Familypedia
Familypedia is a free-to-use public wiki on family history and genealogy. It is a collaborative effort by amateur genealogists and family historians, with over 61,000 unique people having their own pages among over 215,000 articles. For over 33,000 of those individuals, there is a corresponding subpage displaying an ancestry chart, automatically updated, and for most there is a similarly updated descendant table. Over 7,000 pages tabulate, for specific localities or larger areas such as counties, individuals who had life events such as birth or marriage at the locality. There are over 320,000 other pages, including over 13,000 surname categories. It is the largest English-language semantic wiki concentrating on genealogy, but it is not restricted to English.
 Logo of Familypedia | |
Screenshot The screenshot of Familypedia | |
| Type of business | Nonprofit |
|---|---|
Type of site | Genealogy Database |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Headquarters | Miami, Florida |
| Owner | Fandom, Inc. |
| Created by | IFaqeer (founder) and over 1,900 other registered contributors and many unregistered contributors |
| URL | familypedia |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional (required only for certain tasks such as editing protected pages or uploading files) |
| Launched | December 30, 2004 |
| Current status | Active |
Content license | CC-BY-SA |
Hosting and licensing
Familypedia is hosted by Fandom, a wiki farm. Contributions are covered by the CC-BY-SA license.
Software
The software used includes Semantic MediaWiki, which enables the connection of people to events, places, and other people, as well as Semantic Forms, for ease of data entry, and Semantic Drilldown to let users construct their own data queries.
Notability and sources
Familypedia does not have any notability requirements for the people listed, but it does have many prominent families (including the royals of France, Germany and the UK) and people (such as the ancestry of every president of the United States) as well as trivia 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 invites every contributor of new articles to list sources.
Reception
Ed West, writing in the British newspaper The Telegraph, described the site as a "brilliant idea", with the potential to become "enormously important" if it reached the critical mass required.[1] In November 2010, popular genealogy blogger Dick Eastman gave Familypedia a largely favorable 17-paragraph review.[2]
References
- West, Ed (April 4, 2010). "Alfred the Great must be turning in his grave at Obama's foreign policy". The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited. p. 1. Retrieved 19 June 2010.
- "Familypedia: the Biggest Genealogy Site You Probably Never Heard Of - Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter". Blog.eogn.com. 2010-11-11. Archived from the original on 2011-09-29. Retrieved 2011-09-12.