Help:Research Before Editing

Categories: Styles and Standards | Courtesy and Community Rules

Modern Profiles

As a general rule, you should do genealogy research before creating and editing WikiTree profiles.

However, you might want to enter a family tree that was given to you back to your grandparents or even great-grandparents before doing your own research and carefully adding additional sources. This is not likely to cause problems for other community members as long as you are clear about the source of your information.

It's not a good idea to create more than a handful of profiles based on uncertain or second-hand sources without searching for better sources on the profiles you have already created.

Deeper Ancestry

For deeper and more distant ancestry, it is very important that you do serious genealogy research before doing serious editing. Otherwise you're likely to accidentally create duplicates or cause other problems for other members who are working on our collaborative family tree.

Pre-1700 Profiles

Our community has stricter rules on people born before 1700, and even more rules on profiles of people born before 1500. See Help:Pre-1700_Profiles.

This page was last modified 13:46, 7 July 2023. This page has been accessed 3,398 times.