FamilySearch Research Wiki Getting an Overhaul

The Family History Department at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been working on major changes to their online genealogy services at FamilySearch.org. One part of the effort has been the creation of a research wiki. Everything is under development and changes are frequent.

Jim Greene posted a recent update on the FamilySearch Labs blog. He wrote:

"Thanks to you we have had great success on the Research Wiki. Many people have joined our community. In an effort to keep you up to date, we thought we’d post some of our wiki plans to the blog.

"Today (Dec 3, 2007) we posted on our site our plans for the next steps. The FamilySearch Research Wiki is intended to become a general resource available to everyone who comes to FamilySearch.org. In order to scale to that size we need to switch to a different underlying system for the wiki. We are making the switch this week. We will leave the current site and its content live, but no one will be able to edit it or add content. At the same time, we will bring the new software up in a test mode, inviting an increasingly larger group of people until we are sure it will serve everyone. At that point we will close down the current Research Wiki site and switch to the new one which will be open to everyone. Keep watching the FamilySearch Labs blog to keep up to date on our progress."

You can read much more about this project at http://labs.familysearch.org/blog.

Comments

[Margaret]

What I really wish they would get busy on providing is access to all the collaborative data that they advertize as being available via the family history centers. Some may have access, but ours does not. Not much good to be cooperating with all sorts of new groups and NARA if we can't get to the material.

[Jay]

I'm not affiliated with Family Search, but I have spent many hours at family history centers taking advantage of the completly free resources made available to the public, and I have also volunteered many hours of my time on familysearchindexing.org trying to "give back" in a very small way by indexing a few of those millions of microfilmed documents at the main LDS family history library so the public can access them.

I'd like to remind Margaret that all of this is done on a volunteer basis and the more volunteers there are the faster all that content will become available. Margaret, rather than complaining about the slow speed, I'd invite you to be part of the solution by registering on familysearchindexing.org and volunteering some of your time to help with this monumental work. And in the process, it might do well to cultivate a little more of an attitude of gratitude for the many hours other volunteers have already contributed to the effort.