Familypedia

Familypedia is a free-to-use public wiki on family history and genealogy. It is hosted by Wikia, a wiki farm. Familypedia is a collaborative effort by amateur genealogists and family historians, with over 15,000 unique people having their own pages among 84,000 articles (increasing at over 2,000 articles per month in some months of 2010), with over 100,000 other pages. It is the largest English-language semantic wiki concentrating on genealogy but is not restricted to English.

Licensing and software

Contributions are covered by the CC-BY-SA license. The software used includes Semantic MediaWiki, which enables the connection of people to events and places, and to other people (e.g., inbreeding), as well as Semantic Forms, for ease of data entry.

Notability and sources

Familypedia does not have any notability requirements for the people listed, but it does have many prominent families (e.g., the royals of France, Germany and the UK) and people (e.g., some ancestry of every president of the USA) as well as unexpected facts (such as the relationship between Brooke Shields and Charlemagne). The family relationships are usually more detailed than on corresponding Wikipedia pages. The data input form asks every contributor of new articles to list sources. Familypedia's pages AbOUT historical figures commonly appear in the top ten listings of a Google search, some in the top three.

Reviews

Ed West, writing in the British newspaper The Telegraph, has said, "It’s a brilliant idea, and if it reaches critical mass it will become enormously important, being a free database of humanity’s entire family tree. Not only will Familypedia be of interest to family tree nerds and journalists, it may also bring humanity together a little bit, reminding us of John Ball’s words: “When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?”"

In their book The Online Genealogy Handbook Brad Schepp and Debra Schepp wrote, "Familypedia, the genealogy wiki, is a place where you can write articles about your family and link these articles to others that discuss where and when an ancestor once lived"

On Remembrance Day in November 2010, popular genealogy blogger [...] Eastman gave Familypedia a largely favorable 17-paragraph review.

External links

• Familypedia
• Charlemagne's family tree on Familypedia