API: adding and locations

+3 votes
209 views

I couldn't find anything about this, so maybe someone here can answer my questions about:

I am building an application for my family tree and have a few other people who are using the platform I am creating.

I plan to build (some?) integration with WikiTree and was wondering how far could I go:

API: location search
Is there an API option available (or buildable) where I could use the awesome location search functionality?
This would help me greatly in 'standardizing' the location structure. I now have the basics operational using leaflet.js/OpenStreetMap but that one obviously fails with "old locations"

API: add people
I now (co)manage several databases varying from a few hundred records to a few thousand and one containing almost 20.000 records. It would be a tremendous undertaking to manually add them to WikiTree. I could use GEDCOM, but searching for people and linking them seems to be nicely documented at GitHub and possible, adding them could be the perfect next step?

AD: naturally these functions should only be available after authentication, to prevent abuse

in WikiTree Tech by Eesger Toering G2G Crew (840 points)

Hi Eesger. WikiTree does not have its own location databases, but uses FamilySearch's. See

https://www.familysearch.org/developers/docs/api/resources

The WikiTree API is read-only: see this link. I don't think it is likely that creating profiles through the API will ever happen.

If you developed a suitable browser extension, you could populate the fields in the Add Person form. This could enable partial automation of creation of profiles using information from your own database.

Ahhh yes FamilySearch! I took a quick look at it.. looks like that's going to take some time figuring that out..

If you by any chance have a POC or some more info that would help me getting this operational, I'dd greatly appreciate it
Eesger, you can ask in the WikiTree Apps group -- there are lots of knowledgeable people in there: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wikitreeapps

1 Answer

+2 votes

There's no way to automate adding people to WikiTree in the sense of adding 100 or 1000 at a time.  Any way you do it will be one at a time.  This could be via the GEDCompare process, which I've never actually used - search G2G for people's experiences of the system or ask someone who's used it for advice. 

I don't know if this will help, but for my extension, WikiTree BEE, I put data into a JavaScript object and send it to the Add Person page as a parameter in the URL. Then I have code that looks for this in the URL to parse the object and fill the data fields.  The way I'm doing it is scraping record pages on other sites (like Ancestry), creating the object with the data and sending it in a form with other parameters that are accepted by the Add Person page (https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Special:EditFamily ): who (father, mother, etc. of), u (WikiTree ID number of an existing profile person (note that the ID number is different from the WikiTree ID which is Surname-123)), and person (the object). I only do this from record pages, because there's always a source/citation with the data. With your database, you could probably (if you wanted to go this way) do the same thing - create an object, complete with your citations, and send it into the Add Person page. Your fields can be automatically filled this way, but you'll still have to check the suggested matches for duplicates as you do when you're creating any new profile, but it's faster than typing everything. 

Thinking out loud... Another way could be to make an API for yourself on your server so that on any profile, you could search your database for relatives of that person along with their relationship to them.  Then you could click a button to go to the Add Person page with the URL parameters I mentioned before, and then fill the fields by calling your data in via an API call to your server rather than putting it in the URL, which can limit the length and sometimes have encoding/decoding problems. This might be over-complicating things, though.

by Ian Beacall G2G6 Pilot (392k points)

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