Question of the Week: What's on your wishlist for 2021 WikiTree improvements? [closed]

Question

What's on your wishlist for 2021 WikiTree improvements?

Since this is the Question of the Week and not actual proposals, let's try to let people share their wishlist items without getting into too much discussion over them.

Thank you! :) 

Comments

This helps make my point that thing are not obvious or easy to find. I had no idea there was such a template.

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Thanks Ian,

Took me a little self-educating to figure out how to do it but it works really well!

 - Dave

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Agreed. Good suggestion.

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This isn't a wish list item but rather a thank you to who ever added the "ID" "Link" and "URL" copy buttons to the profiles. Can't tell you how much easier that has made my documentations. Thank you!

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A bit late sorry and quite a minor request, but it would be good to have a workaround to allow badges to be moved up and down on an iPad webkit browser in some way (not necessarily as smoothly as on a computer browser). See here.

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What have y'all done to the Wiki Genealogy Feed Emails I receive?  All of the information is in small print and looks like a horrible run on sentence.  Can we go back to the way it was???

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Have a way to check for words within profiles, such as indirect family names that are mentioned but may not have a profile yet.  Example:  Sibling name that has no profile but is mentioned within other profiles.

Also have an option to include the profile number (cator-80 for example) in trees, etc.

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Donna, if you click on the "Search"-button in the "Find" -menu on the right top, the page opens to look for profiles. If you scroll down to the bottom, there is a field: "Search for any text". When you fill that field, the text you search for is looked for in any position of the profile, no matter if name field, data, location or in the biography text.

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Knowing where all the Challenges are.  It would be nice if there was one location in addition to the others.  I might want to be in more than one challenge at same time regarding to a profile.

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@Dave, age at death is now listed next to the death date. Thanks for the suggestion!

Answer 1

When entering in a new person, I would really love better checks for duplicate profiles. I would especially love for birth and death locations to be taken into account. My ancestor born in Illinois is a very different person that the person who spent her whole live in Australia. I would also like a phoenetic check, especially for last names. (i.e. Szymszewski and Shimsheski are actually the same last name. Yay Polish phoenetics!)

Answer 2

Instead of the way marriage is currently shown (husband of / wife of), I would love it if it showed instead as "Married (name) on (date) at (place)."

This would allow divorced persons to not show as still married to the ex spouse.  It would also allow for those who are not male-female married.

Example  :

Comments

Melanie, do you use Chrome?  I've just added this to my Chrome extension.  

I hope that helps.

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Nope, I don't use chrome.

As nice as it is that you did that, it does not change how everyone else viewing profiles sees the marriage display.

Personally — I still will not show my father's marriage to my mother while it tells the world that he IS her husband, she his wife.  They were separated far longer than they were ever married, and divorced also longer than their marriage lasted.  He was not her husband for more than 60 years, and it just seems so wrong that now — after all those decades — they are suddenly married again.  Likewise my own. My ex is not my husband.  Has not been for 40 years.  Yet Wikitree's profile view would have him show as such.

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I made a comment above and your proposed layout highlights my point. Why does the name Paul appear in the wives' details at all? It surely adds nothing to our knowledge of the individuals that married Fred Paul.

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Hi Derek, I see your point, but I think I would disagree, because many women (especially historically) are known by their married name for much longer than by their birth name, and when we research them, most of their records will be found under their married name. In a case such as Zsa Zsa Gábor, who the whole world knew by that name no matter who her husband happened to be at the time, then, yes, it makes much more sense to list to them by that name, but for the majority, I think the system in place is a good one, i.e. FirstName (LastNameAtBirth) CurrentLastName.  In terms of the politics of it, I'm happy for people to be able to choose their last name, whether it be their parent's/parents' last name, their spouse's last name, or a last name that they choose to create for themselves, but for practical, genealogical purposes, I think WikiTree has it right.

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I am not suggesting we get rid of the married names altogether, list them but keep them as subordinate. I find it very difficult when I am going through a list of my named ancestors (e.g. Allen) only to find a third of them are listed elsewhere under a name to which they are not genetically related. My suggestion would be that in most things, including the Watchlist, the individual is listed under their birth name with married name(s) in brackets rather than the other way round as it is today. Second marriages can often be of very short duration and listing women under that name is confusing and unhelpful but doing it this way, all possible names can be picked up on. I won't say they always get it right, far from it, but Ancestry trees seem to cede primacy to the birth name which is sensible in my book.

From the point of view of women still alive I can kind of see your point as you may know them as Mrs. Smith or whatever but for long deceased ancestors, whose only connection to you is genetic, evidenced by their name, listing under their last married identity can be quite a nuisance.

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@ Derek -- way too many married women were buried as "wife of", or "relict of" the husband.  Nobody ever seemed to know (or care) what their maiden name was, so it wasn't recorded on gravestones, only the married last name. 

The only name we have for too many is that of the husband.

 Newspaper birth notices barely ever mentioned the wife, even though she was the one who'd just had the baby.  If she was mentioned, it was as the wife of her husband : example using the Doctor's only sister: "BIRTHS PAUL.—On the 25th of June, at Wickham Terrace, Brisbane, the wife of Mr. Judge Paul, of a daughter, stillborn." (She wasn't even given a birth, or death, registration, because, legally (in the day) she never lived, so was never born.)

In cultures elsewhere, however, where women kept their own last names their entire lives, the husband's name is secondary. 

I have no problem with the way Ian's app displays the names, but I would rather have the native interface change marriage displays because I don't use chrome, nor do I add apps.

Answer 3

I would like to be able to see which profiles for a given surname do not have a category listing for the respective surname project, and similarly which descendants of a profile do not have one.

Comments

Chris, this app I'm working on isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it may help. Take a look and see what you think. 

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Ian.  That's a useful app I think but as you say not what I was looking for.  I am not sure about the layout you have chosen. For me (Win10 PC and Chrome) the boxes could be smaller and in a more logical order.  Thanks.

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Chris, thanks for the feedback.  

You're right, many of the boxes could be a lot smaller, but I chose to lay them out in a grid pattern because it looked cleaner (you can see a non-grid pattern on an Android phone). Being in a grid, the boxes resize to the size of the largest one on each row, so yes, some of them will look strangely large and empty if there is nothing to show in terms of categories and templates used.

About the order, the relatives are in order of birth date (descending), which also groups them by generation. The ancestors are ordered by generation, with couples being together. Bearing in mind that it's basically just a list, without trying to make a tree-like pattern (which would make the page really long or wide), what do you think would be a more logical order?

(It might help me if you could reply on the other page.)

Thanks.

Oh... and by the way, I'm hoping to add a descendants option in the near future, so that may also help you.

Answer 4

It would be helpful while editing a profile if the 'Save Changes' button was inactive (gray) until a change is actually made.  If I'm working on several Wikitree pages at the same time, I often can't remember if I've saved my latest changes.

Comments

When you click "Save changes" and you didn't change anything, there already appears a dialogue in the right top corner saying "You didn't do any changes."

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Yes, but a nice easy visual would be easier than having to repeatedly check whether I've made changes.

Answer 5

A delete button on category pages that then adds the Delete Category code and asks you to select from a list the reason why.  Similarly a button to automatically rename the category and all associated profiles with a new name you enter

Answer 6

1. Something to make inserting references easier, a bit like Wikipedia has with its 'visual editor' mode. You click "Cite" and a dialogue box pops up with various options.

This could make it easier for everyone and especially people who are put off by "editing code." If you're not comfortable doing this sort of thing it can look a bit intimidating.

2. To help with connecting profiles, I would love a magic widget that would do an automatic search, eg. you create a profile for a John Gibson born in Keyingham, Yorkshire; the widget has a look for other Gibson profiles from Keyingham or nearby and suggests possible connections for you to investigate.

3. When adding a child who has a mother but not a father, WikiTree should automatically pre-populate the biography text with "Joe Bloggs was the son of Mary Bloggs." At the moment you only get the links if both parents are linked to.

4. (I've suggested this before) A connection that is not marriage between people who are not married, eg. long-term partners who may have children together. At the moment the two partners can only be connected if they have a child together.

Comments

Katie, for the Cite request, have you select the C or Cite your sources icons at the end of the icon list above the biography text when you are in Edit mode. That will put the beginning and ending ref statements in, so all you have to do is 'paste' a citation that you copied from somewhere else. 

There is also an Ancestry Citation Builder App.

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Yes, I already know about the Cite icon here that but I find it quicker just to type the <ref> tags anyway! 

The Wikipedia tool is much more extensive and includes options to build a proper citation depending on whether the source is a book or website etc. It's worth having a go with it – you don't need to have an account to edit and you don't have to save your changes.

Answer 7

It would be helpful for me if the "Brother of" or "Sister of" line on a profile was changed to "Sibllings," and included the current person in the proper order with the other siblings, but not as an active link.  That would (1) make it clearer how many children were in the family, so I wouldn't continually be wondering why someone was missing, (2) show where the person belongs in the birth order of his or her siblings, and (3) make it easier to click through the siblings without the names jumping around.

Comments

Very much agreed. Just put the current sibling's name in bold text within the list. It would make the sibling list so much easier to navigate, where you may have multiple siblings who died young, with the same names.

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William, do you use Chrome?  My Chrome extension does that (puts the subject of the profile in the list of siblings).  I agree that's the way it should be, but until it is, here's a workaround.  

Answer 8

Put a space for christening/baptism and cemetery/burial on profile. The cemetery space should have a distinct space for the cemetery name that you can search on. I'm a dreamer!

Comments

And for the third time in this thread: Here is the answer of the Team considering Baptism/Burial fields

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whoa.

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You asked for my dream and that was my dream list.

Answer 9

I would like to be notified when a profile on my watchlist becomes orphaned or could we have an option in the orphaned profiles (drop down list) for watchlist only.

Answer 10

See https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1162838/accidentally-checked-no-spouse-now-cant-undo-that

There should be a method to unset the "Unmarried" flag, if it has been set by mistake.

It is set when you click the "X has no spouse" button in the "Add spouse" screen.

The problem is that there's no way to unset the flag from a user perspective.

Logically, the button text should change from "X has no spouse" to "X may have a spouse" in the "Add spouse" screen when the "unmarried" flag is set, and have the action to unset the flag.

Comments

The unmarried flag is now set (or unset) with a checkbox on the edit page.

Answer 11

My wish as improvement on WikiTree is about the Example Profiles of the Week. I'd like the respective projects to be notified for *next week's Wednesday* and not only *next Wednesday*. Here is why:

At one point, I had a mail from a project's group on a Monday evening at 10pm in my inbox: "I just saw that one of our profiles is chosen as EPOW for Wednesday (aka in 36 hours). I could use some help to pimp it a bit." Fortunately several of our project members saw that mail still that evening, so we as a group of 5 or 6 people could find documents to further improve the profile. But - it was pure stress. Now, if we had had a notification for *next week's Wednesday* we would have had 7 to 10 days (depending on when the notification gets to the profile manager) to take care of that profile and the related profiles with it. Then it wouldn't be that stressful to look for additional records, to improve the biography, to do this bit and that bit. The way it was with that mail is actually - I say it the way I feel it - it's unacceptable. We are all - bar two handful of people who get money by working for the organization - *volunteers*. In Germany the worker's unions fight for the right to be unreachable after a certain time, but we get notified at 10pm, that in 36 hours our profile is to be presented. Implicit is the request to improve the profile to the best it can be at that moment. We did it, we managed to improve the profiles, but WikiTree should be joy and pleasure and not stress.

Answer 12

I guess this is likely to get lost in the huge number of replies but my big problem is married women being listed under their married name or last married name (check out Zsa Zsa Gabor!). It makes far more sense to list women by their name at birth surely?

Am I the only person that thinks this way?

Comments

The "Current Last Name" and "Other Last Names" fields aren't just for married names. It's also for when people changed their last names, for example, changing the spelling from Nielsen to Nelson. They may have been born with one surname but most of the records they are found in are for their current surname.

Answer 13

That all communication on times uses UTC/GMT, next to the local time. Using ISO standards will greatly help making WikiTree a global project, not only a US based website.

Answer 14

Following issue is becoming a real pain for my project work.  Can we please do something about the search so that if you search with just a death date it does not give you people born after it!  I know you can select to avoid those with no dates at all.

Comments

Do you have an example of this happening? On the search page it should show the people who died within the range you select on the page (exact, year, +/- 2, 12, or 30 years).

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Just enter any surname and a death year with a range and it will give people born after that, if you select "Include matches without dates?"

Answer 15

Coming in late to this thread, and I'm not sure if it is feasible.  Could tags be subdivided.  I have the name "Earl" in my followed tags. In my feed, I get all the details of profiles changed who have Earl as a name, or Earl as a title.  I dread to think what my feed would look like if "England" was one of my family names.  Could we perhaps have 'England - Name' and 'England - Place' or perhaps colour code how they show up?

Answer 16

I wish for a messages feed if at all possible.

In this separate feed I would like to see all the messages I post on profiles and replies to my posts. At the moment when a profile is not managed by me but in a part of the tree I care about, my posts get lost in my contributions and are very difficult to follow up on.

Answer 17

Dear Colleagues, I'm very late to the party so I'm very sorry. The major change I would like to see is to have drop down display boxes that are large enough to display the full length of the text to stop the selection of incorrect places etc. We spend/waste a lot of time correcting England, United Kingdom, etc.

I agree with the post that there are duplicates in the places drop down list and several entries with overlapping dates. I don't know where the database comes from or who manages it but I would suggest it requires a project to audit and clean it.

Best wishes, Simon

Comments

The database is coming from FamilySearch, and I already say for a long time that especially for locations in Germany before 1806, it is utterly useless.

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If you have a FamilySearch account you can submit corrections to a place here: https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/

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Jamie, 

so according to you I am to submit to a site which I use for sources but for nothing else this list for my ancestor's town:

to 1806 Edingen, Amt Greifenstein, Fürstentum Solms-Braunfels, Heiliges Römisches Reich

from 1806 Edingen, Greifenstein, Herzogtum Nassau

from 1816: Edingen, Braunfels, Koblenz, Rheinprovinz, Königreich Preußen, Deutscher Bund

from 1822: Edingen, Wetzlar, Koblenz, Rheinprovinz, Königreich Preußen, Deutscher Bund

from 1866: Edingen, Wetzlar, Koblenz, Rheinprovinz, Königreich Preußen, Norddeutscher Bund

from 1871: Edingen, Wetzlar, Koblenz, Rheinprovinz, Königreich Preußen, Deutsches Reich

from 1918: Edingen, Wetzlar, Koblenz, Rheinprovinz, Freistaat Preußen, Deutsches Reich

from 1932: Edingen, Wetzlar, Wiesbaden, Provinz Hessen-Nassau, Freistaat Preußen, Deutsches Reich

from 1944: Edingen, Wetzlar, Provinz Nassau, Freistaat Preußen, Deutsches Reich

from 1945: Edingen, Wetzlar, Wiesbaden, Groß-Hessen, Amerikanische Besatzungszone

from 1949: Edingen, Wetzlar, Wiesbaden, Hessen, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

from 1968: Edingen, Wetzlar, Darmstadt, Hessen, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

from 1977: Edingen, Sinn, Lahn-Dill-Kreis, Darmstadt, Hessen, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

from 1981: Edingen, Sinn, Lahn-Dill-Kreis, Gießen, Hessen, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

 

And this only ONE town, which is fortunately listed in German Wikipedia. In the meanwhile I became an expert in using German Wikipedia to find out to which territory a place belonged to at a certain point of time, because I worked with so many locations I never heard of. 

It would be far better to have a dropdown menu that better reflects the historical developments than to rely on a borrowed list which isn't correct. 

Yes, we don't have to use the list, but in case you type something in the field that isn't in the list (and you don't want to delete the list though, because it  can give good hints (!) but nothing more), the suggestions of the list nearly always pop over the next fields you want to fill. And that can be very annoying, especially when these lists are stubborn and appear seemingly a dozen times. 

Answer 18

I wish Merge Proposal reasons would post on both the profile being merged as well as the one proposed for merging into. I understand why the lower numbered one gets the comment, as the pm needs all the facts. But often the  the newer duplicate's creator isn't the person proposing the merge, and that pm also needs to learn what they missed when creating the duplicate, so why not display the merge proposal on that profile as well?

A second wish regarding merges: I wish the profile review boxes could be viewable from the 'compare profiles' screen when initiating a merge. They're there-- but only a corner is visible.

Comments

I thought that was a good idea nearly 5 years ago:

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/231758/can-merge-comments-be-added-to-both-profiles-comments-feed .

My, how time flies!

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Lol, I know, right. Just squeakin' that wheel.

Answer 19

A "Clear Primary Proof" option between "Confident" and "Confirmed with DNA" for parent/child relationships. Current choices:

mother is non-biological
mother is uncertain
mother is confident
mother is confirmed with DNA

With a fifth option:
mother is non-biological
mother is uncertain
mother is confident
mother is supported by clear primary proof
mother is confirmed with DNA

"proven" in an RF trail would look better than "supported", but I understand the reticence of labeling anything as "proven".

Answer 20

I'd like to be able to label personal projects that could then be  listed on my Nav Home Page for quick reference. For example if I want to have a project related to my home town of Blankville I could ad the "Blankville" label to profiles that have some connection. This would make it so much easier to keep track of various profiles. I think this could also encourage some folks to add more profiles than they might otherwise. It could also draw additional traffic to WikiTree through searches for places and things and groups.