 My name is Leanne Cooper, and I've been a WikiTree member for about four years. I've created this presentation series, called Welcome to WikiTree, to highlight some of the key features of WikiTree, and to share why it's such an important tool in my genealogy toolbox. All opinions expressed throughout the series are my own. WikiTree is a free online collaborative family tree. But what exactly is a collaborative family tree? And how does it differ from other online family trees? Those are the questions I'll be answering in this video. As this name implies, WikiTree is a wiki, which is a website that allows collaborative editing of its content by its users. You're probably most familiar with Wikipedia, where there's only one article on a particular topic, and everyone who has information to contribute on that topic contributes to the same article. Likewise, with a collaborative family tree, each individual ancestor should appear only once, and everyone who has information on that ancestor contributes to that ancestor's profile. A collaborative family tree is also known as a one-world tree or a global family tree, where we all have our own branches that connect to these common ancestors. WikiTree is not the only collaborative tree. Other examples are FamilySearch, WeRelate, and Genie. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, but all work essentially the same way, which differs from other sites where you can build or upload your individual family tree, such as Ancestry, MyHeritage, or FindMyPast. Here's an illustration of how it works. On a site like Ancestry, I create my family tree. I'm a descendant of William and Agnes through their son Samuel. I also include information about Samuel's siblings, but I don't have their descendants flushed out. Of course, I have other ancestors in my tree as well, but for the purposes of this example, I'm just using this one line. Person 2 also creates a family tree on Ancestry. He's a descendant of Samuel's brother, Joseph. Likewise, Person 3 creates a tree. She's a descendant of Mary. Person 4 is also a descendant of Samuel, but she has no information on his siblings. And finally, Person 5 is another descendant of Mary. She knows Mary's father's name was William, but she doesn't know Mary's mother's name. All five of us have trees including the same family group, but we may each have some different information on the family members. On a collaborative family tree, I create a profile for each of the ancestors in my family tree and connect them together. When Person 2 comes along, instead of creating profiles for each of the people already there, he only creates profiles for Joseph's children and connects them to the existing tree and adds any information he has on the others to what I have already provided. Likewise with Person 3 and Person 4. Lucky Person 5 doesn't need to do anything but add himself to the tree as all of his ancestors already exist on the global tree. It's easy to see how we relate to the other living people on the tree as our links to our common ancestors are clear. So, what are the advantages of a collaborative family tree? First off, it gives us the ability to crowdsource information on our ancestors. Descendants of common ancestors may have access to different records. By working together, we can create a fuller picture of our ancestors' stories. Secondly, it's a great way to preserve our work. I've been working on my family history for many years now. Since I've shared the information I have on a collaborative tree, even if I were to stop working on my tree tomorrow, it would remain for others to access and to continue to build on without having to start from scratch. But most importantly, in my opinion, a collaborative family tree converges towards accuracy. Let me illustrate what I mean. Recall our five trees belonging to descendants of William and Agnes. Say one day I discover that Agnes' parents were Joseph and Mary, so I add this to my tree. Persons 2 and 3 see this, and they add the same information to their trees. Persons 4 and 5 do not. Over time, 10 more descendants of William and Agnes create trees, and they all add Joseph and Mary as Agnes' parents. But oops, I discover new information that rules out Joseph and Mary as parents of Agnes and determine that her parents were actually Richard and Anne. I update my tree. Being a collaborative sort, I contact other people with Agnes in their trees to share this new evidence. Person 2 changes his tree, but nobody else does. The errors persist, all because they copied erroneous information from my tree. New people coming along will see two trees with Richard and Anne as Agnes' parents and 11 with Joseph and Mary. Many will add Joseph and Mary as parents since that seems to be the theory with the most support, even though all of those people got their information from the same place, which was my family tree. On a collaborative family tree, on the other hand, since there's only one profile for Agnes, when her parents get added and then get changed, new people coming along only see the correct parents. So while on individual trees, errors get replicated, on a collaborative tree, the more people that work on the tree and importantly supply sources for any changes that they make, the more accurate the tree becomes. I hope this gives you a better understanding of collaborative family trees. In this presentation, I focused on collaborative trees in general, not on wiki tree in particular. For more information on wiki tree, check out the presentation Introduction to wiki tree, where I describe its key features and what's included on a wiki tree profile. I discuss pros and cons of wiki tree and I give some advice and tips for getting started. In other videos in this series, I talk about how privacy works on wiki tree and how we collaborate on wiki tree. If you have suggestions for other topics you'd like to see me address, please leave a comment. Hope to see you on wiki tree.