Fremantle
· genealogy · WikiTree · wikis ·
WikiTree's Past, Present, and Future, by Chris Whitten (WikiTree's founder), published yesterday:
The long-awaited redesign of our website is many months behind schedule. It's now my goal to have it ready for testing on a staging server at the end of January. We'll then be working with a small group of testers and Apps community members. I am sorry to say the changes will put a big burden on their shoulders regarding browser extension features.
The release of the redesign is a big deal and will cause many disruptions in the community. I expect that the tech team will spend most of the first and second quarters of 2025 working out the kinks. It'll be a rough time in the community.
It'll be an interesting process to watch.
WikiTree is one of those sites from the early days of "everything a wiki" (before c.2008), with various fancy features being built on top of MediaWiki. Genealogy is a field obsessed with structured data, and to some extent burdened with the software that's resulted from that obsession since the 1980s (looking at you, Gedcom!). A wiki's joy is in it's structural simplicity, but we nerds do like to complicate things and so often it feels like a wiki is just not the right foundation for some sorts of site. It doesn't enforce anything, it doesn't give you simple ways to structure and query anything.
I don't actually think that's true for genealogy though — squishing the genealogical data structures into a wiki might complicate things (and result in quite weird UI choices) but actually I think the issue is not in wikis not supporting the structures, but more that the structures are just too limited anyway for a great deal of genealogical research. The fundamental structure of genealogy is a simple directed graph.
Not that any of that really relates to the WikiTree re-design! I'm quite sure it's not likely to be tackling things like having more than two parents.