Familypedia is great for genealogy

The free genealogy wiki "Familypedia" can help you in several ways:

Record "in black and white" (and millions of other colours) your family's reminiscences and hard facts about your ancestors and your famous or infamous or ordinary distant cousins;

Link to their times and places so that you can appreciate how they lived and maybe why they travelled or worked or played the way they did;

Talk to fellow-researchers about the best ways of displaying your data;

Find where to look for more old records;

And maybe find that someone else has already written about your relatives, making it even easier for you to get a complete picture.

(Talking of pictures - the above image is in the public domain and is housed on that wonderful repository Wikimedia Commons.)

(1) Computer
Connected to the World-wide Web - if you are reading this, you probably have that! Dial-up is OK. Er - you've forgotten what dial-up is? Not a problem.

(2) Papers
About your relatives, such as letters, newspaper clippings, marriage certificates, photos, school reports.

You can manage without any of that paper at first; but the more the better.

(3) Time
As much or as little as you like. Five minutes could be enough for you to create your first article. I think Familypedia's a good use of my time and I've made 27,000 edits, with more to come (D.V.). One guy has made 80,000.

(Public domain picture of ships at Seattle in 1900 - somebody's ancestors were on them and probably had their names recorded!)

Find Familypedia, the Genealogy Wikia, one of these ways:
(1) Click here
(2) Paste or type the following into your address bar: http://familypedia.wikia.com (and with Firefox you may get it without the http://)
(3) Google "Genealogy Wikia"

Create an account for yourself by clicking on the "Create an account" link (near the top right corner of most pages) and filling the required boxes.

Not compulsory, but highly recommended because it:
- is free
- takes only a minute
- lets you upload images
- will make other contributors more likely to help you.
- actually gives you MORE CHANCE TO BE ANONYMOUS if you wish
- screens out the obtrusive ads leaving just a few polite messages via Gooooooogle

Choose your user name with some care. Some of us are happy to use our real names, some use short or disguised versions, and some pick a name from history, such as "Thurstan" or "Zephyrinus". Best not to make it too long, because you and others will want to type it occasionally.

If your user name gives no clue who you really are, no ordinary user of the site will know unless you tell them, and only the managers (who haven't time to check anyone except obvious troublemakers) will have the power to dig into the system to find where in the world your computer is sitting and how to collar you.

The managers hate spam more than you do, so they will not tell anyone else your email address, nor your date of birth (which they need only because U.S. law doesn't let such sites have members aged under 13).

Then, or later, find your "Preferences" link. You can set:
* language interface (to one of several dozen options)
* timezone
* display "skin"
* size of edit box
and several other things.

You have your very own public "User page" (as on many modern sites such as Squidoo). It's good for displaying your ancestry tree as far as it goes, with easy links to individuals' pages and other web pages you have found helpful. A good example is Kborland's user page

There is a matching "User talk page", where other contributors will write messages addressed to you. And once you start editing you will be able to see a record of every edit under "Contributions".

As I said, that video wasn't mine. BUT it illustrates some good points about the Genealogy Wikia:

Wikipedia won't accept all of your family history even if your name is Barack Obama, but the Genealogy Wikia will! You can't have even a little Wikipedia article about yourself unless you're more famous than CapnOAwesome, but on Familypedia, the Genealogy Wikia, you can have many pages about yourself. Familypedia shows far more of the Obama ancestry than Wikipedia shows.

If you can type and click, you can create a wiki page. Type or paste whatever data you have so that the software can put it together. However, it may start life rather prosaic. Maybe not a very exciting page, and it probably won't have links to where you want it to.

Invest a couple of minutes extra, though, by following the current recommended process, to create a "person" page with an infobox and maybe other automatically-generated features such as categories, tables of children and siblings, even an Ahnentafel.

To use the super-fast form, you need Firefox 3 (which is free and respectable) as your browser. If you don't have Firefox and don't feel like installing it (or you have Firefox 4 and don't want to revert), there's a "work-around" that involves a little bit of copy-and-paste.
If using the work-around, you just type or paste data after the appropriate "equals" sign on a list.

With Firefox 3, you start just by entering the article name in the input-box on the "Create new article" page. You type or paste what you know in each box of the form, same as on your genealogy program.
Some of the sections have "Show" and "Hide" links at top right to reduce scrolling. Remember to "Show" the ones that start off hidden, in case you have data to go there.

Then click "Publish". The page won't show everything it should yet, but that's a software trick. Don't panic!!!!. (You want a technical answer? - the page display "calls" some of its own "properties", which it can't do before it's published, so it needs to be "published" again.)

At that point, go and follow the "guidelines" page for detail of how to create related pages, including automatically-generated ancestor chart and descendant table. (The "guidelines" are what you reach when clicking "Help: Creating articles" near the top.)
Very soon your article will be done (though, like a Squidoo lens, it may invite more work later) and will have tabs leading .to ancestry and descendants (if any are mentioned on the site - which may depend on you!).

The article will probably show a surname category at the bottom - click the name to see whether other people with that surname might be related.

NOW - TRY IT! Yes, you can try it right now...

But you could register first so as not to seem nameless. See "step 3" above.
...

If using Firefox 3, go to the "start" page.

Type a real person's name in the "Create or edit" box.

Make it your own name if you like. (I have one for myself.) Or a deceased parent or grandparent, maybe. Just the full name (preferably "birth" name), with an exact or approximate birth year. Add birth year in round brackets, like "Barack Obama (1961)". Dates are not encouraged for living persons (except famous people) but reduce the chance of ambiguity.

Click the "Create or edit" button, and you get taken to a form ready for editing. Fill in "Given name", "surname", and "short name". And anything else you can. (Or nothing else at this stage; you can always come back and add later.)

If not using Firefox 3, you need the "work-around". Go to the Forum page that explains it. Create an ordinary page (with names and dates as described above); the Forum takes you through the necessary steps with a big block of text to paste into your new page; you then put data on appropriate lines.

Firefox or not, once you've added a few facts, you're nearly there.

Click the "Publish" button.

Feel the flush of pleasure at creating a Familypedia page?

But maybe you should first go up this page to what I called "Step 3", and register. See you there!