Monday, August 1, 2011

Do you have information for the "Ancestry Errors Wiki?"

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After discussions on the Transitional Genealogists Forum mailing list, Michael Hait has created an "Ancestry Errors Wiki."  See Michael's post Aug Introducing the “Ancestry Errors Wiki” on his Planting the Seeds blog.   

Michael's blog post says:

"... occasional errors in imaging, image organization, or database programming on these websites cause inadvertent obstacles to our research. For example, some townships appear in the wrong county in one of the federal census databases. Or pages appear out of order. There are many examples of these kind of errors, but no way to know if your county of research suffers from one of them.

"For this reason, I have created the Ancestry Errors Wiki. This wiki will provide a hub for genealogists to notify other genealogists of errors that exist on various subscription genealogy websites. In time, these errors may be corrected, but until then, researchers should be able to search for any known existing errors, and adjust their research accordingly."

The Ancestry Errors Wiki is at http://ancestryerrors.wikia.com/wiki/Ancestry_Errors_Wiki.  There are already several articles there about errors in the Ancestry.com record databases.

Apparently, readers can add or edit content on this wiki without any sort of registration requirement.  If you want to Add a new page, click on the "Add a Page" link (on the "Home" line), type in a title for your article, and then type content in a WYSIWYG environment.  You can add images to the page.

Editing an existing article (e.g., adding text or images) is easy also - you click on the "Edit" link and type or upload.

I think that this is an excellent example of "grassroots action" in genealogy - there was a perceived need for a website of this type, Michael took an action and created something that will be useful and helpful to Ancestry.com users.

I hope that Ancestry.com will take note of Michael's efforts and diligently work on addressing and fixing the problems raised by users of the "Ancestry Errors Wiki."

2 comments:

Michael Hait said...

Thank you very much for the mention. Like every Wiki, we need user participation to be successful. With user participation, this Wiki could become a much-needed resource for researchers.

Anonymous said...

I doubt Ancestry,com will be "thrilled" with this little bit of "tweaking their noses" about their foot-dragging on correcting errors. I've pointed out many errors to them over the years. Other than transcription errors, which they can fix easily, many errors stay unfixed for long periods of time. I'll usually get an email thanking me for alerting them to the error... yes, they are aware of it... and they'll get tuit when they get tuit!