Projects should:?

1) Historical value seems too vague to me. In some cases, a project might be better suited as a Wikipedia article rather than Geni project.
2) How would you define "good readability"?
3) I think rather than an aim, a project should have a well defined scope. The scope should begin at the title and culminate in the lead section.

Private User, I started a content structure section. Maybe we can go from there to define good readability.

*The way I put it might be vague yes, what I really mean to say is it should be relevant to Geni, so no projects that are not related to genealogy or history where there are no profiles involved or the possibility to add profiles and therefore are not relevant to a site like Geni.

*With good readability I mean to refrain from signs or other things that do not give the project extra value., like the example below:

wiki-schrijf-ervaring? Noteer het dan als 'discussie' en de redactie zorgt voor de rest...
Codering: Ⓐ-own-site ‧ Ⓑiografie · ‧ · · Ⓕacebook ‧ Ⓖeni-ongelinkt ‧ ‧ Ⓗyves ‧ · Ⓘnternet ‧ ‧ Ⓛinkedin ‧ · Ⓜail ‧ · Ⓣwitter ‧ ‧ ‧ ‧ ‧ Ⓦikipedia ‧ Ⓧ ‧ Ⓨ‧ Ⓩ ‧

*Correct, it should be a defined scope not aim , agree with that

I have just studied the structure section and think this is exactly what the projects need, might have to change one or two of my own projects LOL

What about planning and preparing a project ?
1 research
2 is it interesting to others?
3 Finding and adding material

Think we should have a project creating class :)

I think follow you now. The main thing I'd like to stress is that focus of a project should be tangible peoples and not simply a topic. For instance, a project about a TV program should be about the actors, writers, etc., i.e. peoples related to the show, and not explicitly the show itself, detailing a synopsis or whathaveyou.

Ah, right, that would be under Manual of Style. I think you could even define them as misspellings.

Good points.

Actually, if you have a background in Wikipedia, it's a lot easier. In fact, we could simply direct people to Wikipedia videos.

Yes, yes, yes, all about people and nothing else, there are some great projects as example like the Artist project what has all the ingredients, it is historical, genealogical and has loads of profiles and IS about the people and not their art.

Wiki even has a practice page, where you can practice how to use it, it is quite easy once you know it is there. But even without all the Wiki experience , working on Geni is not difficult

What we could do (if not there already) is creating a ''how to create a project'' document with advise, the wiki-codes, the do's and dont's and guidelines.
The question will be do enough users know that the documents exist, or should we create a project for this?
I am willing to write this if we want to do it as I am used to writing work procedures and processes anyway.

Similarly, to do genealogy with sparse records and no or variable surnames, you need to study families and naming patterns and geography, which is why it makes a lot of sense to have geographically based projects for early America or for Jewish villages and towns (or for a specific administrative district) in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. But it's still around people who make up the families and marriages between people :)

My own feeling is that the goal of a project need to be made clear. My projects generally have one of two goals: (1) to help users navigate Geni information all in one place, that is to be informative such as the family projects, or (2) to answer a question or prove a hypothesis by creating context to do genealogical research, such as the geographically-centered projects. Although the latter are informative as well.

Yes the goal or scope has to be made very clear at the start of the project.
Do not think there is a problem having geographical based projects as this is like you said helpful to users and it HAS all to do with genealogy and history, very relevant projects that function as a research gate.

Geographical projects will be replaced by place profiles, which is currently in production.

Place profiles ?

As in historical/genealogical themes that tie it to a particular place and time? Or how will the place profiling work?

That's yet to be seen.

Interesting idea :O

Not sure that I agree with the idea that all geographical projects will be replace. I tend to have projects around villages in an administrative district that were close enough given transportation in the 19th century for there to be commerce, movement and intermarriage. There certainly will not be "place" profiles for early 19th century Lithuanian administrative districts :)

Why couldn't we have place profiles for 19th century Lithuanian administrative districts?

Either way, we'll have to wait and see how place profiles manifest.

How will a place profile not be like a person profile. A person profile may be in many projects. Similarly, people might have a place profile associated with projects with very different goals. I absolutely do not see how a place profile would or should replace projects.

In fact this reminds me of Geni's thinking on surnames which was faulty - that the surname repository (of all the people with that surname) would served as the "project" for that family. Based on a faulty assumption that all people named Williams are in the same family or that the only viable project around "Williams" would be to look at all people with that surname. I'm being unfair, but a collection of all the people with the same surname is only an overlap with a family project very rarely :)

1. There was discussion at the beginning of this thread about whether a project should have a scope or an aim. I would say both. Hatte gave an example at http://www.geni.com/discussions/105779?msg=773293 of a scope and an aim [goal].

2. The project page currently says a project should "be non-redundant". What does that mean?

3. I suggest the advice should cover sub-projects. Some projects are in danger of becoming too big for their own good and may benefit from splitting into sub-projects. I started a discussion with Randy on the Namesakes project on that basis.

Don't forget "associated projects.". For the portals, for instance, it's a navigation from UK to Scotland to Ireland to Australia, etc., with no sense of hierarchy in those relationships (nor should be for a "search for your ancestors here."

Examples of geographically based study group different from the Places idea Geni is working on - First Founders of Hartford, Connecticut. Ancient Planters of the Virginia Colony. In other words, only certain people have received certain designations, and that is discussed in the Project Scope Statement.

Hatte Rubenstein Blejer, well, it's really hard for me to speculate on place profiles. I would hope that unlike projects, place profiles will allow for nesting, which would be a huge advantage. Again, we know what we need but don't know what we'll get.

Private User, be non-redundant means avoid duplicate projects and avoid duplication of coverage. If the wording doesn't make sense, lets fix that.

Yes, we should have some verbiage about excessively large projects and spreading out the load.

Victar - non-redundant - how about: "should not substantially duplicate an existing project"

Annemarie - your suggestion of " how to create a project" document would be helpful. If a document already exists my own feeling is that perhaps users don't know how to access them.