Quick WikiTree Trickery

Building profiles as part of my process

If you are a regular reader, you may have seen that I include links to WikiTree profiles for ancestors or cousins mentioned in my essays. I do this because I have found that people have difficulty viewing my Ancestry files without an Ancestry account.¹ I also want other researchers to benefit from my work, and to be able to edit and fix any mistakes I might have made.

Researching on Ancestry and then building a profile on WikiTree also helps me generate essays and stories for my newsletter - sometimes in ways that aren’t obvious. Here are some basic tips for working with WikiTree.

Your Research

If you want to dive into WikiTree, think of it as an outgrowth of the research you’re doing anyway, using whatever tools and services you prefer. Once you’ve found enough information about a particular person to put into a biography, you can write the narrative - and you will need to include source citations.

How good your WikiTree contributions are depends entirely on how good your sources are - so as you’re deciding what needs to go into a person’s biography, focus on the evidence. If you have unsourced stories or “tales told by grandma,” that’s fine to include - just make sure it is clear in the narrative or source citations which parts of the biography are supported by evidence, and which are memories.

If you’re new to WikiTree, you will probably start building profiles with yourself. You can (and probably should) make your profile private - getting your account set up is a whole other topic, but you should be contacted by a WikiTree mentor who can help you get started if you have any questions. My profile, Callin-50, is set just one level below “Public” - so anyone can view the biography I have written and my family tree (living people on my tree who have higher privacy settings are obscured).

You can use your own profile to experiment and learn the tricks of editing a wiki page - since you marked yourself as “Private” no one else will be able to see it if you make mistakes. Once you’re comfortable with editing, you can build profiles for your relatives or, hopefully, connect to existing profiles for your relatives.

If your parents are living, you’ll want to discuss with them how they would like their profiles to be handled; my mom signed up so she could control hers, but dad (who doesn’t like dealing with computer technology) left his for me and mom to manage. Be mindful of putting information about living people on any internet platform.

A New Profile

Hopefully, you will find existing profiles made by other contributors and you can connect your tree to theirs. But you may need to create new profiles, first.

Usually, you will start the new profile process from an existing profile:

Click on “father?” “mother?” “spouse?” or “children?” links to add their profiles.

If you need to start a new person from scratch, you can do that from the “Add” pulldown menu at the top/right of the page:

Click “New Person” to create a free-standing, unconnected profile.

A Solid Biography

When you create a new profile, WikiTree will have you fill out a Basic Data form before sending you to the edit page for the Biography section. The Biography is where you will have a chance to do your free-form writing.

WikiTree’s basic data entry form.

As I said, you should have already done your research, and you should have sources to support the facts you include in the Biography. WikiTree doesn’t care how you format your source citations - MLA, AMA, etc. - as long as you put them between the “ref” tags (the <ref> at the beginning of your citation and the </ref> at the end).

Some people are most comfortable composing in the WikiTree form; I am one of those people who likes to compose my text in Notepad first, then paste it into WikiTree. Here is an example of one of my ancestor profiles, my “code” on the right, and the “live” page on the left. I drew a yellow circle around the text of my first source citation, then drew lines to show how it renders on the final page:

Side-by-side view of a Biography page and the wiki markup code.

If you skim through that example, you can also see how I used links to existing profiles for spouses and children, and how some of the formatting works (bold, italics, and the like). The goal of source citations is that a reader should be able to find your source for themselves - if you can link to the source in your citation, that is great, but even just giving the reader the name of the database you used can be enough.

You will probably be surprised by how many existing profiles are already there. And don’t feel bad if you discover after creating a new profile that somebody already made one - that’s what the Merge function is for. (Though, again, they have helpful posts for that on WikiTree.)

Conclusion

WikiTree.com boasts on its front page that “Our community is now 1,107,821 members strong” and they take a bit of criticism for that claim in places like Reddit’s r/Genealogy thread, where you can find skeptical arguments that say the number is inflated or that (crucially) there is no way to know how many of those users are active. The lion’s share of criticism comes from people who have had a negative interaction with another WikiTree user or who found “incorrect information” on the site and decided to leave rather than try to fix it.

I usually find criticism of user-editable content sites (including my time on Wikipedia) to consist of about 5% valid criticism of the tool or site itself, and about 95% criticism of other people which, frankly, is a different problem the site shouldn’t be held accountable for.

But if you are doing your research and building thorough, well-documented profiles, you’re going a long way to address the 5% of valid criticism. Just be open to outside editors, make sure your sources support your claims, and don’t be shy about asking questions.

If you’re already comfortable with building personal profiles, maybe look at what you can do with Free Space pages:

1. I am frequently reminded that anyone with a free Ancestry account should be able to see my public trees, but then I have to remind the reminding people that not everyone wants to create a whole account just to look at my research. Even that free account is a barrier and a limitation to freely sharing my work.