Maintainers' Dos and Don'ts

Introduction

There are a few key points that maintainers need to watch as they create pages and add information to them.

Links to commercial sites

The GENUKI service is intended just for genealogy-related information, all of which (other than a minimal amount providing links to the rest of the world) should be of relevance to the British Isles. There is no obvious definition of the term "genealogy-related" that can be applied. A rule of thumb is that if the information, or something like it, is in the LDS Family History Library then it is appropriate for inclusion in GENUKI.

Much of the information we provide is in the form of links to other websites. We include links when they will be relevant and useful for genealogy, irrespective of the commercial or non-commercial nature of the site. As a GENUKI maintainer you will receive numerous requests to include links to other websites. Before including such links from your pages you should assess the site for suitability. To be suitable the website must have content that is evidently relevant to the aspect of UK and Ireland genealogy covered by your pages, and that is likely to be of interest to family historians.

In addition, GENUKI maintainers should ensure that their pages do not inherently favour one information provider above another, except on the basis of content.

Acceptability of use

Maintainers are expected to be familiar with the acceptable use policy of the internet service provider hosting these pages, Mythic Beasts Ltd., and should ensure that their pages do not infringe that policy. In particular you should avoid links to material that is in some way actually or potentially illegal as a result of copyright infringement, defamation, fraud etc. Note that some innocent domain names are purchased by questionable web publishers and their websites' content replaced with undesirable material.

Information accuracy

Evidently we would like all the information in this service to be accurate and up to date. In practice, we will often have to leave the judgement on such issues to the readers. Information sources and dates should therefore be indicated wherever appropriate and possible.

For information items which are particularly likely to need updating, it is best to state such information just once, ideally in a separate page, and if necessary have multiple links to that page. For example, society contact addresses should ideally be given just in a page that also gives general information about the society - a page that the society or its nominee is responsible for updating. However to use a separate page when all one has is an address is excessive. And there are a number of files, e.g., transcribed library leaflets, that we want to include in their entirety even though they contain information such as addresses which might be less up to date than other versions of such information elsewhere in the server - the partial "solution" is to make sure to indicate the date such a leaflet was printed, or copied onto a server.

Bibliographic citations should be not only accurate but also as complete as possible - in the case of books, it is useful to include ISBN information.(If there are many potentially relevant references that might be cited in some given topic area, try to choose the best and most up to date ones - and perhaps provide a capsule summary or review of the each item chosen in order to indicate the reasons for its inclusion.

The standards we adhere to for our transcriptions are explained in our Standards of Accuracy.