Safe Place for Genealogical Information

Are you or your genealogy society looking for a place to record genealogical information? Are you and several other people working on a group project? Would you like a place that multiple people can work together and the information will be stored in an archive forever? Why not create it on Wiki!

Wiki is a great place for having multiple people collaborate on a project. The project might be listings of transcriptions from census records, or old tax records, marriage bonds for a particular county or you can even write up a history of the town or county your are putting together. It can even be your whole family tree with input from relations that live around the globe.

Wikipedia.org is the best online encyclopedia and has grown to contain twenty to thirty times the information ever found in a traditional encyclopedia, like the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia contains thousands of authors with each contributing whatever knowledge he or she wishes to share. Accuracy does vary but it has been shown that Wikipedia.org has about the same number or errors as the Encyopedia Britannica. .

The best thing about Wikipedia.org is that it is a free site unlike many other encyclopedias sites that charge for access.

According to Wikipedia.org, a wiki is defined as:

A website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a Web site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (the original wiki) WikiWikiWeb and on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.

To shorten Wikipedia's description a little is that wiki is a website where users can add, remove and edit every page using a web browser. It's also easy to use. In fact wikis are becoming known as the tool of choice for large, multiple-participant projects.

The wiki software is a common source for about any large collection of reference material, especially for information collected by a large group of people. An Encyclopedia is a common application, as is a dictionary, thesaurus, and most any other reference work. Wiki will work very well for any project that a multiple of people are wishing to post and share ideas and information.

Here are some ideas that you might want to use wiki for your next project.

1. Creating a town or county history with input from multiple authors.

2. A group effort of transcribing old records with everyone contributing their extractions to the master copy, again with multiple transcribers.

3. Two or more authors can collaborate on a book of almost any topic. Each author contributes his or her own latest pages and can also easily see the pages written by others. The group collaboration can be much easier than sending pages by e-mail.

4. Publishing the society's newsletters, including back issues.

5. Creating a book of "all the descendants from the original person," Or republishing an existing family history book. Each person listed in the book would receive a separate page on the wiki and could have more data contributed by others as time goes by.

6. Multiple people from around the globe can contribute stories and pictures that can be stored in the archives forever.

Why is wiki a great tool, because: it is an archive, as every page is saved and it is always available at any time; it is accessible from any computer anywhere and anyplace that has a web connection. It is an exciting, and an empowering adventure. Everyone has a say.

Wiki can be a tool for a local history book that your society is wishes to create some day. It's a group effort with input from a large group of people that could easily become more complete than any effort conducted by only one person.

Almost all the wiki pages are built on group participation. Most of the wikis allow new information to be replace or update previously entered information.

So what are you waiting for, start your wiki page today!