Familypedia

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Familypedia

Logo of Familypedia
Web address familypedia.wikia.com
Commercial? No
Type of site Genealogy Database
Registration Optional (required only for certain tasks such as editing protected pages or uploading files)
Available language(s) Multilingual
Owner Wikia
Launched December 30, 2004 (2004-12-30)
Current status Active

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 30,000 unique people having their own pages among 145,933 articles (increasing at over 2,000 articles per month in 2012). For over 19,000 of those individuals, there is a corresponding subpage displaying an ancestry chart, automatically updated, and for most there is a similary updated descendant table. There are over 200,000 other pages, including over 9,900 surname categories. It is the largest English-language semantic wiki concentrating on genealogy, but it is not restricted to English.

Hosting and licensing

Familypedia is hosted by Wikia, 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

  1. 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. 
  2. "Familypedia: the Biggest Genealogy Site You Probably Never Heard Of - Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter". Blog.eogn.com. 2010-11-11. Retrieved 2011-09-12. 

External links

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