Ancestry.com Family History Wiki First Updates

In case you haven’t heard, Ancestry.com has a wiki. (You can read the original announcement here.) We launched in beta in April at the conference of the National Genealogical Society (NGS) and since then, there’s been a lot going on.

Before getting into that, however, let me introduce myself. My name is Matthew Rayback and I am a senior editor for Ancestry.com and am the overseer of the wiki. I wrote the silly little Bad Baby Names: The Worst True Names Parents Saddled Their Kids With, and You Can Too! , but more importantly,  I was one of the editors who worked on the third edition of The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy, which is one of the foundational sources of content for the wiki. I’m very excited about this wiki and I hope we’ll all have a lot of fun making it great together.

Now on to the good stuff.

Since NGS, we’ve been working hard and making improvements, both to functionality and to content. Check out these highlights:

• You can now register to use the wiki. Note that if you are already an Ancestry.com member, then you are already registered: if you are logged into your Ancestry.com account, you’re logged into the wiki as well. Make sure you’re logged in before you make any changes or add any content.
• We have created county pages for every county in the United States. These pages use information found in the extensive tables in Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources and are now “stub” articles, waiting to be fleshed out.  User “Tinauofa01″ started this ball rolling by adding some great stuff to the page for Pima County, AZ. For more information about what we’re looking for on county pages, read our suggestions.
• We’ve updated the homepage, making it cleaner and hopefully easier to use. Let us know what you think.

This is just a smattering of what’s been going on here at the wiki and you can expect more changes and improvements going forward, so keep your eyes out for my posts on the Ancestry.com Blog.

And don’t worry. I know there are a number of questions about moderation and quality. These are issues we’re well aware of and have a plan to address. Watch for a future blog post on this subject.

For now, go explore the wiki if you haven’t already. Make some changes. Add some stuff. You can get there using the “Learning Center” tab on Ancestry.com or by simply clicking here.