I have used PhpGedView to publish my genealogy website for several years, but I am considering the feasibility of using MediaWiki, the popular wiki software that runs Wikipedia. Abandoning the industry-standard GEDCOM and adopting software that isn’t optimized for genealogy is a difficult decision. Does GEDCOM provide any essential feature that couldn’t be reproduced with a wiki, and aren’t there several benefits to a wiki that make its adoption worthwhile?

Genealogy wikis such as WeRelate and the Genealogy Wikia already exist, but I would want to host my own wiki to have control over my data, limiting it to people related to me, and so I could do more customization.

A notable example of a nice genealogy wiki is that of the Whitney Research Group.

Benefits of MediaWiki:
• I have become highly familiar with MediaWiki markup after editing Wikipedia intensively for a while.
• Collaboration: I have never directly collaborated with other genealogists in such a way that we are both editing the same data. MediaWiki would facilitate that by its intuitive user management and edit histories.
• Namespaces would work well (Person, Place, Source, Contributor, etc.)
• Meta pages: a wiki could have, for example, family pages describing a family, independent of any person pages.
• Don’t need to have a page for every person. For many of my distant ancestors, I am probably never going to add descendants of all their children, so rather than have a page for each child, we can simply list the children in the parent’s entry, redlinked if preferred.
• Sourcing. Using the MediaWiki cite extension, with <ref> tags, is much easier and better looking that having a GEDCOM source record and having it displayed however PhpGedView does it. Plus, only sources which warrant one need their own separate page.
• Images. Images can be put anywhere in an article, and can be managed more easily than with PhpGedView, where I have never successfully had images on my website for a long period of time because I sometimes lost the image links when I reimported my database.
• Categorization. Categorization can allow for som interesting pages, like Category:Immigrants with royal ancestry, or Category:Immigrants from Germany, etc.
• Interwiki linking can be used to link people to their Wikipedia articles or articles on other wikis, such as WeRelate.

Issues needing addressing:
• Privacy: can two different versions of a page be created, one for logged-in users that displays private details, and one for non-logged-in users that does not?
• Initial creation: a bot, perhaps a gramps plugin, would need to be written to initially populate the wiki
• Export: could a bot be written to extract the wiki to GEDCOM format if it was needed? There is nothing inherently wrong with not using GEDCOM, but it needs to be able to assure continuity.
• Reports and relationship calculation: Though not essential, the ability to generate descendant, ahnentafel, and other reports is a highly valuable feature of most genealogy software. Could a bot be written to do this upon request? Or perhaps an external website that can do it immediately, like some of the Wikipedia external tools?


Namespaces
Person, Place, Report, Source, Template, Category

Templates
Templates would be a critical part of being able to maintain consistency across the wiki in formatting, and being able to change the formatting on all pages easily. Ideally, templates could be used for all information on person, place and source pages. Templates might be something like {{person | image = | bd = [[April 20]], [[2008]] | bp = Ayer, Massachusetts | dd = … | dp = … | md = … | mp = … | fields for each GEDCOM event type, etc. | content = any page biography here, complete with sections and such;}} or perhaps the content could be outside of the template (which would probably create an infobox.

Categorization
People
*People by origin
*People from Germany
*People from Baden-Württemberg
*People from Kreis Tuttlingen
(by town is probably too much categorization, and for countries with fewer people in the database, perhaps by county or state is too much)
*etc.
*etc.
*People from England
*etc.
*People by immigration
*Immigrants from Germany
etc.
*People by religion
*Christians
*Catholics
*Protestants
*Puritans
*Quakers
*Methodists
*etc.
*People by date
*People by birthyear
*People by birthdate
*People by lifespan
*People by occupation
*Farmers
*etc.
*People by relationship
*Ancestors of Michael White
*Descendants of Marinus Van Aken
*Bennett family
*etc.
*Places
*Places in Germany
*Places in Baden-Württemberg
*Places in Kreis Tuttlingen
*Places by size (?)
*Places by status (i.e., non-extant localities) (?)
Sources
*Book sources
*Internet sources
Images
*Source images
*Census images
*Images of people
*Images of places

This would be a very nice setup. The question is, with the possible sacrifice in ability to do things like relationship calculation and descendant reports, is the extra work involved worth it? I think perhaps the thing I am really wishing for is for genealogy web software to display things more in a wiki format, with an infobox on the right and a biography in the main page, and to have the ability to categorize people more, and have separate place pages. Perhaps it would be better to modify PhpGedView to display pages more like a Wikipedia biography (with an infobox, and notes right up front), and to have wiki aspects of place and source editing.

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