Genealogy Wiki
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Genealogy wikis are one possible answer to a huge problem facing genealogical research today of the lack of appropriate collaboration tools for researchers. See MMOGA for more discussion. Many resources exist today to help researchers to find the genealogy information, but once researchers document that information, few solutions exist to efficiently and quickly share that information with those people interested.
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What is a wiki?
A wiki is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, and typically without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. In fact, this very page is published on a wiki.
The need for mass collaborative authoring in genealogy
Family historians have long been plagued by a problem of efficiently collaborating with others to document their genealogy. Genealogists make changes to their family trees only to discover later that the work was repeated by others. At best the work is identical and at worst the work is different and incorrect data overwrites the correct work. To avoid the later situation genealogist spend many hours trying to merge files from relatives.
It’s a mess that software experts have been working to solve for years. One major strategic solution is to use a wiki.
Pros to Genealogy Wikis
- Software availability - many free wiki solutions exist today
- Flexibility - wikis are excellent at capturing family histories that may include biographies, photos, and other unstructured data.
- Search engines - wikis are typically indexed by search engines
- Multi-user - the open nature of wikis allows many users to all edit the content without having to merge later
- Change history - allows for rolling back changes
Cons
The cons center around the wiki's lack of structure. The wiki usually stores its content in large text fields in a database. Any structure is added as HTML or other wiki code.
- Limited searchability - Searching for Johnson's born between 1850 and 1860 in New York is impossible.
- Weak security - the lack of structure makes security based on family relationships impossible (ie seeing living siblings, spouse, and children)
- Only dead people - because of missing security capabilities, you can't store information on living individuals which means no charts of you and your ancestors
- No GEDCOM interface - without a GEDCOM tool, you can't quickly load data in from your PAF program or export it out
- No LDS data - LDS researchers want to know if Temple ordinances have been done but others don't care and want to hide that information. Wikis can't show/hide based on preferences
- No charts - although you could potentially create some basic charts based on the HTML links, anything complicated would be impossible and error prone
- No Family Tree Index - Wikis don't have the ability to automatically calculate who your relatives are and only show you changes and activity related to your family. Massively multi user applications only work successfully when it doesn't feel like its massive.
- Translating basic facts is manual - every wiki translation must be made manually. Uniform data such as dates and even locations must be translated on each page.
- Weak matching - searching for duplicates is difficult due to limited search capabilities
- All or nothing merging - because everything is stored in one big text page, merging is difficult and may result in just one person overriding everything in the other file, rather than doing a more effective merge.
- Editing is not user friendly - the flexibility built into wikis confuses most users. People need simple screens...type your first name...type your last name...click enter.
Recommendations
The idea of a wiki (massively multi-user online collaboration) used for genealogy is a great concept, but many crucial elements have to be added to the model. SharedTree has tried to solve all of these problems while still maintaining the basic advantages to a wiki. Please see Founding Principles and Features for more information.
