User talk:Sam Francis/Genealogy wiki

Sharing Ideas for a Genealogy Wiki?
I think we have a need in search of fulfillment, for general usage, a "shared memories" writing project. There are hundreds (thousands?) of genealogy portals and websites, but I have not yet found one that supports WIKI-style collaboration for family data and histories.

I'm just brainstorming here, but it occurs to me that http://CivicEvolution.ORG could be a useful tool for collaborating, managing, and sharing family histories. Any other suggestions?

I'm searching for a collaboration tool for collecting genealogy data and writing a family history, from the perspective of many, many cousins. (Probably 10 - 15 or more active participants, and up to a few hundred or more casual participants?)

I've collected basic family data from many genealogy websites over the past few years, and from public records, as well as family records and emails. Some is factual, some is anecdotal. It's hard to manage all this. Using a genealogy program requires strict control by one author, we can't really collaborate, except via email... I've found over 100 living cousins.

http://www.fanucci.us/genealogy.html is my crude public portal for family info, and I'm also casting a net looking for more relatives in the US and Italy. Every few months another distant cousin pops up.

I'm looking for a family history and genealogy collaboration tool that would work better than a FORUM or EMAIL, but easy enough to use for a few dozen people to share. The end result would be a living, growing family history document where relatives could write and revise drafts, and could exchange comments on drafts. Perhaps a new kind of WIKI?

Each node in the family tree could have several types of entries, perhaps, or maybe just one "chapter" with a primary editor and many collaborators.

It would be shared among a family group of many collaborators, writers, reviewers, and other interested family members, by invitation only.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. Any recommendations?

--GeoFan49 18:21, 30 September 2006 (UTC)


 * GeoFan49 hadn't looked very hard for the desired collaborative genealogy wiki. Genealogy started in 2004. Now nisknamed "Familypedia", it has 34,000 articles, with several dozen contributors every month, and is starting to use Semantic MediaWiki for the ultimate in clever stuff while making fairly clever use of standard MediaWiki templates and categories. I've written a step-by-step introduction to it on a blacklisted site (S q u i d o o) which I can email to anyone interested! Robin Patterson (talk) 13:02, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Congratulations to Sam, though; possibly as an indication that there are few genealogy wikis, I googled "genealogy wiki" a few minutes ago and got Wikipedia's genealogy article top of the list and Sam's subpage second. The abovementioned Wikia site is at number three. At least two of the top ten hits are not genealogy wikis. Robin Patterson (talk) 13:02, 12 June 2009 (UTC)