Wikis are good for genealogy

An early "wikicity", now in the top ten Wikia sites, is "Genealogy", familiarly named "Familypedia". It's not the biggest genealogy wiki YET. May 2009 saw it reach 32,000 articles about people or places. But it aims to cover the ancestry of everyone who has ever lived, and it is growing geometrically with dozens of keen volunteers (including a few programmers) and excellent host support. Its articles have been created by people, not primarily by machines.

The wiki concept is excellent for a potentially cooperative hobby such as genealogy (family history). Familypedia, the Genealogy Wiki, can help you to:
Record in black and white (or multicolor) 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 (on the purpose-made "talk" pages) 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.

Now the use of Semantic MediaWiki is making inline queries and other searches more comprehensive.

Computer with internet access.

Papers about relatives, such as marriage certificates, newspaper clippings, letters, photos.

A few minutes to learn the basic editing skills. A few hours to pick up lots of cleverer tricks along the way. There are plenty of help pages and friendly fellow-contributors

Find the Genealogy Wikia by typing or pasting in your address bar http://genealogy.wikia.com - or just clicking it here if you're ready to have a look.

Create an account. Not compulsory, but it is free, it takes only a minute, it actually gives you more chance to be anonymous if you wish (because your IP number is hidden), and it will get other contributors helping you. The managers hate spam more than you do, so they will not tell anyone else your email address.

Look all over the home page to see which aspects could interest you.

Find and click the "Help" link, probably near top left. That gives you an overview of the built-in help that the site offers. Any more questions? Someone on the Wikia is sure to be able to help you (though possibly not to break down your genealogy brick wall!). Check the help desk. (It's under "Forums").

Hit the "Simple page for person" link. The target page offers you a very quick option for making a page about an individual.

For pages about several related individuals, or writing about surnames or places, there are templates that take another minute or two of thought but make it all fairly easy and link together seamlessly with better results the further you go.

The use of Semantic MediaWiki further improves pages with inline queries and other informative displays.

(Screenshot Image - a typical page for an individual - from Familypedia, license GFDL, here under "Fair use" to illustrate the site)

See list.