 My name is Leanne Cooper and I've been a wiki tree member for about four years. I've created this presentation series called Welcome to Wiki Tree to highlight some of the key features of wiki tree and to share why it's such an important tool in my genealogy toolbox. All opinions expressed throughout this series are my own. In this presentation, I'll be providing an introduction to wiki tree, including what it is, what you'll find on a wiki tree profile, some pros and cons of wiki tree, and finally, some tips and advice on getting started. So, what is wiki tree? Wiki tree is a free online collaborative family tree, also known as a one-world tree or a global family tree. For more information on what is meant by a collaborative family tree and on how that differs from other online family trees, be sure to check out my What is a Collaborative Family Tree video, which is part of this series. Wiki tree is designed to balance privacy and collaboration so that living people can connect on a one-world tree to common ancestors. It enables you to privately collaborate with close family members on modern family history, and collaboration on deep ancestors is between distant cousins who are serious about genealogical research and careful about sources. Wiki tree is free to use. Anyone can access the information on the tree. Those who actively help grow the tree must agree to the mission and the honor code. The wiki tree honor code is a pledge the community members make to each other. This is not like those user license agreements that we all just click I agree to without reading. This really does govern how we all work together on wiki tree. First off, we collaborate. When we share ancestors, we work together on the same ancestor profiles. We care about accuracy. We are always aiming to improve upon our worldwide family tree and fix mistakes. We know that mistakes are inevitable. We don't want to be afraid to make them. We assume that mistakes are unintentional when others make them and ask for the same understanding. We know misunderstandings are inevitable. We try to minimize them by being courteous to everyone, even those who don't act accordingly. We respect privacy. We privacy protect anything we think our family members might not want public. If that's not enough for someone, we delete their personal information. We respect copyrights. We don't knowingly copy information that is owned by someone else. If we ourselves want to preserve a copyright, we're clear about what's copyrighted so others don't accidentally copy it. We give credit. Although most genealogy isn't copyrighted, researchers deserve credit for the work they've done. We cite sources. Without sources, we can't objectively resolve conflicting information. And finally, we're united in a mission to increase the world's common store of knowledge. We always respect copyrights and privacy, but we keep information as free and as open as possible. Wiki Tree is all about collaboration. There are multiple ways that this can be done. We can work together on common profiles. We can connect with possible DNA matches. We can work on projects. A project is a group of members organized around a topic or a volunteer activity. We can group profiles into categories such as a place or an event and collaborate with others interested in the same place or event. We can connect with people researching the same names we are. And finally, we can ask or answer questions in the Genealogists to Genealogists forum, also called G2G. For more information on how Wiki Tree supports collaboration, check out the video in this series called Collaboration on Wiki Tree. Meanwhile, in this video, I'm just going to be talking about profiles. The profile page is the central place for organizing and viewing information and sources on an individual. Each person who ever existed should only have one profile on Wiki Tree. For example, this is my third-grade grandmother, Agnes Ryder. There have been many Agnes Ryders in the world. There may even have been other Agnes Ryders born in 1794 in Devon, England. But there was only one Agnes Ryder who was baptized on December 3, 1794 in South Milton, in Devon, was the daughter of Richard Ryder and Agnes Pilditch, married William Prowse in 1822, migrated to Prince Edward Island in the mid-1820s, had seven children, and died in 1876. There are at least a dozen trees on Ancestry that include this Agnes Ryder. Not all include all of this information, but they each have some bits. But on Wiki Tree, there's only one profile. If someone creates a second one for the same person, then the two profiles would get merged, combining the information, and anyone wanting to add new information on Agnes would add it on to the same profile. Since the profile is such an integral component of Wiki Tree, I want to take a moment to show you what's included. Let's start with the header. If you look at the address bar and on the menus, you'll see that Agnes's profile is Ryder 780. Each profile has a unique Wiki Tree ID made up of the last name of birth and a sequential number. This is one of the best features of Wiki Tree in my opinion. Every profile is its own webpage, which means it can be found via a Google search. On most other sites, only members can access the information. With Wiki Tree, because each profile is its own webpage, any search engine will find it. This makes it great cousin bait, as other people searching for the same ancestors as you will be able to easily find the profiles that you created. As well in the header, you can see that there are several tabs, including profile, edit, images, family tree and tools, changes, and privacy. These are how you access the various aspects of the profile. I discussed privacy, including the difference between a public view and a private view of a profile in the video called Privacy on Wiki Tree, so be sure to check that out. Let's move to the data fields. This part of the profile contains the basic genealogical information, birth date and location, parent's names, sibling, spouses, marriage date and location, children, death date and location. You can click on any name and it will take you to that person's profile. As well, you can click on the ancestors or descendants buttons from here and get quick access to Agnes's family tree. As well, it also indicates the name of the profile manager. In this case, me. While I don't own the profile, since Agnes is not only my ancestor but other people's ancestor as well, I do have some control over certain functions and any questions on this profile will be sent to me. If you click the little green square next to my name, it takes you to the relationship finder where you can see exactly how I'm related to the person whose profile you're viewing. The narrative part of the profile is the biography and sources. This can include as much or as little information as you have on the person. You can include any research questions you have or disputed information. It's also where the sources are listed, with links to online sources where available. Next, DNA connections. When you identify in your own profile that you've taken a DNA test, the system will then add this information to connect to profiles. Here you can see me and a couple of my family members at the bottom who've all taken DNA tests. As well at the top is Anne, who's a fourth cousin of mine, who's also taken a test, but on a different site than we have. Because her GEDmatch ID is indicated there, I can check on GEDmatch to see if we are a DNA match. Finally, collaboration. There are many ways to collaborate on a profile. Depending on the privacy setting, you can edit the profile directly or you can send a private message to the profile manager. You can put a public comment on the profile that will be visible to anybody viewing the profile. And you can ask a question in the forum. Again, I go into much more detail on collaboration in the video Collaboration on Wikitree. Turning now to some pros and cons of Wikitree. This is completely from my perspective. Others may have a different list, but this is mine. First off, there are multiple ways to display and share the information once you've entered it into Wikitree. Here are a couple of examples. Some are traditional ways, like a pedigree chart or a family group sheet that you'd expect to see on any genealogy site, but some are different. This is one of my personal favorites. This is the seven generations of surnames in my tree. I find this link handy to send to DNA matches to see if any names might be familiar. And there are many other ways to view the information once it's in the database. Next up, cousin bait. I mentioned this earlier. Wikitree is the best cousin bait. I've been contacted by many people who've seen the profiles that I've created on Wikitree, have contacted me to either add additional information to what I already had, to ask me a question, to answer a question that I put on the profile, or even just to say hi. It's a great way to connect with close and distant cousins. The site is always being improved upon. With new features, regular improvements, many of these improvements are suggested by the strong community. Wikitree is not just a website. It's an active community of people focused on creating an accurate and free global family tree. You'll find a lot of really nice people on Wikitree as well. And finally, there's a real focus on sources, and that's something that's really important to me. The community takes sources seriously. It's vital to collaboration and to accuracy. Cons of Wikitree? Well, you do have less control. Collaborating with others does mean giving up total control. There are people that don't want anyone touching the profiles they've created. That goes against the spirit of Wikitree. In order to get the benefits of collaboration, you do need to be willing to give up total control. And finally, community standards may not align with how you prefer to do things. Things like how to deal with place names that change over time, naming standards, things like that. You may have your own preference on how to deal with these types of issues, but the community has developed standards that must take precedence over your preferred way of doing things. Finally, I'd like to leave you with some tips and advice on getting started on Wikitree. You can upload a JEDCOM to use the JEDCOMPARE tool to compare your family tree against the Wikitree database to see if some of your ancestors already have Wikitree profiles. It's a great place to start. And if they do, that likely means that you already have either close or distant relatives that use Wikitree, which is a great way to begin collaborating. However, I would caution against using the JEDCOM to add a whole lot of new profiles at once. It can be quite overwhelming. While you can use the JEDCOM to add new profiles, I think that when you're first starting off, it's better to add new profiles one at a time to get the hang of things. Don't just add names and dates. Add biographical information and, of course, sources right away. It may be tempting to add a lot of new profiles with the intention of going back later and flushing them out, but I find it's better to add what you know right away. The more information you have on each profile, the more likely someone will contact you about that profile. Include collateral lines, not just your direct ancestors. That's where you're more likely to make new connections with distant cousins. Explore the site. There are so many tools. There are some you'll use more than others, but taking the time to explore the menus will let you know what's available. I've just scratched the surface in this presentation. There's so much more to Wikitree. And finally, don't hesitate to seek help. Wikitree does have a bit of a learning curve, but there are lots of how-to videos on the site. There's a mentoring program. There's a forum where you can ask questions. It may seem daunting when you start off, but stick with it, and I promise you, it will get easier. So that brings us to the end of this video. In this presentation, I focused on the key features of Wikitree. In other videos in this series, I provide an overview of collaborative family trees in general and how they differ from individual family trees. I talk about how privacy works on Wikitree and how we collaborate on Wikitree. If you have suggestions for other topics you'd like to see me address, please leave a comment. I hope to see you on Wikitree.