Question of the Week: What WikiTree improvements are on your holiday wishlist? [closed]

Question

As we are excited to head into our 11th (!) year, we'd love to know what WikiTree improvements are on your holiday wishlist? If you could improve one thing about WikiTree, what would it be?

Comments

Patty, 

Three excellent points but first why did I get an email notification that this (your) comment had been added after my comment by Miller Rinehimer?

That name doesn't even appear on this page as far as I can tell. I would post the email notice here but G2G doesn't allow us to cut and paste inside this comment box. Why not is another good question. 

A minor "bug" I realize but I will forward my email notice to you or anyone at WlkiTree who is interested in having the site function  correctly.

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Unless someone is an only child and a childless orphan, the only profile on this site that is 100% theirs is - theirs.  If you have siblings they have just as much to say about your parents as you do.  By gen 4 you have 16 profiles, but they may have hundreds of great grandchildren.

I think there needs to be more protection for hard work put in (and probably an ability to revert if it is not there).

As to the 'like it or leave it' debate, I'm not sure that is how it was meant, but seeing as it was heard that way it could have been said better.

We all feel pride of ownership in our work but these are all shared profiles.  A manager should have more ownership over the profiles they own and no matter their stature, the experts maybe need to tread more lightly on the work of newer members.

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Jeff,

An excellent comment. I couldn't agree more. Thanks

Skip

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I personally don't have a problem with first single name fields as I feel this helps prevent people putting incorrect or middle names in without being noticed.

My problem is with Profiles being set up with out some checkable source, as with a GEDCOM import that proves to wrong.

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I'm with Melanie in spirit:  "wife of" and "husband of" seem a bit precious in this modern climate.  Back in the day, County Clerks often substituted the words "Consort of" in place of "husband or wife of."  I once thought this quaint and old-fashioned, but now I see it quite differently.  Sometimes the older generations were a little wiser about these things.  I guess they spent more time with their nosees to the grindstone instead of the smartphone.  Anyway, "Consort of" satisfied, as best it could, Melanie's issue (I believe).  Most dictionaries define "consort" as husband, wife, or companion, whether legal or not, and, as Oxford puts it, someone who someone habitually associates with, married or not.  I think its high time we bring that word back.

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There is a profound difference between "adding details" and blundering in and making major changes that may or may not be accurate. So far no one has butchered one of my profiles. So far the only changes made have been to add sources and correct typos. As a member of less than two years I already have hundreds of profiles, more senior members obviously have thousands. Over time highly granular details that explain why a conclusion was made that Person X was the grandson of Person Y can get misplaced. No matter how well sourced something is there can still be minor details that tie everything together that can't easily be explained without writing a book. It would be nice to have some level of confidence that some well meaning member won't make wholesale changes to my painstaking work without my knowledge.

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Searching for Related Profiles: If would be AWESOME if I could input a particular profile of an individual that is NOT related to me and have it search automatically for all descendants of that individual that are RELATED TO ME, listed by name, dates, and parents (sortable would be even better!).  

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Watchlist Suggestions only appear for the profiles where I am profile manager. Please could the suggestions be extended to the profiles where I am on the trusted list as well. At present I have to open each trusted list profile from my Watchlist, then go to the menu for the profile, and click on suggestions to see if there might be something wrong.

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I would like to see an easy access list of family ID numbers in my group so I wouldn't have to go back and forth . I can't remember all those numbers

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Take Find a Grave  ,differences of profile, out of suggestions.

Answer 1

I would like to see a field added for honours and titles which would be visible in the profile index. Although this is primarily a European issue, American profiles could use it to show e.g. 35th President of the US and of course African, Arabian and Far Eastern profiles could use the field to denote Emirs, Chiefs, Sultans, Emperors etc etc. Currently some people put titles in the surname field which is incorrect.

Answer 2

Great question - thanks for asking and I hope you're able to implement some of these great ideas.

Two main areas:

1. WikiTreeX

Fantastic tool - developing this further would be excellent "bang for the buck". For instance, allowing you to add an entire family from a census record rather than one by one - ancestry lets you do it and technically it can't be that hard. Also expanding the reach to include sites like FreeCen, FreeReg, FreeBMD (disclosure: I'm a trustee of UKFreeGen) and fixing bugs.

2. Preparing for growth

WikiTree with 30,000,000 profiles is only two years away. At that size, certain fundamental website designs that worked fine up to now will start to be impractical. To take two, the profile naming convention using only surname and "close matches" assessed before considering locations.

I'd love to see a proactive and strategic approach taken to this - one that involved the community as well as the owners.

Comments

#2: excellent suggestion!

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Endorse both suggestions.  

1) WikiTreeX is a handy tool - this would be a nice improvement. 

2) And looking forward to future challenges with size is wise. The example of matches that consider geography as well as birth date is an apt solution for a larger tree.    

Answer 3

Nothing at all. Every aspect of WikiTree is perfect in every way.

:: Note; this is intended to be the most ingratiating response posted. Happy Holidays!!!

Comments

And you only got one up vote! What’s that all about? 

Answer 4

When uploading images, allow the manager to select the image that will appear in the family tree. I would like to be able to arrange the order in which the images are viewed in case it is different from the order in which the images were loaded onto the site.

Comments

I presume you’re aware of it, but if not, a variation of this option already exists that might meet your need. If you go to the edit page for your preferred photo, you’ll note on the right hand side, “Set as Primary Photo.” Click to box; press the button; and it is now thee photo that shows for family tree.

It has been a while since I’ve uploaded a new photo, but memory suggests that this option also exists while you’re uploading.

Best wishes

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Hello Jim, Good suggestion. Thank you for your help. You are right about the box to click. For some reason I had trouble with that. I think I know what went wrong at my end. Sorry for the delay in my reply.  Best, Marion

Answer 5

Less than 1,000th of 1% of Wikitree genealogists have attained the status of G2G Astronaut.  Of all of us, there are only 8 Astronauts.  That is really a huge milestone when you think about it.  

I really think that there should be an Astronaut badge.  It is a huge "good job" to those who stuck with it and it is a great incentive for people to maintain a long-term commitment to G2G.

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/667003/recommendation-lets-create-an-astronaut-badge

Comments

This is news to me. Where do you find out how many points you have?

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If you post a question or an answer, your points appear next to your name.  You'll notice in my answer you can see my points, but in your and my comments, the points are displayed.  In this case, just click on your name and it will take you to your "recent Wikitree activity" and that page shows your points, your up/down votes given/received, how many questions and answers you've posted, and a feed of your latest activity.

Additionally, if you click the "members" tag near the top of this page, you'll get a list of ALL Wikitreers by their point rank - you'll notice the number of members with > 1,000,000 points who rank as Astronaut.

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It’s been mentioned before, and you are still right. There needs to be a badge for the astronauts!

Answer 6

A decent handling of patronyms. Probably a dedicated field for patronym, which should be indexed like a surname. A lot of cultures around the world have been using patronyms rather than surnames or a combination of patronym + cognomen or toponym or a real surname or whatewer. There's really no obvious place for a patronym in the WT naming scheme. It could be entered in the "Middle name" field if that was searchable and not hidden behind a single initial.

Comments

A few more thoughts on the matter. I'm quite comfortable with using the LNAB field for the patronym; that's what has been decided by all the Scandianvian Projects here on WikiTree. The problem is that there are a few extremely common patronyms, like Andersen, Olsen, Hansdatter. So to separate one Ole Olsen from the other, some other identifier has been common. In Norway, the most common practice is to append the "Farm name", like "Ole Olsen Berg". The farm name is not really part of the name; if Ole moved to the farm Dal, he would be called "Ole Olsen Dal" in the next parish register entry. Many lived for generations on the same farm, and modern family historians tend to think of the Farm name as a kind of surrogate surname.

Now, there are two ways to handle the farm name, and both have their pros and cons. One may enter it as the "Current last name", and our Ole will show up in family Trees as Ole (Olsen) Berg, which is not so bad. But on his profile page he will show up as "Ole Berg formerly Olsen" which is positively wrong. He never gave up his patronym and at his burial he will probably be found as "Ole Olsen, 70 years old, Berg".

The other way is to enter the farm name in "Other last names", which is what I personally prefer. But then he will only be "Ole Olsen" everywhere but on his profile page, and the Berg farm name won't even be indexed.

There is a third way, which should be called an anti-pattern: Entering his LNAB as "Olsen Berg". We actually see that on thousands of old GEDCOM imports, because most genealogy programs only have one surname field. It looks nice both in the profile and in family trees, but neither Olsen nor Berg will turn up in searches or as possible matches.

My preferred solution would be to have the "Other last names" indexed and appended to first and last name everywhere. Hopefully, we might also get a report to weed out the "Olsen Bergs".

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What he said!!!  Hear Hear!

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I also endorse Leif's preferred solution to have the "Other last names" indexed and appended to first and last name everywhere. 

Answer 7

I wish that all date entries could allow a date range to be entered.  Often I have known that an event (birth, marriage, death) happened between two dates.  Using the 'before' or 'after' options does not cut it, because it leaves one or the other end of the range unspecified, and by implication, unknown.  This is inaccurate, since I know the date range.  Nor does the 'about' option suffice, as it implies that the limits are unknown on both ends.
 

Comments

I agree.  It is especially important to integrate this with the new profile entry procedure search for potential matches.  I frequently find I have created a duplicate profile because the difference between my estimated date and the date of the matching profile apparently exceeds the search algorithm being used to find potential matches among existing profiles.  It is probably important to retain the presently unquantified about/uncertain button for existing profiles, but I suggest adding buttons for about/uncertain plus or minus categories like the 2 years, 12 years, or 30 years presently available in the search screen.

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I strongly agree.

All dates are date ranges, whether implicit or explicit.  The date '1909' is the date range of '1909-01-01 to 1909-12-31'.  The date '1920s' is the date range of '1920-01-01 to 1929-12-31'.  The date '1909-03-24' is the date range of '1909-03-24 00:00 to 1909-03-24 23:59''.  Every date is a range from minimum to maximum of the units of the next higher precision.

Other date expressions are also implicitly date ranges, although they often require arbitrary rules for common usage.  For example, the date 'about 1909' could be understood as the range of '1907 to 1911', with an arbitrarily decided rule of plus/minus 2 years.  The date 'about Jan 1909' could be expressed as the range of '1908-12-01 to 1909-02-29', using a plus/minus of 1 month.  It would be useful then to determine common usage rules for all date qualifiers, such as 'about', 'before', 'after', etc.  I'd also like to see other implicit date expressions, such as "early 18th century" (rule: 1800 to 1850), "the 1600's" (rule: 1600 to 1699), "mid 19th century" (rule: 1830 to 1870), etc.

Since we're already using some implicit date ranges, it's only a little more development to add explicit ranges, such as '1909 to 1913'.

Then a single date comparison algorithm could be created for ALL date matching, that first converts each date expression into a date range, in the highest precision unit currently in use in the system, then compares the ranges for overlap.  The comparison is easy - is high of range1 less than low of range2 .or. is low of range1 greater than high of range2 .then. no_match .else. match.

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Yes. Even my FTM program allows for that.

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Another excellent idea.

Answer 8

I think Wikitree is great, but I do have a few improvements such as......

* Videos - It would be nice to put some family videos like a birthday party or wedding video!

* Photos - It would be awesome if we could put them in the order that we want. I know it can be put in order by date etc, but it doesn't seem to stay.

* Cause of Death - I think this should be a standard on all of Wikitree profiles as a blank to fill on on a profile. I feel cause of death should be known and made a blank box upon making new profiles to be filled in.

* Keeper of the Family Records Badge - There should be a badge that could be placed on the profiles of the person that has made the family tree on Wikitree. All of their hard work should be known to all. Perhaps the badge could be a white scroll with a red wax seal and the badge should be called Keeper of the family Records.

* Badge make up month - Have a month/week etc.....where we can work to getting a badge that has passed example.....if you didn't get your badge for July, then even though it's a different month, you can choose what old badge you want to work for. Perhaps this could even be an option to make up for old badges, after you get your current badge for the month.

Just a few ideas. I hope these help! Thank You!

Comments

#4: nice idea, but that may be only my pride speaking. I am the go-to guy on both side ps of my close family.

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All great ideas and very useful. Will help make things a better streamlined experience! :)

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These are great suggestions. I don't know what the administrators of WikiTree do for storage space, but they must have lots of it for all the profiles. It may be a challenge to include video but it would be a nice touch. I also suggested that we need to be able to specify the order of our photos, and I was told that this feature is in the works and some day we may be able to do it. I like the idea of a "Keeper of the Family Records Badge" for the same reason that Pip likes it. I call this esteemed position the "De Facto Family Historian, Genealogist, and Exploder of Family Myths."

Answer 9

In the form for entering a new profile, the birth location should be immediately after the birth date, just as it is in the edit form.  Likewise with the death date and location.  Often you know the date and location of the event together, and it is a nuisance to enter the date, and then have to scroll down to enter the location.

Answer 10

Consistency in the way stickers work, particularly country of origin and migration stickers. England sticker allows one to specify county which displays the county flag, yet Ireland and Scotland don’t have this option. Canada only displays the Maple Leaf adopted in 1964. This whole set of stickers needs to be worked on together.

Answer 11

Hi, I would like to be able to "bookmark" a particular Wikitree page to allow me to get quick access to frequently-referenced pages or resources. The bookmarks could be stored in a "My Bookmarks" link under the "My Wikitree" menu.

Also, is there a way to automatically remove a profile manager if the PM doesn't respond to a merge or trusted profile list request if one or more other conditions also exist? For example, if the profile was created more than six months ago and has no sources added, this PM would be automatically removed after a merge/trusted list request has gone unanswered for 7 days?

Comments

Oooo, I like this idea!

Answer 12

When someone who has no relationship to me or my family but is adding info to Wiki from other sites, and  locks profiles but has bad info, yet  wont allow others  to edit. This is a issue that I  have come across. Some people do take info from other sites sites and copy them onto to here.... for what reason, who knows? In my case it was all taken from a tree I called   "investigation tree" and it was very clearly labeled as such.  I also had a another one that was called "facts" that wasnt public. Since that time, the "investigation" tree has been deleted because I now have all documents, dates  and a lot of help. The person who copied everything, has my great aunt, and  her siblings and so on with a lot of bad info, also has children born to my great granny that do not belong to her,  but will not allow me to edit. I have tried. I have even tried to make my own and bypass the bad one but they get rejected.  I would love a way to override this if someone like myself can show proof we are legit family and have the documents to back up.  Even if it meant to could have a email address we could just send the proof to with files. 

Sorry I thought I posted this under all the others, not under the  wedding thread 

Comments

Hello Cheryl,  I understand your frustration. In database technology, we have something called "record-level locking" which means that if you have opened a record, such as a profile, for editing, no one can access it until you are done editing it and you have finished by clicking on the "save" button. The way things are here, we evidently don't have record-level locking. My husband and I found out about it by accident. I was editing a profile the same time he was. No one had a lock on the record and I think his changes did not end up in the record. With record-level locking, only one person at a time can have edit access to the record (profile) to complete the open transaction. The lock stays on until the "save" button releases the record for anyone else to edit who is authorized. It is not possible to have a lock on a record by only reading the record. Many can read at once. Hope this helps.

Answer 13

I would love the ability to find a matched on the compare pop up and easily be able to add the missing people they have to my tree (person). Something like a Match To in reverse back to my person. Very often I find well done listings and/or better information than I have and it would be great to more easily bring those missing people/info in to where I am missing the same on my end. I hope that makes sense.

Comments

Billy, it's not clear to me if you are talking about other WikiTree profiles (to bring back info to your 'own' profiles), or are you talking about importing info from external trees outside of WikiTree.

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I’m really talking about bringing other data that matches my primary person when doing compares. For example, I may have the husband and children but may not have the wife’s parents. Or I may have one husband but not other. Also many of the better trees I’d like to bring over have additional source material or photos that would be nice to update on my matched person.

I hope that makes more sense.

Answer 14

A way to expand the "edit text" box to the entire horizontal space of the screen or, alternatively, to eliminate the sourcing and formatting tips in the right hand column.

Comments

Maybe you know how to format in a Wiki, but there are others to whom this column is a help.

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Sure, but if there was a way to minimize it or opt out would be a help to me and possibly others.

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This can be done in https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:Preferences click Editing link and enter 40 lines and 120 columns. I have those settings and they kind of work.

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Thanks Aleš, it is working. Tried it out myself

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Excellent. Thanks Aleš . I discovered that not only can I increase the size of the edit block, but I can enable section editing!  For those ancestors worthy of an extensive write-up, this is a wonderful option! 

Answer 15

I'd like to see the Wikitree ID displayed on more pages and near the name of the person to whom it relates. Thank you.

Comments

This! Yes! I’m constantly trying to select that from the URL or copy it from a link in the page (copy the WT ID not the link).

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Agreed!

Answer 16

Autocomplete on EVERY Place/Location field. Please.

Comments

I greatly prefer my browser's auto-completion to WikiTree's, which feels rather like a hijacking. I never get a decent suggestion from the built-in auto-completion.

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The big issue here is getting the correct historical name, as some places world wide have had many variations. That’s why I’d like a modern name field or radio button for when finding the correct historic name is just too hard.

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Only if the US county name and the word “County” is included!!!

Answer 17

I would like to see:

1. More than 20 followed tags.  I have many more names in my tree.

2. A Badge for 500 edits in a month.

3. Sources--a way to keep people from using Ancestry trees as sources.  Even with the "supposed links" they are not visible.

Answer 18

Prohibit merge requests when one profile assigns parents or spouses and the other does not. In such a situation, at least one of the profiles is in error or incomplete, and a merge will potentially create an incorrect profile.

Rather, place the two profiles being in conflict in a separate 'merge pending conflict resolution' category, with appropriate notifications, and perhaps addition of a Wikitree volunteer mediator to assist with resolution. If the profiles fall under a project, then the project can mediate.

As we know, correcting incorrect profiles can be an endless process of frustration here when a profile manager (or project manager!) insists on maintaining unsourced data in data fields. This is why I object to the default merge, or  'merge them anyway and let God sort it out' principle in force here.

There is a 'Brick Wall' category here that perhaps could be a pseudo project, enabling assignment of PPP status to profiles with this category, to prevent a merge from assigning bogus people in ancestral data fields.

Comments

Brickwall category: yes!

Answer 19

Currently I am off the internet more than on so am missing a lot of WikiTree due to family illness and death.  So I am glad I saw this in the WikiTree Feed to answer it.  

1.  If you are given a Wonderful WikiTreer award you are not notified.  So unless you are checking this forum and querying for your name you may not know to thank someone for being so nice as to recognize your participation.  So I would like to see that anyone whose name is mentioned gets an email notification.  If more than one person has the same name on WikiTree I would error on the side of notifying more.  The blurb could read something like:  Someone with your name has been recognized in G2G.  If this is you, Congratulations!   And have the link to the post in the email.  

2.  Above several posts have mentioned a birth and christening / baptism option as a field.  I also think this is a great idea because often the only record that exists is christening / baptism and since they can be the same day as the birth the before and after option does not work well.  Also the suggestions seem to ignore before and after designations which lead to false errors.  Thirdly on this topic, some locations did not have resident clergy in prior centuries so christening / baptism may happen years later.  Most genealogical software has this is a standard field

3.  In the same spirit as #2 is having death and burial fields for much the same reasons but with burial in some areas a burial could be deferred until the ground thawed enough to do one so it could be off by months.  

4.  Ability in the Search function to limit any text to your watchlist items and to search only the bio.  Because so many alternate versions of what is included in fields is now being dumped into bio a better way of searching the bio would help.  Perhaps where you search for dates a toggle could exist that allows search of fields, search of bio, or both?

5.  Maybe it is just me but categories leave me pretty befuddled.  I lookup table that allows a user to pick the one they want and it inserts the coding would be of extreme help I think to many who would like to use categories but find it too complex.  

6.  Locations.  The idea of using "what they used" sounds good but the farther you go back in time the less realistic as often places had multiple names and did not have standardized spelling.  I would love to see something more like Google Earth Maps where you can put in a modern name and get prior names.  Once again if lookup tables are used and those stream into an ISO location name which is built on GPS that never changes a lot of the problems we have with location names evaporate.  And it helps when you see there can be more than one place with the same name in a given country and those countries as we know them did not always exist but most folks are not time travelers with geographic understanding in every century.  So if I put in Muntzhall it would show that is the archaic name for modern day Meisenthall in what is now Moselle, Lorraine, France.  But at one time it belonged to Switzerland!  Most users are not historians, cartographers, or up on naming conventions across centuries.  It is important to know what something was called in your document but even more important to know what it is called today so you can find it on a map.   See:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_6709

7.  Ability to query on your Watchlist to get to a profile quicker.  So if I put in a surname all of those show more quickly than drilling through the list and this is really needed for married women who are currently sorted by their husband's names.   

Thanks for asking!  Those are the ones I can think of right away.

Comments

Sorry to hear that you are dealing with so much illness and death, Laura.

Did you notice that there is a new search box on the top of WikiTree pages that searches your watchlist for a particular name? This feature won't address all of your wishes related to better watchlist searching, but I believe it will help.

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Thank you Ellen, I did not see that box until you mentioned it.  I have not been on the computer much with everything going on.  This should help a lot!

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I agree that categories need to be simplified and made user-friendly. Otherwise it's just not worth the time spent trying to figure them out.

Answer 20

Simplify the whole thing. It is way too complicated. I am technology challenged, as in old, and some of this is difficult.

Comments

Well, I definitely agree with that. I'm young and working in IT, so I'm used to work with complex things, but at this site, I feel overwhelmed.