WikiTree Community Blog

A-1 awesome WikiTreer C-G Magnussen has been pioneering the use of categories on WikiTree.

Those of you familiar with Wikipedia or another wiki may know how categories work. Anyone can instantly connect pages under the umbrella of any category they choose. For example, I could create a category called “Whittens from Fitchburg, Massachusetts” and add my family members to it. I simply go to the Edit page of a family member and enter this anywhere in the main body of the Bio/Notes: [[Category:Whittens from Fitchburg, Massachusetts]]

Without doing anything else, this page is created: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Whittens_from_Fitchburg%2C_Massachusetts

I can even proceed to make “Whittens from Fitchburg, Massachusetts” a sub-category of something like “Whitten Families” or “Families from Fitchburg, Massachusetts” or both.

C-G’s current interest is Italian immigrants to Sweden so he’s been working on this: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Italians_in_Sweden.

Categories are potentially very powerful tools for wiki genealogy but they haven’t been optimized for our WikiTree use yet. For example, the links on the category pages appear as file names (aka WikiTree IDs) instead of names, e.g. Whitten-1 instead of Chris Whitten.

Today C-G asked about this: “When I add the category info in the Bio Notes it isn’t showing on that profile unless you have permission to edit. I wonder if the information about what categories a person belongs to should be listed automatically somewhere on the Profile page!? I know I can add the category links manually.”

I think this is a good idea. Does anybody else have input?