The FamilySearch.org Research Wiki went online in 2007. Almost immediately, I began contributing content as part of the Wiki Support Team. For approximately, the next eight years or so, I worked with an ad hoc committee of contributors who mainly served at the Salt Lake City Family History Library (Now the FamilySearch Library). I continued to be actively involved until about 2019 when editing the wiki was taken internally by FamilySearch. At that time, it appeared that the Research Wiki had mostly been abandoned. Since then, my contributions have been sporadic because of my other responsibilities. On July 1, 2024, FamilySearch took the Wiki entirely internally and notified me that I could no longer add content or edit existing entries directly. Thus ended my direct involvement with the Research Wiki after 17 years. Oh, I might mention that after the Research Wiki appeared to have been abandoned, it revived somewhat a few years ago and began to be useful again.
Here is the content of one of the notices I received about the Research Wiki.
We are standardizing specific types of pages on the Wiki to improve the Wiki experience for all users including those new to our website. The following is a list of pages affected and details and standardization regarding the information on that page.
Until further notice, all new pages in the Wiki must be coordinated with Wiki Administration.
I had one rude contact from someone at FamilySearch when I questioned the complete shutdown.
Wikis can be open-edit, moderated or closed and only available by specific invitation. You might ask, how I know that the wiki has been abandoned and how do I know if it is working again? Until they purge me from the website, I am still registered and the wiki shows 500 of my most recent contributions. However, each of the pages that I worked on has a complete record of all the changes, so older pages will show my earlier contributions back to 2007. These histories are extremely valuable as a way to see when certain changes were made to each article (page). In addition, you can follow almost any of the pages of Research Wiki and be notified by email of any subsequent changes. This allows the pages to be monitored for content and accuracy. I know when the Research Wiki was abandoned because I follow 1,124 pages and when I stop getting notified of changes, I know the Research Wiki is dormant. By the way, since July 1, 2024, it has been mostly dormant but I see there have been 250 changes in the last 12 days, however, it appears that all the changes have been to broken links or adding links with a few content updates.
I can go into a long, really long, discussion about the structure, the content, and the purpose of the Research Wiki, but I don't have the time to write about it right now.
By the way, because most of the other regular contributors to the Research Wiki were older than I was at the time, I assume they have almost all died off or retired.
Now the issues.
From the very first, we were trying to establish standardized page designs for all the different categories. During all the early development of the Wiki, I frequently raised the issue of having the pages moderated with FamilySearch. I kept pointing out that an unmoderated wiki would get out of control quickly. FamilySearch never even wanted to discuss the issue. Today, despite this effort to "standardize specific pages of the Wiki" the effort will fail if there is no consistent moderation. FamilySearch has never allocated the resources necessary to maintain 100,000+ pages of the wiki with internal staff and Church Service Missionaries. I still watch a few hundred pages, and I can see that hardly any editing is going on. You could take me off of the wiki but what would that accomplish. The coordination and moderation of the Wiki does not need to be done in a "high handed" manner. Presently, you are discouraging the very people who have the knowledge to contribute accurate and consistently standardized content. For example, the English County Derbyshire page https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Derbyshire%2C_England_Genealogy is out of date, and I can only assume all the other 47 English counties are also out of date. Some or most of the pages are also out of date. The longer editing is on hold, more pages will be out of date. Here is an example of what has gone on in the last 100 years for English Counties. Cornwall, England has 213 civil parishes, with the exception of the unpopulated Wolf Rock, which is the only unparished area in the county. These parishes are governed by a variety of local councils, including: 168 parish councils, 28 town councils, A city council, A community council, and 15 parish meetings. This parish structure began changing more than 100 years ago and presently, all of the county boundaries have changed. Another example, Herefordshire. Administratively Herefordshire was merged with Worcestershire in 1974 to form the county of Hereford and Worcester. This administrative unit survived only until 1988, when the Unitary Authority of Herefordshire was formed, with much the same borders as the traditional county.
Ok, so what is my point? The Research Wiki is a wiki and maintenance requires extensive cooperation and contribution. I cannot understand why FamilySearch etc. are so certain that they all know what will "improve the wiki experience for all" when the information is becoming dated as I write this. We have a wonderful resource contributed by hundreds (if not thousands) of people. Keeping the Research Wiki a useful tool involves much more than dumbing it down to include those who are new to the website. We now have AI to help. Maybe the needs of the new users is better addressed by a section of the wiki devoted to new users. There are a lot of possible improvements that could be made but closing out experienced users is not one of them.
Last question, how many of the people in FamilySearch's group can read and edit HTML? I can.
I note contributions to wikis from all over the world to county US wikis. The ones I've checked have serious errors, possibly from misunderstanding/misinterpreting things. I've grown tired of trying to correct them.
ReplyDeleteIt was a sad day when I found out I could no longer contribute to the research wiki. Changes that I could have made in less than a minute to fix broken links or improve the information just aren’t being made. I hardly ever visit the sites anymore. It’s unfortunate that they won’t allow folks with intimate knowledge of the pages they are interested in to make them better for everyone. I wholly support your post that would help the hard-working folks of FamilySearch by allowing us back in to help them.
ReplyDelete"I had one rude contact from someone at FamilySearch when I questioned the complete shutdown."
ReplyDeleteNo, never. They never bridle at being criticised in the slightest. They always react with reasonableness and provide good responses. Yeah right.
They hate criticism of any kind, regardless of whether it's constructive and useful or just whining by someone who is utterly clueless and cannot be bothered to do some basic learning. Look at the situation of the BYU projects of "Professor Joe" et al that have added thousands of junk entries to FSFT, have been strongly criticised over the years (very justifiably so) and have simply been let continue.
They didn't like that BYU project garbage being called vandalism of FSFT, which it is, and I suspect that's one of the main things that caused them to ban me from the community site. This is the same. They don't like being called out for their dreadful decisions, of which this wiki one definitely is. Your post on the community site will essentially be ignored. This blog post will essentially be ignored. You may even end up persona non grata at Familysearch for daring to criticise their decisions.