A few examples from the genealogy database that I designed, and have on my website… When entering a record, the system I have will not allow you to put in a death date earlier than a birth date. I have routines setup to cross-check dates of a person with the dates of their parents, spouses, and children to make sure it’s at least feasible. Data entry tries to make sure place names are entered consistently to enable color-coding, mapping, and statistical reports.

In a free-form wiki, I don’t see how any of this is possible, even if there are templates.

Crwth: First off, crwth is the old Gaelic instrument whence my surname, Crowder, comes. Crwth became crowd, and the person who played the crowd or crwth was called a crowder. I was reading Sir Orfeo in my Middle English class a few months ago and ran into a mention of it, in fact. So, cool nickname. :)

You’ve got a good point here, namely that wikis lose some of their usefulness when it comes to structured data. I agree. In the past, the research end of things has generally been neglected in favor of structured storage, which is why I’m pushing for more freeform methods, but it would obviously be pointless to swing completely over to the other end of the room. Errors in extremity are errors regardless of which side they’re on. That said, I’m not quite sure where the golden median lies, and even with structured data we’re still not quite where we need to be — the only standard we have (GEDCOM) is over a decade old, and every attempt since then to replace it has failed. And I don’t think that those failures necessarily mean that GEDCOM is fine the way it is and doesn’t need to be renovated.

Templates would be good, especially for beginning users. (I’ll be writing about that — wikis and beginners — soon, incidentally.)

The set fields that you point out as lacking are often the very fields that you or others are looking for, and I think the “record managers” that you refer to still have a purpose.

Perhaps we need a hybrid, with structured records for known data, but a freeform block, either per individual, per family, or per dataset, for research notes.

Back to the fields: MediaWiki, and perhaps other implementations, does support the idea of templates, which can aid in a common data structure. You can see examples of this throughout Wikipedia, under animal entries for their classification or under country entries for their statistics. I’m not sure if you can specifically search these fields, but it provides a visual structure, if anything.

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Crwth

Have you thought about expanding something like the XFN microformat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Friends_Network)? Potentially something like this could be used across the ‘Net to show relationships . . .