Help:Overview

What Is This?

This site was created with a few important properties in mind.

Accessible. The main goal of the wiki is to make it easy to learn about our ancestors. Its focus is on telling families' stories. Like an encyclopedia, each article stands on its own without assuming any prior knowledge; readers who don't know much about a family should be able to browse the family's page and quickly get oriented. The wiki also encourages viewing photos, reading stories about events, and visiting landmarks, all with the intent of establishing a connection.

Unstructured. The structure of the wiki is flexible. There are pages for families and places, and these tend to follow a certain template, but the content of each page can be arranged in whatever way makes the most sense. Further, if there are special-purpose needs not covered by the standard page format—making a list of related pages, describing a surname's history over generations, coordinating on to-do lists, whatever—a special page can be created. The wiki software is also highly customizable, allowing for things like special-purpose reports or visualizations.

Collaborative. Anyone with access to the wiki can make changes. This lets us share our knowledge and resources, rather than leaving each person to rediscover the same things. Unlike a book, the task of creating each family's page is never "done"—everything is subject to revision. Also unlike a book, it's easy for lots of different authors to work together. Among other tools, there are logs of all changes made to each page, to help identify where different parts came from and, if needed, fix mistakes; email notifications to track pages of interest; and discussion areas associated with each page, where questions and notes about the page can be placed.

Private. Access is restricted to family members, as determined by membership in a Facebook group. (Caveats: special access for non-Facebook users can also be set up; and specific pages or files can be designated as public.) A big benefit of restricted access is that we're free to document details about living people—and it's often much easier to collect this information while they're alive! We're also in a better position to make "fair use" of copyrighted material like professional photos. Of course we should still be sensitive about these things—respecting privacy, not assuming security is perfect, etc.—but limited access greatly reduces the burden.

There are also a few things that the site is not. These needs are better met by FamilySearch, personal genealogy databases, published books and documents, etc.:

Not a database. Every fact about every person of interest does not belong here. The goal is to extract the most interesting bits from existing databases and records, and use them to tell a story. So, for example, it's rarely useful to talk about the date on which something occurred: the year already provides enough detail. The wiki does record some basic information about each family, and uses this to generate reports about relationships between families and places. But this data is not very detailed: it tracks families, not people, and counties, not cities or landmarks.

Not authoritative. Generally, every fact about a person should be backed up by an authoritative source. In the wiki, while it's good practice to clarify which facts are speculative, we're not concerned with properly citing the source of every fact. Instead, the citations are implicit: FamilySearch or a referenced document should provide the source details for all information on the page.

Not public. Since the wiki is private, things posted here will not directly benefit anybody outside the small circle of users with access. Since genealogy work benefits greatly from collaboration, it's a good idea be engaged in public forums, too.

It should be clear that this is not a replacement for other Family History resources. Instead, it's meant to meet some unfulfilled needs and complement existing resources. Various features are designed to facilitate this complementary role: each family page contains links to FamilySearch; personal databases can be uploaded and shared; private document and photo collections can be consolidated; work in FamilySearch and elsewhere can be coordinated in discussion spaces; etc.