MormonPlaces Content

We want MormonPlaces to be an intuitive website that can be used without a lot of explanation and assistance. This document is intended for those who want more details on our intent, content design, and technical architecture. Also, anyone who contributes to the database should be familiar with this document.

What Belongs in MormonPlaces

Generally, we are interested in any place that is of significance to the early (pre-1844) Church or any of its heirs (LDS, RLDS, Strang, etc.), up until 1930. Occasionally, there will be an end date after 1930 for the sake of accuracy, but please do not enter places or properties thereof that started after January 1, 1931. That may seem arbitrary, but we had to cut it off somewhere, and 100 years seemed a nice round number. We are interested in a variety of places:

• Congregations: Local and regional Church units, including branches, wards, stakes, conferences/districts, and missions.
• Settlements: Towns and villages that were originally settled primarily by Mormons (that is, it would have been called a "Mormon settlement"). As a counterexample, Chicago should not be entered as a settlement just because some Mormons lived there.
• Cemeteries: As with settlements, these should include cemeteries that were started by and/or contain predominantly Mormons.
• Buildings: Structures that are of some significance, such as temples, meetinghouses, mills, or locations of important historical events. While a variety of places could be entered, initially our primary interest is in buildings that are still standing today. Generally, individual homes should not be entered unless they are somehow significant, like the oldest home in the community or the home of a well-known member.
• Events: A place where something significant to Church History happened. It could be a important as the place where the Church was organized, or as small as a campsite on the pioneer trail. It is not necessary that there be a monument there today.
• Boundary Features: The geographic features that were used to form the boundaries of official jurisdictions of places, primarily congregations, including roads, rivers, mountain ranges, and so on. In MormonPlaces, we do not digitize the boundaries directly, but the features themselves, then point to them as parts of a boundary.
• Source Artifacts: These are not places, but are the documents and other historical artifacts that are the source of our knowledge about places, including books, periodicals, diaries, maps, reports, and so on. In keeping with the standards of historical scholarship, we expect you to cite your sources for everything you enter into our system. This type of entity is where you can document information about a source, similar to a library catalog entry.

MormonPlaces Database Structure

This is not a full technical specification of our data model, but there are a few things all editors should know about how MormonPlaces works:

• Every entity (any of the places listed above) has a unique ID number. Generally, these are generated automatically when you create a new place. These are used to refer to other entities, such as relationships (e.g., a ward being part of a stake) and source citations; in these cases, make sure you enter them correctly.
• The characteristics of an entity, including its existence, name, beginning and ending, location, relationships to other places, and so on, are not assumed to be known facts, but are assertions or claims, which could be factual, or could be vague, debatable, doubted, or subjective interpretations. That's just the nature of history.
• It is totally acceptable to have multiple assertions of the same characteristic for an entity; that is, the place record could have three names or two locations asserted. Usually, this is either because it changed over time, because there are alternative scholarly opinions of what happened, or just because the people at the time claimed different values (this frequently happened with names).
• Any asserted characteristic can have qualifiers, or assertions about the characteristics of that assertion. The most common qualifiers are the dates when it was valid ("it had a membership of 45 on April 15, 1867") or citations of sources ("it had a membership of 45 according to the Deseret News, V.45 #15 p.367"). Qualifiers themselves can have their own qualifiers, such as the source of a valid date.

Detailed Help

• Guidelines on properties/characteristics that can be entered for each entity.
• Formatting Dates according to the Extended Date Time Format (EDTF) standard. Incorrectly formatted dates cannot be processed by the system!

Editorial Policy

Public editing of the MormonPlaces database is coming soon!

MormonPlaces is a massive undertaking that may never be "done." We may never know all there is to know about the places of early sites of Mormon history. However, we know that there is far more knowledge out there than what our small team at BYU has access to, so we welcome contributions to the database from our users, regardless of their level of historical expertise, or which branch of the Restoration Movement they come from. If you know something about these places, help us!

Our mission to document the places of Mormon History as accurately as possible, and also to foster collaborative scholarship, even debate, about those places. Therefore, we welcome, even encourage, alternative viewpoints on past places and events, and comments/feedback on the assertions of each other. Contributions are welcome from anyone in the community, but to ensure the ongoing quality of the information in MormonPlaces, we have chosen to not make it quite as free-wheeling as Wikipedia or FamilySearch. Therefore, we have two levels of registered users:

• Contributors, including all new registrants, can add whatever information they wish, including new places, new asserted characteristics of places, and giving feedback on existing assertions. They can modify and delete their own contributions, but not the contributions of others. If you disagree with something in the database, provide feedback and/or add an alternative with better sources and justification.
• Editors are a selected group of users who we trust to wisely administer the data in MormonPlaces. Editors have the right to modify or remove any information that does not meet the guidelines above, or that is demonstrably incorrect; on the latter case, our policy is to allow (and even encourage) including conflicting opinions, unless one is clearly proven to be false.