details shown on the top right to link to your webpage, and include an interesting bio about your company or self that doesn’t sound spammy.
   • You should initially have at least half a dozen or so tweets, so they reach the bottom of the browser on most monitors, lessening the impression of being new to Twitter.
   • Your tweets should be engaging and interesting, not spammy, and it is especially good if they invite @ replies.  It is also good to have some @ replies in your tweets to indicate community participation.
2. Following the right people.  To maximize the effectiveness of your time, you need to find people who have a high probability of following you back and/or would be a valuable follower.
   • Follow high-profile Twitter users such as @guykawasaki and @chrisbrogan who follow nearly everyone who follows them.  There are various websites with lists of the top Twitter users.
   • Obviously, follow everyone who @ replies to you or otherwise mentions you in a tweet.
   • Search Google on site:twitter.com for as many keywords you can think of that people who would be interested in you or your company/product would be likely to have listed in their Twitter bios.  For example, I searched for at least a dozen occupations and hobbies related to the company I was doing the work for, and variants of those words.  Add anyone for whom you think there is a remote chance of them following you back, i.e. anyone with a followers/following ratio of less than 10.
   • If you or your company/product have a geographical focus, use the location toplists at Twitter Grader to find top Twitter users in your area to follow.
   • As a last resort, you can find people who are mentioning related keywords on search.twitter.com.  This is initially what I tried but I found the noise level to be far too high.  You will have to sift through a lot of unrelated and bot tweets to find people tweeting about what you want, and this method is not a very effective use of time.
3. Managing your following/followers ratio.
   • This ratio is probably the single most important aspect of your Twitter page.  If most Twitter users see you with a low ratio, they will assume you are a spammer and not return your follow.  Try to avoid letting this ratio get below 2/3 early on.  Once you have hundreds of followers you can probably afford to let it get a little lower, perhaps to 2, but avoid a difference in the number of digits of followers and following – I think it has a subtle pyschological effect, like the price of something being $99 instead of $100.
   • In order to avoid a low following/followers ratio, you need to be constantly unfollowing people who have not reciprocated. One to two days is probably a good amount of time to wait before unfollowing someone, depending on how impatient you are.  However, if you notice someone who has tweeted since you followed them (except if their tweet was from a mobile) and has not followed you back, unfollow them as long as it has been at least 15 minutes since you followed them (you can assume they checked their email and decided not to follow you back).
   • If someone follows you on their own, follow them back.  It still decreases your ratio, and if you did not reciprocate they would be more likely to unfollow you at some point in the future.  You are most likely not a celebrity or famous website (otherwise, you wouldn’t need to do much to get followers), so you can’t expect to have a ratio over 1.
   • If you are not on a deadline, a good way to do this is to follow a batch of people once a day, perhaps 50 or 20% of your follower count, whichever is higher, and then unfollow the ones who didn’t reciprocate before you do the same the next day.
   • Use SocialToo.com to automatically unfollow those who unfollow you.
   • Don’t unfollow any of your followers unless they are extremely offensive; doing so is considered bad Twitter etiquette.

This is just how to rapidly add followers.  Once you have them, you have to come up with a strategy to keep your tweets interesting and engaging, and you may have a few unfollows a day, so unless you are generating organic follows by then, you will occasionally need to follow some more people.

• Read 50 books.  Recent discussion about the effect of web-surfing on the brain’s text-processing made me realize that I don’t read books much anymore.  The ability to quickly skim one-page articles online and gain a brief understanding is good, but I think it is important to retain the ability to process the in-depth arguments of book-length writing (and plot, but I won’t be reading fiction, except perhaps for a few classics if I’m in the mood).  Books are still the best method for conveying big ideas and supporting them with great detail.  I’m starting off with On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot, Blown to Bits, about privacy in the digital age, and The Bill of Rights by Akhil Reed Amar, who coincidentally seems to have originated the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  I will be posting reviews of the books I read.
• Increase my content and software production.  I have, so far, been mainly a consumer of information (RSS junkie, etc.) and a user of software, perhaps with the exceptions of my relatively unimportant Wikipedia articles and several-year-old calculator programs.  In 2009, I resolve to blog regularly, even if only book reviews, and to get involved in free software in a significant way, be it creating GNOME themes, writing a small application based on one of my frequent ideas, or contributing to a free software project that I use.

Unfortunately, tonight, I was writing a paper, and when I had finally got working for an extended period of time, and when I switched to my browser to look something up, I involuntarily was sucked into Facebook because I had the tab open.  This also happens a lot with Wikipedia; you can read chains of linked articles and end up reading about something entirely irrelevant.

To remedy this, I envision an application, possibly a browser addon, that, when you have a word processor open (and it could do some checks to see whether the document you are editing is likely a paper, such as by seeing whether you have a standard MLA header, for example), compares the text of your document to the text of the tab(s) you currently have open, and closes it/them if there is insufficient relevancy to indicate that what you are browsing is related to your paper.  I believe this is necessary because one can unconsciously procrastinate when web-browsing, so a strategy or tool such as this is a useful counteraction.

This post was a method of procrastination.

Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Sr. is listed at age 5 in the 1930 Census with his parents M. George, 33 and Marion, 31, and brother Richard, 1 11/12

Robert M. Wurzelbacher SSDI 299-16-8180 b. 23 Nov 1924 d. 10 Jan 2004 (last residence – Cincinnati)

Obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Wurzelbacher . Robert M., beloved husband of Dorothy Wurzelbacher (nee Homer), dear father of Barbara Arndt, Mary (Phil) Hogan, Carolyn Streight and Robert (Beth) Wurzelbacher Jr., and step-father of Christine Wilson, Joan (Jim) Knox, Carolyn Chambers, Douglas (Barbara Valliere) Wilson, and Kathi (Cary) Kindberg, and brother of Dr. Richard (Dorothy) Wurzelbacher. Also survived by 12 grandchildren. Suddenly. Saturday, January 10, 2004. Mass of Christian Burial will be held at St. John the Evangelist Church, 7121 Plainfield Rd., Thursday, January 15, 2004 at 10 A.M. Friends may call at Geo. H. Rohde & Son Funeral Home, Linwood & Delta Aves., Mt. Lookout Wednesday from 5-7 P.M. Family requests memorials to the charity of choice.

Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Sr.’s obituary indicates that his parents did not have any other children after the 1930 census, so if Samuel Joseph “Joe The Plumber” Wurzelbacher is related to Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Jr. by closer than a second-cousin relationship, he would have to either be:

• a son of Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Jr.  This can pretty much be ruled out because he would have been about 19 at the time of Joe’s birth (1954 to 1973).
• a son of Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Sr.  He is not, because he is not listed in his obituary.
• a son of Richard Wurzelbacher.  A DailyKos diarist has dug up a company profile for a Wurzelbacher Brothers company whose line of business is “Water/Sewer/Utility Construction Plumbing/Heating/Air Cond Contractor Repair Services” and whose owner is Richard Wurzelbacher.  Is it the same Richard Wurzelbacher who is Robert Wurzelbacher’s brother and, as it seems possible given the lines of business, is this Richard the father of Joe?  And wouldn’t that mean that the other brother in the business would have to be Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Sr.?OpenSecrets.org shows Republican campaign contributions for a Dr. Richard Wurzelbacher in Key Largo, Florida, who is likely the same Richard Wurzelbacher, but it seems that it would be difficult to prove that he is the father of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.  Also, news reports said Joe said he had lived in Florida at some earlier point in his life.

So, let’s approach it from Joe Wurzelbacher back. An Intelius search (mentioned by another DailyKos diarist) shows as the relatives of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher: Jennifer P Wurzelbacher (his wife), Phyliss Kay Wurzelbacher, Frank Edward Wurzelbacher, Robert Lee Wurzelbacher, and Kay Wurzelbacher. Some of these names may be slightly inaccurate (who knows whether it’s Phyliss’s middle name or initial that is K, and Kay Wurzelbacher could be the same person), but let’s see where we can get.

Ancestry.com public records (subscription required) show a Frank E. Wurzelbacher, born Dec. 1957, who has resided in Holland and Toledo, OH and Tuscon, AZ.  A Frank Edward Wurzelbacher, presumably the same person, is listed in the Florida Marriage Collection as being married on 2 Jan 1982 in Okaloosa, FL.  Joe Wurzelbacher was born in Dec. 1973, so it is possible but highly, highly unlikely that Frank is his father (he would have been 16).  Maybe a brother? (EDIT: Upon further examination, the marriage record lists Phyllis Kay Bloomfield or Phyllis Kay Johnson as the wife; same as the person below.)

Ancestry.com public records (subscription required) indicate Phyllis E./K. Wurzelbacher was born in Dec. 1954 and has lived in Holland, Toledo, and Tuscon.  Again, she could be his mother, but it seems more likely that she is a sister or sister-in-law.  There is also a Phyllis C. Wurzelbacher, born 1934, who lived in Cincinnati.

Ancestry.com public records (subscription required) indicate Robert L. Wurzelbacher, born Aug. 1975 has lived in Holland, Toledo, and Tuscon.  Most likely a brother.  He is filing for bankruptcy with his wife Kelly Jean Wurzelbacher.

This is all I’ve got for now, and I’ve mainly brought together what other people I’ve linked to have already found.  Perhaps someone with better skill at researching public records can take this further and see whether Richard Wurzelbacher is Joe Wurzelbacher’s father.

UPDATE 1: Interestingly, Richard’s wife Dorothy (yes, both Robert M., Sr. and Richard apparently had wives named Dorothy) seems to be a genealogist, as we can see from the snippet on Google Books of an entry of hers in Everton’s Genealogical Helper in 1999, listing her address as 62 Marlin Ln., Key Largo, which is the same address from which Richard Wurzelbacher’s 2008 campaign contributions come from.  This confirms that the Richard Wurzelbacher in Florida is the brother of Robert M. Wurzelbacher.

Interestingly, Robert M. Wurzelbacher also has a book listed called The Graying of the American Parish, but there is not a single Google result for that title.

I think we should keep in mind that there are actually quite a few Wurzelbachers in Ohio and that Toledo and Cincinnati are relatively far away from each other, and that they may just be very distant cousins.

There are many decent notetaking programs for Linux, including NoteCase, KnowIt, BasKet, Wyneken and others; other solutions such as a wiki, text-file, Tomboy notes, or sticky notes can be used. However, none of them are built specifically for educational use, and it would greatly increase the productivity of students to have an information manager that was.

Most note-taking programs currently have a sidebar on the left which contains a hierarchical note tree. I believe that this outlining model is actually unnecessary for students, and I find that I tend to just have top-level notes for each of my classes and then a flat sequential collection of notes for each class one level below. It would be better to have the program store a flat series of notes for each class, get rid of or make temporarily viewable the sidebar, and have buttons for each class aligned horizontally at the top of the editor. For students, I think doing away with the tree structure of notebooks is a good tradeoff for the added simplicity and space in the UI. Notes could be scrolled through chronologically using back and forward buttons, and they could be renamed or re-ordered with a preferences dialog rather than in a tree view. Notes could automatically be named by date (this is similar to how Wyneken currently operates), or a name could be prompted for upon creation.

The ideal notetaking software for students needs to be WYSIWYG and, importantly, have a way of making bulleted lists that does not require any clicks (perhaps with a keyboard shortcut or by recognizing the “*” character as a bullet).

Task management programs such as Tasque and gtodo have the same problem of not being designed for student use and so being less than ideally useful. To enhance usability for a student, task programs should know what homework assignments and larger projects are. They should also get rid of almost all the manual preference setting required, and have the student only need to enter a title, optional description, and optional due-date, and select a class for each task.

The notebook and task list for each class could then be shown side-by-side in one application.

UPDATE: In September 2008, I discovered TakeNote, which is almost the ideal notetaking application – it does what you want it to do and nothing more.  However, I later switched to Zim Desktop Wiki, which is fairly popular in the Linux world, because it seems a little more polished and its linking ability could be useful.

I think much of the media narrative about the minimum wage is framed as whether to prevent corporations from exploiting their employees if there is no collective bargaining or if they are undocumented and thus fearful of asking for higher wages, but we should more often consider the possibility that some jobs which today do earn minimum wage could never pay minimum wage in a free market.

• Amazon to Target $5.5 Billion Textbook Market with New Kindle?, TechCrunch
  
• E-Textbooks — for Real This Time?, Inside Higher Ed

I would tend to think that new formats and distribution methods for textbook e-books are more important than new devices to view them on, considering most college students use their laptops a lot, probably even in class often.

For my benefit, I worked on Draft Bloomberg, helping in a very, very small way to influence the political process in the U.S. Bloomberg’s possible candidacy was always tangentially related to the electoral college, because any discussion of what percent of the votes he could win (even believers would admit that it probably couldn’t have been more than 40%) must be accompanied by a rational strategy for winning an electoral college majority. If no candidate wins an electoral college majority, the president is elected by the House, making Bloomberg’s chances of winning small. Some proposed complicated contingency plans involving cabinet seats or policy promises, but ultimately, there was no clear way for Bloomberg to become president.

One of the schemes I came up with was to have Bloomberg call upon the other two candidates to recognize the unfairness of the House contingent election and the fact that a popular vote plurality winner might not become president.  Since electors are chosen by state parties, the candidates could direct their party apparatusses to ensure electors would vote for the national popular vote winner regardless of who won in their state, ensuring that the national popular vote winner would be elected president.  This is essentially a way of implementing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (which will hopefully be in effect by 2016—which could be to late) with the need for any legislation.

Read the paper I wrote about this for my product (apologies if the writing is less than perfect).

Genealogy wikis such as WeRelate and the Genealogy Wikia already exist, but I would want to host my own wiki to have control over my data, limiting it to people related to me, and so I could do more customization.

A notable example of a nice genealogy wiki is that of the Whitney Research Group.

Benefits of MediaWiki:
• I have become highly familiar with MediaWiki markup after editing Wikipedia intensively for a while.
• Collaboration: I have never directly collaborated with other genealogists in such a way that we are both editing the same data. MediaWiki would facilitate that by its intuitive user management and edit histories.
• Namespaces would work well (Person, Place, Source, Contributor, etc.)
• Meta pages: a wiki could have, for example, family pages describing a family, independent of any person pages.
• Don’t need to have a page for every person. For many of my distant ancestors, I am probably never going to add descendants of all their children, so rather than have a page for each child, we can simply list the children in the parent’s entry, redlinked if preferred.
• Sourcing. Using the MediaWiki cite extension, with <ref> tags, is much easier and better looking that having a GEDCOM source record and having it displayed however PhpGedView does it. Plus, only sources which warrant one need their own separate page.
• Images. Images can be put anywhere in an article, and can be managed more easily than with PhpGedView, where I have never successfully had images on my website for a long period of time because I sometimes lost the image links when I reimported my database.
• Categorization. Categorization can allow for som interesting pages, like Category:Immigrants with royal ancestry, or Category:Immigrants from Germany, etc.
• Interwiki linking can be used to link people to their Wikipedia articles or articles on other wikis, such as WeRelate.

Issues needing addressing:
• Privacy: can two different versions of a page be created, one for logged-in users that displays private details, and one for non-logged-in users that does not?
• Initial creation: a bot, perhaps a gramps plugin, would need to be written to initially populate the wiki
• Export: could a bot be written to extract the wiki to GEDCOM format if it was needed? There is nothing inherently wrong with not using GEDCOM, but it needs to be able to assure continuity.
• Reports and relationship calculation: Though not essential, the ability to generate descendant, ahnentafel, and other reports is a highly valuable feature of most genealogy software. Could a bot be written to do this upon request? Or perhaps an external website that can do it immediately, like some of the Wikipedia external tools?


Namespaces
Person, Place, Report, Source, Template, Category

Templates
Templates would be a critical part of being able to maintain consistency across the wiki in formatting, and being able to change the formatting on all pages easily. Ideally, templates could be used for all information on person, place and source pages. Templates might be something like {{person | image = | bd = [[April 20]], [[2008]] | bp = Ayer, Massachusetts | dd = … | dp = … | md = … | mp = … | fields for each GEDCOM event type, etc. | content = any page biography here, complete with sections and such;}} or perhaps the content could be outside of the template (which would probably create an infobox.

Categorization
People
*People by origin
*People from Germany
*People from Baden-Württemberg
*People from Kreis Tuttlingen
(by town is probably too much categorization, and for countries with fewer people in the database, perhaps by county or state is too much)
*etc.
*etc.
*People from England
*etc.
*People by immigration
*Immigrants from Germany
etc.
*People by religion
*Christians
*Catholics
*Protestants
*Puritans
*Quakers
*Methodists
*etc.
*People by date
*People by birthyear
*People by birthdate
*People by lifespan
*People by occupation
*Farmers
*etc.
*People by relationship
*Ancestors of Michael White
*Descendants of Marinus Van Aken
*Bennett family
*etc.
*Places
*Places in Germany
*Places in Baden-Württemberg
*Places in Kreis Tuttlingen
*Places by size (?)
*Places by status (i.e., non-extant localities) (?)
Sources
*Book sources
*Internet sources
Images
*Source images
*Census images
*Images of people
*Images of places

This would be a very nice setup. The question is, with the possible sacrifice in ability to do things like relationship calculation and descendant reports, is the extra work involved worth it? I think perhaps the thing I am really wishing for is for genealogy web software to display things more in a wiki format, with an infobox on the right and a biography in the main page, and to have the ability to categorize people more, and have separate place pages. Perhaps it would be better to modify PhpGedView to display pages more like a Wikipedia biography (with an infobox, and notes right up front), and to have wiki aspects of place and source editing.

Organization

Like any bibliographic database tool, Zotero easily records publication information about sources. Automatic recognition of sources on web pages through COiNS and other metadata is excellent. Organization of sources is very intuitive and easy. You create collections of sources, which can have subcollections as well. Multiple items that are part of the same source, for example a book source record and a link to a web page containing an excerpt of the book’s text, can be bundled together collapsibly under the main source record. The My Library view shows sources from all collections in a flat view. The organizational structure works very well, but, unfortunately, when it comes to exporting sources to a bibliography, there is no option to include items in subfolders, so you must go into the My Library view and select the sources you want to export.

Store copies of web pages and files

Probably the single best feature of Zotero is its ability to store copies of your sources. Rather than having to keep track of an HTML or PDF file saved on your hard-drive, you can simply take a snapshot of a web page, and Zotero stores a copy locally, which you can later view without having to worry about where you kept it (or if you’re offline). You can also attach any file type to a source record and Zotero will store a copy of that file. This is a helpful feature that gets rid of a lot of manual organization normally involved in research.

Notes and Annotation

You can create plain-text notes (basic formatting would be a welcome addition), either attached to sources or standalone. Notes, along with snapshots and PDFs (if you have PDF-to-text software installed), are full-text indexed by Zotero for searching. Sources and notes can also be tagged and linked to related items.

Highlighting and annotation of saved snapshots is very simple. In order to highlight text, one must simply select it. Annotations, similar to sticky notes, are added with ease.

Exporting

Zotero can save selected sources as bibliography entries in many different styles, such as MLA, the Chicago Manual of Style’s style, and those of many journals (and more can be installed). These can be saved to RTF or HTML, printed, or copied to the clipboard. It can also export to many formats, including BibTex and, amazingly, Wikipedia {{Cite}} templates. An HTML report containing a summary of source bibliographic information and the full text of notes is also useful.

Microsoft Word and OpenOffice extensions place a toolbar in your word-processing program, from which you can select a source to cite (footnotes and endnotes are generally supported) or insert a bibliography. In my experience, the OpenOffice extension was slightly buggy, and messed up the usage of Ibid, but it was usable.

Zotero can also create a nifty timeline showing the distribution of your sources.

The next version of Zotero is planned to use a server where users can store their sources; if this were made social like del.icio.us, it would be another great development for the research process. Overall, Zotero is by far the easiest to use and most powerful (and certainly most suited for my needs) bibliography manager I have used.