From WeRelate
Frequently asked questions
What is a source page?
- A source page is a WeRelate wiki page that contains information about a genalogical source. The source wiki contains over 1,300,000 source pages for over 100,000 websites, 250,000 message boards, and 950,000 items from the Family History Library Catalog. Source pages can contain links to online sources, research tips for using certain sources, information on source reliability or availability, and any other genealogically useful information. Most source pages do not contain this information yet, so if you know something about a source that will help others, please share! See About source pages for more information.
How do I find a page for a source?
- To find a source, click on the blue Wiki tab and then on the Sources heading. You will be taken to the Sources page. From here you have several options:
- If you know the name of the source you are looking for: enter a few words from the source's name into the keywords field in the search form. For example, if I were looking for a source entitled "Birth and death register, 1870-1900," I would enter "birth death 1870 1900".
- If I wanted to search for certain types of records within a particular website, I would enter "Cite:url key words". For example if I wanted to search the Family History Library Catalog for the "Birth and death register, 1870-1900," I would enter "Cite:FamilySearch.org birth death 1870 1900".
- If you know the domain name of the source: enter the domain name into the keywords field in the search form. For example, if I were looking for OneGreatFamily.com, I could enter "OneGreatFamily" or "onegreatfamily.com".
- If you are looking for sources for a particular surname or place: enter the surname or place in the surname or place field. You may also want to enter a record type in the keywords field. For example, if I wanted to find birth records in Minnesota, I would enter "Minnesota" in the place field, and enter "birth" in the keywords field.
How do I create a new source page?
- Do you know of a source that is not in the source wiki? If so, please add a page for it! Click on the Wiki tab and then on the Sources heading. Under the heading "Go to or Add a source page", type in the desired title for the source page, and click the Add new page button. For example: to create a source page for a website with the title "Genealogy Trails", you would enter "Genealogy Trails" and click the Add new page button. On the edit page that opens, fill in the blanks and save your work.
Is there a format for source page titles?
- See Help:Source page titles. See also WeRelate talk:Source page titles for background information including guidelines and ideas.
How do I edit a source page?
- To edit a source page, find the page you want to edit and click on the Edit button near the top of the screen. Source pages belong to the entire community and we encourage everyone to contribute to the source wiki. See Ways to contribute below. When you edit a page, it is a good idea to click on "Show preview" to examine your changes and then on "Save page" to save your changes.
When will my changes start showing up in searches?
- Pages are indexed every night, so if you created a new page (or made changes to an existing page), the new page (or new words on the existing page) will start showing up in searches the following day.
How do I tell what changes someone else has made to a source page?
- Click on the History link near the top of the screen. This displays a list of all changes made to the page. For each change you can see how the page appeared after the change was made, the date of the change, and who made the change. To see exactly what was changed, click on the two versions of the page you want to compare, followed by Compare selected versions. Here's an example where someone added information about a library's holdings.
What if I want to leave a comment, but don't want to edit the page itself?
- You can leave comments about any page on its talk page. Just click on the Talk link at the top of the screen, then click on Add Topic.
What is a MySource?
- MySource is a WeRelate term referring to a personal source, having a significance to your specific research, rather than to the community as a whole. For example, your grandmother's birth certificate would be a MySource, while a compilation of birth records for the state of Idaho would be a community source. See About MySources for more information.
How do I know if a source is a community source or a MySource?
- Ask yourself if the source would be of interest to someone conducting research on a different line. For example: other researchers might want to know about your grandmother's birth certificate, but if they do, they are working on the same line and can find the certificate easily from your grandmother's person page. A birth certificate is a MySource. However, many different researchers might find a compilation of Idaho birth records useful for work on many different Idahoans in many different family lines. Such a compilation is a community source. Use your best judgment, knowing that any mistake in classification can be easily corrected.
General information
Source page titles
- See Help:Source page titles. Also see WeRelate talk:Source page titles for background information.
Ways to contribute
If you know something about a source that might be of interest to other researchers, please share it! Here are ways that you can edit a source page to help improve it:
Adding research tips
- You can add research tips in the Text box near the bottom of the edit screen. If you add a research tip, please remove the {{source-stub}} marker at the bottom of the page.
Adding coverage information
- To add or correct information about what the source covers, edit the following boxes on the edit screen:
- Surnames: Enter the most important surnames that this source covers, one surname per line.
- Places: Enter the most important places that this source covers, one place per line.
- Year range: Enter the year range that this source covers.
- URL: Enter the URL of the source. Our crawlers will start crawling the source from this URL so that we can include its pages in web searches. (During our beta period it will take a few months for us to include pages from new sources in search results. We'll be much faster at searching new sources later in the year.)
- The above boxes can be left empty if they do not apply to a specific source.
Tagging non-genealogy sources for removal
- To create the place wiki, we crawled the Web looking for genealogy websites. It's likely that some of the websites that our crawler chose are not really relevant to genealogy. If you find a source that is not relevant to genealogy, please edit the source page and add the text "[[Category:remove]]". We'll review the source and remove it.
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