Insights Into Our Future And Our Past

Folks who hear about the new family history research advice wiki at wiki.familysearch.org want to know two things. First, What is a wiki? And second, How will the wiki deliver more of the research advice I need?

What is a wiki?

Wiki. A short, sweet, strange word whose form matches its meaning — a Web site you can edit without being a programmer. A site where average people like you and me can write things to help other people. A place where we can share information and even collaborate on articles that make us each look smarter than we are alone. A paradise for people who seek information. A wiki community can deliver and revise more research advice information for more users in more languages.

Challenges in the traditional approach

To see the potential of FamilySearch Wiki, it helps to explore the challenges an organization faces in offering free research advice worldwide when they try to do it the traditional way. Prior to the creation of the wiki, five barriers challenged our organization’s potential to provide genealogical research advice worldwide. The first is that publishing research advice for every part of the world is an enormous task. Our publications – paper and digital – covered only about half the world’s countries. Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, and Asia were not fully covered. Somehow, we needed to find a way to cover more of the world.

The second challenge we faced in offering research advice worldwide is that the number and variety of our writers’ assignments prevented us from revising our content rapidly. Many of our publications – including paper research outlines and Research Guidance — were five to ten years old. In a world where new genealogical records are released online every day, we needed a way to revise content faster.

In order to provide research advice for more areas and revise that content faster, we would need more authors. As big as the FamilySearch organization is, our mandate sometimes seemed overwhelming. We simply didn’t have enough employees to do the job. And given budget constraints, we needed to find a new source of authors outside our employee pool.

FamilySearch had a fourth challenge related to the second: the process of adding content to FamilySearch.org was relatively slow and complex. Research Guidance was essentially a static project that had not been enhanced since 2001. The process of updating our research outlines was also slow. Approvals, meetings, stylistic guidance, editing reviews, rewrites, budgeted funds, and programmer time were all needed to change anything on our Web site. If we wanted our content to remain relevant, we needed a way to speed up the writing and publication process from months to minutes.

Finally, we had a challenge in languages. Although there is no shortage of language experts at FamilySearch, we generally published research advice only in English. So if we published a research outline for a Latin American country, we did it in English. This made sense when most of our customer base was English speakers, but that was changing rapidly. We needed to offer content in many more languages.

Possible solution: a community model

Faced with these five challenges, FamilySearch leaders began to ask some questions. In review, we needed a research advice solution that would allow us to cover more of the world, revise content faster, engage more authors, quicken the publication process, and provide content in more languages. Looking around, we noticed that content-rich Web sites were achieving these aims with a “Web 2.0” approach – one in which corporations teamed with volunteer communities to write content.

Many eyeballs make any bug shallow

Perhaps the best example of a content-rich Web 2.0 site is WikiPedia. It is obviously popular – number nine on the Internet – but studies also show that its information rivals the accuracy of Encyclopedia Britannica and the journal Nature. But writers are only human. Mistakes do happen, so it’s also good to know that when people post erroneous information on Wikipedia, it tends to be corrected quickly. The idea behind the success of Web 2.0 sites is best described by a mantra of the volunteer community that developed Linux: “Many eyeballs make any bug shallow.” The idea turns the traditional method of programming and content publishing on its head: Instead of employing just a select few professionals to develop a product, open the development process to a wider group including the volunteer community. If you attract enough volunteers, they will feed off each other to innovate faster, notice and correct errors faster, and thus quicken the pace at which the product is improved. This theory has been proven with open-source software like Linux and Firefox, as well as Web 2.0 content sites like Wikipedia.

Milestones: the current state of the wiki

So FamilySearch aims to leverage the power of the worldwide genealogical community to revise research advice faster, cover more of the world, engage more writers, quicken the publication process, and deliver content in more languages. These are big challenges, so it will take time. Even WikiPedia took years to grow into the powerhouse it is today. Although the wiki will take time to arrive at its projected destination, it is on the right track and has reached some important milestones:

1. It has a simple authoring tool that allows anyone to contribute content.
2. It can scale to accommodate any size of contributor community.
3. It allows users to update content in minutes rather than in months.
4. Its research advice is already more current than that on FamilySearch.org.
5. It now has content regarding parts of the world that FamilySearch was never able to cover before, such as Latin America, India, and China.
6. Volunteer contributors are significantly enriching content on many topics, such as American Indian research.
7. The wiki is drawing highly knowledgeable writers from outside of FamilySearch’s employee pool – people like David Samuelson, a freelance professional genealogist, and Blaine Bake, creator of the Western States Marriage Index.

“Now I know where I can publish”

Probably the biggest victory of FamilySearch Wiki is the way it empowers writers to quickly publish helpful content for others. Jimmy Parker, retired manager of the Family History Library, probably said it best. When he heard about FamilySearch Wiki, he said “This is great. I have three file cabinets full of information I’ve always wanted to publish. Now I know where I can do it.” Professionals and volunteers find that publishing research advice on the wiki is fast and easy. In five minutes, you can add information that other genealogists can use immediately. Contributors get instant gratification, and users get the free genealogical advice they need. This focus on rapid, community-based authoring is why FamilySearch Wiki is already starting to deliver research advice faster, in more languages, to more of the world.