Why does WikiTree make sources so difficult to add?

Question

For a site that considers sources to be of paramount importance, WikiTree sure doesn't make sourcing easy. The actual data fields can't even be sourced, and the biography text field involves coding gibberish, especially if you want to attach specific sources to specific facts. (And heaven forbid you want to attach the same source to multiple facts...)

I haven't even gotten to 20 people in my watchlist, and yet I find myself inadvertently re-doing work I've already done on another profile, because the same document can be a source for information about multiple people. This creates all sorts of opportunities for errors to creep in. For example, the GEDCOMpare import kills links, but I don't always remember to fix them, because they're hidden in all the gibberish.

Is there any chance of somehow completely rearranging things to make it quick, intuitive, and easy to add sources? I'm thinking something like a drop-down box with formatting buttons kind of like the ones on this G2G input box (bold, italics, create link, attach image, etc.). There could be links for such a drop-down attached to each data field, and a button for attaching/creating one in the text entry (bio) box. For sources like funeral notices that are relevant to dozens of profiles, it would be nice if the drop-down source box had a "save to use elsewhere" function. Once you'd entered the source once, for subsequent profiles you'd pull down the "add source", select "saved sources", find the one you need, and click "attach".

Has such an improvement already been suggested and rejected? My G2G searching skills are apparently inadequate to the task of finding such a question.

Comments

Well said!

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Wikitree references are not explained well at all. I have several people where I have inserted <ref> Source </ref> in the text as I believe it is supposed to be and the source does not show up below under sources and I end up with an unsourced person. Can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

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Have you made certain you have the two lines needed following the text in the bio?

== Sources ==

<References />

If one of these is missing, sources will not show correctly.

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M Dory, as Shirley says, make sure you have the <References /> line. (The "Sources" subheader is actually technically optional -- your footnotes will show up perfectly fine without it.)

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I use a profile template, that takes much of the effort out.

https://1drv.ms/f/s!AnmPf3XCjcZyj74dpd-lB3-qNFfCTQ

I don't cross link sources like marriage or birth records.  Those remain in the profile of the principle participants (the child being born, or the children being married).  However, one could customize the template for their own needs.

The required content, the Sources and References are located within this template.  So, in addition to this template, you can do sourcing consistent with WikiTree for the biography section.

As long as your sources are listed from where you obtained the information, then it's possible to identify a source.  If additional clarity is needed, a note can be added in the note section (I have some prepared ones).  

Here is an example of a profile with this template in use:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Budd-389

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Larry, that's quite the array of information in that template, but it doesn't fix my problem of source citation text interrupting narrative text and making everything impossible to find in edit mode. Also, my citations almost always include the relevant text from the source (see for example Gaiter-4), and part of the work is massaging that text into a form that WikiTree will not mangle when it eats all the linebreaks.

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The problem of source citation text interrupting narrative text and making it unreadable in edit mode has a pretty good workaround: list all the source citations first and give them names, so you can just put a short tag in the actual text. Here's an example: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Carlow-72

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Alot of members have been complaining about the sourcing system for a long time. It seems the techs at Wiki tree are not taking notice. The discussion seems to be going nowhere.Wikitree is leaning way to far to the technical side and frustrating many members. Just check g2g section to see howmany are frustrated. Sourcing is not a complicated matter in other genealogical programs, so why here at WikiTree.?

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It can.

I'm not a narrative biographer.  However, in some situations where I am, I'll take the link I have in Research Profile (Source: Link) and put it within Ref tags.  This doesn't do what WikiTree prefers, but for me, it's a compromise.  It provides a readable reference to the source (i.e. Birth record), which then a person can either click on or scroll down to.

Deb is doing something similar, but also, very different.  We both use a short but sweet text for references (sources), so we're not making the narrative packed with information in editing.  

If I can find a profile where I've actually done this, as a reference, I'll add the link.

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I sort of agree, but on the flip side I don't.

I've used Ancestry to build my tree (actually took my tree from here and added it there), and yes, it is extremely easy to identify sources.  Ancestry helps with that a lot.

The flip side of this is that, they also make it EXTREMELY easy to make mistakes.  

WikiTree doesn't make it more or less hard to make mistakes, everyone can easily make them.  However the difference is that WikiTree requires you to do sourcing work.  If you can't find it, you don't make it up.  If you find it, you link to or reference your source.

The point of sourcing is to give anyone who comes along an understanding of where you found it, so they don't repeat the same work you've done in researching a person.  Not that you have a paper copy of every document on ever person, and that it's posted online, and you have every line referenced in those documents.

Generally speaking, for me, sourcing isn't a chore.  Yes, some people are not fun to document.  However, I can easily get lost in tracing down people with sources.

Then again, I use a template.  I fill out what I can for that person and then move on.  As long as I have one solid reference to the existence of that person, I add them.  It doesn't always work out well, as I've had people who were the same person just referenced differently on a census, but that can easily be cleared up with a merge.

Would it be nice if there were better sourcing tools...maybe.  But I think it would be better if we got people who loved sourcing to work on profiles of the people who sucked at sourcing.  Then, we got the people who were good at narrative biographies working on the profiles of people who hated narrative biographies.

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Many people complain that entering a source at WT is hard.  It seems that the default answer (from folks who have been here a while) is, "Its easy, just do a, then b, then c...

It really should be all this coding and copying and pasting.

When it comes time to enter a source, there should be a pull down box or a list and you can tick one:

_ Book

_ Journal

_ Census

_ website

_ birth/death cert

_ family tree

_ bible

etc.  You tick your choice and a drop down box appears that asks you, say if it was a book:

Book title:

Author:

Publisher:

Date of publishing:

you enter the data and it fills it all in for you.

The GOAL of WT is to expand the ranks and get folks to source, but even from veteran trees I look at, the sourcing doesn't match from one to the next.

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It's hard to make a list like the one you propose complete enough to be useful even in one language; it's basically impossible to make it properly portable between cultures. But it's not necessary to compartmentalize the parts of a source citation: as long as all the necessary information is there, it doesn't matter what order it's in or how it's punctuated. So simplify: a drop-down text box, with basic formatting options just like the ones here on G2G (bold, italic, align left, align centered, link, etc.), and an option to name it and save it for later. If your source offers a pre-made citation, you could just copy and paste it into the box and call it good.

(I don't think standardization of citation formatting is necessary, nor even necessarily desirable. There are too many possibilities for the types of sources, and lots of other things that people can spend their time on. But it's all currently moot, because it's a major achievement to get any sort of readable source citation onto WikiTree.)

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That is a nice trick. I like it.  Since I imported from an Ancestry gedcom, I have been doing Timelines.   I delete the entire biography, create a Timeline, enter the events I want to highlight in biography, then grab the sources I want either from family search or ancestry and just click the C and pop them in, and then delete all the junk under sources.  It's not ideal, but I don't have to worry about figuring out if I missed something in all the text mess the sources create.

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LOL, two years later and I'm searching about in this forum trying to figure out why there's no WYSIWYG method. I find this post. And many many others. All asking about why the hell it's so hard to do anything here with references and sources etc.

I read all the BS from those happy with the WikiMarkup stuff about how WYSIWYG is just "too hard" to build. (IRRITATION, that's not true)

I think about the hour-plus I just spent attempting and failing to get one person with 20-some sources to look like anything even remotely legible, much less informative. (FRUSTRATION, what waste of my time)

And then I think that WikiTree will just never achieve its stated goal of creating a unified tree of all of us. (CONTEMPT, you obviously don't actually care about attracting more data if you can't be bothered to remove this obstacle)

Because the technical 'barrier to entry' for newcomers that have no coding background is just too high, the time-cost of learning and then piddling about with code is too high, with garbeldygook syntax of slash and bracket... all of it nonsense and useless beyond this one website.

I'm SURE there are people WikiTree could hire to create a 'conversion' application that takes an Ancestry (or other for-profit) GEDCOM and turns it into a legible, well laid out Wiki entry.  

For crying out loud, we (humanity) can write artificial intelligence that can (on its own) design 3-D structural elements used in cars.... We can convert JPG to AAC, MPG to WAV, we can convert Microsoft's quirky and odd special formatting of HTML and turn it into lovely, clean code.  All this in mind, I should think this WYSIWYG Wiki crap would be play-school to accomplish for programmers.

But nah. "I can do it so why can't you?" is the answer.

Because I already invested hundreds of hours into my tree. THAT'S why. There's zero justification for making me take hours for just a single person.

Answer 1

J,

Perhaps we could ask - Why is English or Chinese or Hungarian so difficult to learn?

The answer is that they like Wikitree are a language and unless your mother, or possibly father, taught you from day one it is difficult.  It took me about 3 months to learn.  (A lot easier that when I tried to learn Cantonese.) 

I can add a profile with sources and use the those same sources for multiple facts as fast as I can type - with copy paste they can be very fast. - But it took time to learn.  Yes, I agree it would be nice if there were better integration with the data base fields and the biography section, but you can provide more than enough material in the biography to make up for it.

Make sure you investigate the use of <ref name="XName">. Source 1</ref> and its use later in a profile as <ref="Name"/>

Here is a very simple example that only took a few minutes. 

David Pelton (1773 - 1821)

One way to make things easier is to make good use of a Word file with sources that you may wish to use again.  I have them in a format that I can just paste into a profile.  I have a very long list of sources that I use multiple times and it saves a huge amount of typing.

 

Comments

I've already investigated named references, and the variant on it that takes advantage of the fact that the first reference doesn't have to be the full one. I'm reasonably good at coding and typing and all that geeky stuff. But the biography still ends up a wall of gibberish if it uses any inline references, and it takes time and effort to sort it out, find and correct errors, and add new information. A lot of time and effort. It doesn't have to be this way: even this simple comment box has a better link-adding interface than the profile edit box, for example.

At the very least, if there's gotta be code in the edit box, for heaven's sake offer some syntax highlighting for it...

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Yes, having the tags and links highlighted in Edit Mode would be very helpful.

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I'm not here to learn Hungarian or Chinese.  I'm here to put up my family tree.  I have a degree in history and the sourcing here is so convoluted that I'm frustrated.

It drives away a lot of people.

The fix isn't shaming people into learning the programming style of WT, the fix is fixing the broken part - that the sourcing is so backwards and unnatural.

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SJ: I'm not here to learn Hungarian, either, but in my case it's at least partly because I already know it. :-)

However, an extra language just adds to the complication: if I do a bilingual biography, inline sourcing has to be done with named references, and it all gets incredibly messy incredibly fast. I've mostly given up on inline for this reason. I don't have _time_ to track down missing bits of punctuation.

Answer 2

Thanks for identifying some ways that WikiTree sourcing could be made more user-friendly for people who don't immediately feel at ease doing some light html coding. 

In addition to posting this excellent question together with a first pass at how you envision these new WikiTree features might work here at G2G forums, you might also consider starting a free space page where people could add further user specifications for such a tool. 

I'd love to see WikiTree develop a Print/Export tool, so in addition to my posting a query to the G2G forum like you've done, I also started a WikiTree free-space page where people can come and help specify the way such a WikiTree improvement might work. You can do something similar for Source Tools, if you like.

Here's the free space page I started to specify WikiTree Print / Export capability: 
 https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:WikiTree_Print/Export_feature  

Comments

I can't get any of the search boxes to cough up a G2G question or free space profile for the topic, but I can't possibly be the first person who wants to improve how sources work on WikiTree. Any suggestions on steps I can take to avoid re-inventing the wheel?

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I'm certain you're not the only person who'd love this feature, and your G2G question here with the tags you've got on it are perfect for getting this topic to the attention of those who will be able to add it to the WikiTree improvement list. Similarly tagged and worded questions appear down under these comments--and when I look through them now, I don't see that anyone has yet expressed what you've said as clearly and thoroughly as you've said it. Yet I'm certain you're not alone, and I like your suggestions.

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I got tripped up at the very first step of creating a free-space profile: what the heck should it be called? Therefore, as a temporary measure, here are some G2G discussions I found relevant to the subject of sourcing on WikiTree:

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/568052/why-does-wikitree-make-sources-so-difficult-to-add
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/528315/biography-section-include-duplicate-material-already-heading
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/220823/should-think-before-expanding-usage-space-profiles-sources?show=221212#c221212
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/211696/why-isnt-there-an-easier-way-to-add-sources?show=211781#a211781
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/7881/is-wysiwyg-possible-with-wikitree?show=7881#q7881
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/283971/could-ref-ref-sources-in-the-bio-be-a-different-colour?show=284634#c284634
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/321091/where-to-put-the-complete-source?show=321102#c321102
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/340347/separating-biography-and-sources-sections?show=340374#a340374
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/5872/turning-off-visible-coding-in-the-biography-section?show=6012#a6012

Answer 3

I asked back in 2016 if the sources could be in colour:

www.wikitree.com/g2g/283971/could-ref-ref-sources-in-the-bio-be-a-different-colour?

Chris Whitten's answer was:

Ros, I like this idea, but it is something we looked at doing in the past and it turned out to be complex. We'd likely end up causing trouble for various editors.

Comments

I do mine like this:

Fact line of bio
<ref>
source
</ref>

so it's a lot easier to see where bio ends and source begins.

Answer 4

I will admit that I do not use much of the inline sourcing reference tags, not so much that I don't understand them, but that it takes too long to put them in place. I end up listing my sources below the Biography section into the Source section primrarily in Chronological order. Maybe not the most ideal method of doing it, but it is clean, understandable, and can be investigated easily by backtracking the sources to see the original data.

I will admit that this involves a great deal of copy and paste activities, which could be a bit easier to do, and it does not make it easy to understand which data components are tied to which source, but I am often trying to find a way to fit hours of research into minutes and make it effective. I do get where you're coming from.

Comments

It's not really more labour intensive than listing underneath though, if you are already adding a line of bio about the content of the record, which is the ideal way of doing things. All it is is a button click then paste.

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I suppose I'm not practiced well enough to do it efficiently - it's comfortable for me to review my sources, in chronological order, to see if there are gaps, areas where I should look further, etc. and when the inline puts them in the listing it just drops them in order of when they were entered. So it frustrates me when I go back and wonder what sources have been found and have to scan up and down and back up the list to try to reassemble them to figure out which Census or birth/death records I should be trying to find. Just my personal issue, I suppose. If I became more practiced at inline, I could perhaps adapt to viewing them that way to seek the gaps based on which facts appear to be weakly or perhaps unsupported by facts, but I haven't made the jump since attempting to do so quite awhile back and finding it very awkward to use.

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Ooh... just saw this example above. Allows me to keep the chronological order and use inline. I'll have to consider this approach.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Carlow-72

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I agree Scott, that's an amazing and organized way to do it, simple and straightforward (and no spanning!).  Deborah Pate deserves a lot of credit!  Great idea!  Shall we call it the Pate method?

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I'm with Scott on this. Sure, I know how to do inline references. For the most part I find them annoying. I'm not trying to write a perfectly formatted academic article.

Like Scott, I do record sources, in chronological order (as much as possible) in the Sources section. It is faster to do it that way, compared to inline sources. Mainly because I'm focused on Sourcing, and Connecting, and not so much on Biography writing.

For the most part, I find it relatively easy for me to see where the various data fields are derived from (and mapped to) the various sources. But I know that not everybody can do this quickly either.

Answer 5

I open up a word document.  At the top it has

== Biography ==

Then I insert here things that I want to point out.  If I want to specify a source I can allude to one of the sources listed like:  In the 1930 US Census it said:  

== Sources ==

<references />

Then under here I list my sources.  

I keep adding sources to this word document and then I just have to copy and paste them into the pertinent profiles.  

I make sure to put a * in front of each new source.

Hope that helps.  

Answer 6

The answer (which you're probably not going to like) is that WikiTree is a wiki. Wikis are supposed to be easier for people to deal with than actually learning to code HTML. (I learned HTML first, and have been working in raw HTML for so long that I actually find wikis harder to deal with than straight HTML would be, but that's because what most people mean by "easy to use" is actually "what I already know". Probably normal people would look at straight HTML that I code without even thinking about it with horror, and scream, "Aaaaah! Give me back my wiki!")

But quite aside from discussions about which is easier to learn or use, both wikis and HTML require putting in the time to learn how they work. (Personally, I have fairly standard wording that I use when I'm adding a birth, marriage, census, or death record, so I just copy it in and then edit it with the data for the record I'm actually looking it.)

But the point, as Philip pointed out, is that WikiTree uses a language. (In this case, mediawiki, which is the form of wiki that Wikipedia uses, and probably the most widely used wiki there is. [There are other wikis with wildly varying syntaces. That's one of the things that drove me nuts when I first started working with wikis: no two are exactly alike. At least HTML has standards to follow.]) It may not be intuitive, but those who have taken the trouble to learn it know how it works, and if WikiTree were to make unilateral changes in the wiki we use here, then people who know how to edit Wikipedia would not be able to transfer their knowledge of wikimedia here, nor would WikiTreers be able to transfer their knowledge of how WikiTree works to Wikipedia. (Actually, WikiTreers would have to throw out what we've already learned about wikimedia, because we'd be using something different: "bride of wikimedia" or "son of wikimedia" or some kind of sequel-ish name like that.)

More critically, the changes that you're asking for (boxes to fill in) aren't the find of thing that any wiki can do, because the point of a wiki is that people don't have to drop into the "source code" to see what's going on. There are lots of HTML editors which look WYSIWYG on the surface, but then have a "Source" button that lets you see and fix things when the WYSIWYG editor messes up the HTML [which isn't uncommon], or when you want to do something more complicated than the WYSIWYG editor can handle [which also isn't uncommon]. So far, wiki advocates have claimed that wikis are simple enough that people don't need that kind of functionality.

Personally, I disagree. I think it's long past time that somebody put out a wiki editor which would let people use a WYSIWYG editor (like we have here in G2G), including things like filling in boxes for adding sources, and then have the editor generate the actual wiki text (or "source code"). As long as there's a button which lets those who have bothered to learn mediawiki syntax drop down to that level and work in it, then in my opinion, the site would still count as a wiki, but it would be a lot easier for people to learn to use.

P.S. If you want Chris to see and comment on this thread, I recommend that you add "Tech" as a tag. I don't know what other tags he follows, but I know he follows that one.

Comments

Greg, thank you for your detailed thoughts. I've added the recommended tag.

I don't think my source boxes and your wiki are mutually exclusive things. The underlying code could still be exactly what it is now, except with some links added between data fields and source references, and more importantly, arranged such that only people who actually want to edit code need ever do so. Everyone else could add sources easily and intuitively, without worrying about misplaced punctuation marks.

As a fairly close analogy, I use a GEDCOM editor (GenealogyJ) for my offline family tree. This directly edits the text file that is a GEDCOM, but presents it in a human-readable form that I find easy and intuitive to work with. I know just enough about HTML and coding in general to know that this approach could apply equally well to a wiki: they're all basically just text files at heart.

(Maybe I'll try searching G2G for "wysiwyg". I'm still convinced that somebody must have asked my question already.)

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I have a few thoughts on your statement that "WikiTree is a wiki", and the implied continuation that "it behaves like, looks like, or is edited like a wiki". I think that any interface that allows collaborative editing can be a wiki interface. Wikipedia itself offers a visual editor; you can switch to the source code editor if you want to or need to, but you can add text and source citations without it.

In other words: just 'cause it's a wiki doesn't mean it needs to be a _clunky_ wiki.

I understand that the manpower and resources are severly limited for modifying how WikiTree works, but couldn't that be changed? There are all sorts of open-source projects out there, and I know there are programmers who also do genealogy. And besides, I'm not talking about re-inventing the wheel here: this comment box that I happen to be typing in right now is almost exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about adding to WikiTree's edit tab. The code already exists. It just needs to be applied.

Answer 7

Hi, J --

If you're using Chrome, one of our members created an extension that allows you to merge information in from an external source. This extension also creates a citation that is pasted into the Sources section of a bio. It's my go-to method for adding information from sites like FamilySearch, Find-a-Grave, and a variety of others ... see this help page: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:WikiTree_X

To give you a little more background as well ...

WikiTree is built on an older version of Mediawiki. It has been highly customized to create an interface that works with a shared family tree. Rewriting the interface would be a major undertaking.

I'm not sure how much you know about how our site was created, but it is built to remain free forever. This means that we don't have a technical "staff" that can take on projects of this scope. Basically, we have one programmer who handles improvements and bug fixes. We already keep him pretty darn busy. ;-) 

WikiTree is definitely a different way to work. I hope you'll find it easier to use as you go along. Keep asking questions in G2G, and you'll find a multitude of helpful hints from our more experienced members. I'm always amazed at the creative ways people have of streamlining their work!

Oh, and have you had a chance to work through any of the Tutorial pages?? https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:New_Member_How-To

Comments

Are there any plans for making this plug-in available for other browsers?

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Not to my knowledge, J. The developer who created it did so just to help out fellow WikiTreers. He's currently had to step away from this type of thing in order to attend to real life matters.

Answer 8

When I'm working on a tree where several sources can be applied to multiple people, I create a free space page, put the sources and images on it then just use the link to the free space in the sources section on profiles.

Easy  peasy

Like this

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Brad_Johnson

All the sources for multiple family members of

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Johnson-65283

all tied together 7 generations

Answer 9

Deborah Pate's idea was so good, I ran with it, customized it for myself, and then discovered it's really great for cleaning up Ancestry GEDCOM imported profiles!  So I've created a G2G thread and a web page explaining it and explaining how to use it to clean up an Ancestry import.

• Easier and cleaner sourcing with 'References First' method (plus easier Ancestry import cleanup)
• Cleaning up Ancestry GEDCOM imports with the 'References First' method

Make sure you check the examples, in normal and Edit mode, just to see what a difference this method makes!  For me, it really does make sourcing much easier, and much more organized, with much more readable bio's in Edit mode.