I’m back! :)

I’ve switched over to using a wiki for my productivity needs (to-do lists, research notes, etc.), and I’m more and more convinced that it’s perfect for genealogy research. It’s freeform, laughably easy to store, and the hyperlinks make it a piece of cake to stitch things together where needed (and when you think about it, researching genealogy is just that: you stitch evidence together to form people and then stitch them together to form families and lines). And wikis are collaborative, and most support revisioning.

The only real downside I can think of is that there aren’t any set fields for things like names and dates, so searching is basically just a full-text search unless you have some kind of parser that picks up fields automatically. (And it would be easy enough to add some codes to the wiki markup to let users specifically designate portions of text as dates or names or places or what have you.)

And in reality, doing it this way is far more flexible, which makes it much nicer when you move to the international playing field, dealing with hundreds and thousands of different languages and cultures. The rigidity of existing record managers has been acceptable, but we’re in a new era now, and we need something organic, something that can grow and mold itself to the needs of the user. And users have vastly different needs.