 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 all about collaboration. In this video, I'll be discussing how collaboration works on Wikitree. Collaboration is simply two or more people working together towards shared goals. Collaboration is nothing new. People have been collaborating since the dawn of humanity. What has changed is the technology that makes collaboration easier than ever. The internet and social media have made it easier to find people with shared goals and interests and once we find them, to share information and to work together. Genealogists collaborating is also nothing new. People have worked together to collect and share family histories since long before the internet. In the 1970s, for example, my mother was contacted by a distant cousin researching the descendants of my third-grade grandfather, James Willis, born in 1806. He got my mother's contact information from her cousin and he wrote to ask her for information on our branch of the family. He compiled all the information he received into a 180-page, type-written, photocopied, spiral-bound book which he then mailed to everyone who had shared information with him. He also sent us annual updates in his Christmas newsletter. Today we have many more tools at our disposal that help us to connect with cousins, gather information and share that information with other descendants of our common ancestors. One such tool is Wikitree. Wikitree is a free online collaborative family tree. For a general overview of Wikitree and a discussion about collaborative family trees in general, please be sure to check out the first two videos of this series. Wikitree is designed to balance privacy and collaboration so that living people can connect on a global family tree to common ancestors. In the third video and in this one, I dive deeper into these two keywords, privacy and collaboration. Collaboration on Wikitree takes many forms. In this video, I'm going to talk about three ways of collaborating on individual profiles, on groups of closely related profiles, and on projects. Recall that each person who ever lived should only have one profile on Wikitree and everyone with information on that person works together on the same ancestor profile. There are many ways to collaborate on a profile. You can send a private message to the profile manager. You can put a public comment on the profile that anyone viewing the profile will be able to see. Depending on the privacy setting of the profile, you can edit the profile directly. If two or more profiles were created of the same person, you can merge them. I've talked to many genealogists about Wikitree, and it's these last two that scare some people. What, they ask? Someone else can just go edit the information I've put there? Hmm, I don't know if I like that. What if they're wrong? It's really not as scary as it sounds. You do get notified when people make changes to the profiles on your watch list, which is made up of all profiles for which you're on the trusted list. On your home page, you'll see the family activity feed, where you can see who has made what changes to which profiles. This information also gets emailed to you once a week. Besides information on the profiles on your watch list, you can set tags for surnames that you're following, and you can see any activity on those names. This appears in the Wiki genealogy feed, also on your home page. And even if you miss that, on each profile, there's a changes tab. This gives you all of the changes that have been made to that profile since it was created. Here you can see that I created the profile for Robert Clements in July 2014, and did some edits to it in October 2014. This past summer, my fourth cousin Ann did some work on this profile, including adding a child that I didn't know about and editing his birthplace. She also added a death date in place. I noticed that her only source for this death date was her ancestry tree, so I searched for a better source, which I then added. By clicking on any of these changes, you can see exactly what was added. In this case, you can see that Ann added a death date of December 11th, 1934 and a death location of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. But what happens if someone adds something that you disagree with, or that you know to be wrong? WikiTree has established processes for resolving disagreements over profile content, and it works quite well. The key is to have good sources. If you have solid sources to support your position, it's usually pretty easy to resolve issues. In the four years that I've been active on WikiTree, I can only recall one instance that was really challenging. By going through the established processes, we did come to an agreement on what to include and what not to include on that ancestor's profile. In the vast majority of cases, I have found collaborating on profiles and sorting through conflicting information did be easy and painless. After all, we all have the same goals to have complete, accurate information on our ancestors. The next type of collaboration I want to talk about is collaboration on closely related profiles, such as one-name studies, one-place studies, family groups, and events or associations. For example, you may want to work on a group of people from the same military unit, or buried in the same cemetery, or who were involved in the same event. There are two WikiTree tools that are really helpful for this type of collaboration, categories, and free space profiles. I'm going to show you an example of collaborating on a family group where we're not quite sure how everyone fits in. I've been collaborating with my distant cousin, Arthur, on a quest to determine the parentage of my fifth great-grandmother, Charlotte Richardson. With the help of mitochondrial DNA, we've determined that she was most likely the daughter of James and Hannah Richardson, who were in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in the 1770s. There were other Richardson's on the island at that time that appear to well be related, but we haven't yet figured out exactly how. We created a category called Prince Edward Island Richardson's that we add to each profile. By clicking on the category, it takes you to a list of all of the profiles in that category, which allows us to easily link the profiles to each other, even if we aren't sure how they're related. As well, we created a free space profile, which is a page that is not about a specific person. This is where we're documenting our research questions, the research we've done to date, and any information that we have that isn't tied to one particular person. The advantage of doing this in WikiTree, instead of just sharing this information between the two of us, is that other people can also find it, as, like an individual profile, a free space profile can be found with a Google search. Who knows who's out there who has the missing piece that will answer our questions. Finally, I want to talk about projects. A project is simply a group of members organized around a topic or activity on WikiTree. Projects make it easier for members who are interested in the same profiles or volunteer work to find each other, communicate, and coordinate their efforts. There are two types of projects. Functional projects are centered around WikiTree activities. For example, I'm a member of a WikiTree presenters project, where we share our presentations and give each other ideas on doing great presentations about WikiTree. There are also projects around sourcing unsourced profiles, correcting data errors, and numerous other functions. Topical projects are centered around a group of profiles that are connected in a geographical or historical way. This is similar to the closely related profiles that I talked about earlier, but on a much larger scale. Project members manage controversial or historically significant and widely shared ancestors, and develop styles and standards for editing those profiles. There are high-level projects, like Canada or United Kingdom, each of which has multiple sub-projects. These can be geographic, like Ontario, or thematic, like British home children. There are also historical projects, like the Mayflower Project, Puritan Great Migration, etc., or projects related to particular religious or cultural groups, like the Quakers or Native Americans, for example. Projects are a great way of finding others with shared interests and sharing information and resources. To find a project of interest, you can go to the Categories section in the Find menu and select the Projects category, where it will list all of the project categories and you can drill down to sub-projects. Alternatively, you can go to the Projects page, also in the Find menu, which will give you an alphabetical list of all projects. I'd like to close with the benefits of using WikiTree for genealogy collaboration. As with everything in this series, remember this is from my perspective. Other people may have a different list. First off, WikiTree has a very strong, active community. Chances are there's already someone on WikiTree interested in the same families, locations, or topics as you are. WikiTree makes it easy to find those people. Second, there's a real focus on sources. Good sources are the key to collaboration and to making a more accurate global family tree. The WikiTree community takes sources seriously. WikiTree is great cousin bait. You don't need to be a member of WikiTree to find the information on WikiTree profiles. Anyone doing a Google search on your common ancestors will find the information that you include on profiles. And remember, this includes free space profiles. So people interested in the same topics as you can find you instead of you needing to always find them. And finally, WikiTree's free. Who doesn't like free? This brings us to the end of the video. In this presentation, I focused on collaboration. In other videos in this series, I present the key features of WikiTree, discuss pros and cons, and give some tips for getting started. I provide an overview of collaborative family trees in general and how they differ from individual family trees. And I talk about privacy 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.