How is it possible to be born 9 years before your father

Question

I have only just come accross WikiTrees. It has taken me less than 10 minutes to see that it is no better than Ancestry in terms of accuracy. You claim that Sources are important to you - but Ancestry is not a source since it is open to anyone and nothing is checked. Nothing in this tree appears to have a source. WikiTrees is a nice idea, pity about the bad execution.

Answer 1

Yes, you will see the same problems on WikiTree that you see on other genealogy sites where information is shared by many people. However, the focus here is that if you become a contributing member, you can collaborate with others to edit, clean-up, and merge profiles, with the goal of having one profile for each person. People may have uploaded GEDCOMs (some quite large) that contain information gleaned from other websites, and these may be referred to as sources, but original source citations most certainly are preferred.

Please check out the Honor Code before you give up. http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:Honor_Code

Sandi

Comments

Perhaps some basic sanity-checking is possible to implement -- after all, it probably wouldn't be too hard for the application to notice that a person is older than his father and flag for further review. Seems to me like that would be a worthwhile addition.

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Edward like you I'm serious about genealogy and have joined Wiki Tree recently with high expectations.  I found the same issues you have.  I like the Wiki Tree concept of one profile for each person.  When I first arrived, I started notifying people with the correct information for that person.  When I checked back awhile later, we are now down to one or two on many of them.  So it is starting to clean up.  It is up to you, I and all who are serious to make it an ideal genealogy site, in which we all can trust the research.  Please stay and help.  Al

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I too have been disturbed by the number of profiles that clearly have not been touched since they were uploaded by someone.  The difference I see with Wikitree is that unlike a private tree on Ancestry or elsewhere, where that is an unfortunate end point, with Wikitree it is a beginning point.  I have added a lot of sourced data to profiles like that, and those profiles now belong to everyone.  And recently I was chagrined -- but pleased-- to discover that someone else had found a profile I had created but intended to add sourced data later -- and someone else had added the sourced data.  That's what can happen with a collaborative effort!

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And I see that the Edward Lewis you are referring to is an "orphaned" or abandoned profile -- just begging you to take it over and clean it up!