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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wonder about a really big public version of this. Something like a Wikipedia of family tree history, so people working on their family's genealogy might meet up with others somewhere 5 or 6 generations back and discover some stories going back a couple hundred years. I imagine allowing for people to fill in little biographies and attach photos or references of ancestors.

But such a thing would probably have a bunch of abuse scenarios that would be hard to solve for (it's "what's your mother's maiden name" as a service, for one), and I'm not sure if they're easily solved. But it'd be really cool.

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https://www.familysearch.org/ does exactly this. Only information of people who are deceased is viewable outside the account of the person who entered the information.

It's run by the LDS Church, so there's a religious tone to their marketing. But you don't have to be a member or religious to use it.

I'd agree. Family Search will eventually be understood as the authoritative tree.

One challenge with an authoritative tree is when a distant or non-relative creates a profile, marks it living and then that creator disappears.

A close relative shows up but the profile is locked to the creator. The actual relative has to jump thru hoops to get access to their own family.

With privacy concerns, I don't know how to handle it better. Only that folks might want to avoid creating living profiles except for close relatives.

I'm glad it exists, but I'm not super comfortable encouraging everybody in my extended family to give all of their information directly to the LDS Church, especially with their history of stuff like proxy baptisms of holocaust victims.

But on the other hand, I was just a minute ago wishing that this sort of service existed publicly as a Wikipedia-like free resource, which is a strict superset of the LDS Church having it, so maybe that's unfair.

The church did make an effort to prevent unwanted baptisms as noted here:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/what...

I need to sign in to see it, which I probably won't do.

And I should also point out that the Church issued an apology for that particular incident, as well.

https://www.wikitree.com/ I believe is what you are describing. It's great. If you have any interest in building your family tree this is where I would start.

Oh, wow, that's exactly it! Thank you.

I do all my genealogy there and it's great. I haven't seen any vandalism problems, but there are data quality problems and poorly sources facts (a link to ancestry.com is not a useful source!) that you have to deal with, but you can generally fix problems created by others, or at least leave comments explaining why you think it's wrong.

It is great, except it could use a UI/UX overhaul. I guess the barrier to entry keeps the data quality better but it could benefit a lot from simple quality of life updates.

Basic things like being able to attach sources to data points (like birthday) at time of creation.

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