I fully agree that a genealogy website needs structure
(parent/child/sibling/event etc), though there should be room for free-form
narrative as part of any individual's page.
Familypedia has been using Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Forms (which
will, we trust, be upgraded eventually by our host so that it has the
current name "Page Forms") since 2009. It has over 60,000 articles about
individuals and tens of thousands of subpages automatically displaying
people's ancestry trees or descendant tables for four generations (subject
to data availability). Example at
http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Charlemagne/tree It can do complex-looking
searches such as tabulating (in a way that allows sorting by a particular
column) all Familypedia people born in Pennsylvania whose father was stated
to be born between 1849 and 1875:
http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki/demo_query-subquery And
it has pages for several thousand places (villages, counties, nations, etc)
automatically tabulating the people who had events such as birth and
marriage at the place.
However, I also agree with one or more correspondents that such a wiki
should be able to handle GEDCOM files. Familypedia people have tried, with
little success.
So on the Demo wiki I've asked for semantic extensions to be made available
and I will start agitating for programmers to work out how to import GEDCOM
files and siphon their data into individuals' pages with minimum
duplication. A tall order, but several big genealogy websites have ways of
doing it, generally by alerting the contributor to apparent duplications and
offering to merge the individuals' pages. The WikiTree experts may be able
to help there. Probably WeRelate people can too.
Robin F. Patterson, Plimmerton, Porirua City, New Zealand
http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/User:Robin_Patterson
(I hope you folks are pleased that I cut off all of the earlier stuff; I
hope other contributors will similarly trim so as to leave little apart from
the points they are answering.)