The Ancestry.com Wiki

Ancestry.com announced the Beta version of its Ancestry.com Wiki. Quoting from the press release:

The Ancestry.com Wiki is a new section on Ancestry.com available to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. It offers detailed and useful information about family history records, research, and places pulled from The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy and Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources.

As explained by Ancestry.com, a wiki is a collaborative website that can be edited by anyone who registers. From the recent changes page, it is evident that the editing process has already begun. Because the Wiki already includes the contents of both useful reference books, it has a substantial amount of useful material already. However, consistent with its newness, the Wiki is lacking in both links and references to any other outside material. For example, a link to Arizona's Online Genealogy Birth and Death Certificates was broken, although Google was able to suggest the site. But because the site is a wiki, I was able to fix the broken link in about a minute.

I really like wiki sites, I think they are the essence of what is good and useful about the Web. I applaud Ancestry.com for adding a major new wiki site to our genealogy community.