July 2008

At this point, you have everything you need to build your genealogy wiki.  But in WikiWorld there’s always more.  Some of it’s easy and some of it’s way-out-there.

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to import tiddlers from one wiki to another without the stress and strain of copying and pasting.  Either on your own hard-drive or from the Internet.

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You can link to any type of document or multimedia file: html, pdf, pps, doc, audio, video, whatever you have.  If you have the software to create it or open it, you can link to it.  Txt is OK;  rtf is really not unless you can make it open directly with something besides your browser. You might as well do something that looks better.  You can just as easily save the page as html.

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Check List:

• Write a summary of one person
• Make a list of WikiWords for their main activities and events
• Add tags for all the names in the summary

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Stories don’t really have beginnings.  People just pretend they do.  Then they go backwards and forwards and sideways in the telling.  Have you ever heard a story without tangents?  Probably not.  So, it doesn’t matter where you begin, it just matters that you do.

But, before you start writing, who’s your audience?  Is this an academic exercise for yourself or are you talking to a favorite cousin?  This will define your voice and your content.  If you don’t know who you’re talking to yet, just imagine someone, if that helps, or go straight down the middle: interesting but neutral.

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Everyone should have some direct-line ancestors lined up in their MainMenu now. Each one of the ancestors in your MainMenu is a WikiWord and therefore represents a tiddler.

As soon as you start writing a tiddler several things happen. I’m going to try to keep from confusing myself by not talking about them all at once.

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Put the paint brushes and drop cloths away.  The ancestors are coming for dinner.

Wikis are non-linear, just like our lives and the lives of our ancestors.  Using this simple document it’s possible to write and present history in the chaotic way it happened and have it make better sense than it does when we’re repeating ourselves in linear reports or searching through a pdf trying to remember how a segment on page 5 links to another segment on page 247.  If you can imagine a large ball of interconnecting loops, that’s what we’ll be creating instead.  We’ll still be fitting in our regular reports and other things we’re used to, but in a way that more closely resembles the tradition of good story-telling.  Twists and turns and flying trapeze-artists.

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If you haven’t joined us yet, please feel free to jump in anytime. You’re only 2 short segments behind.

Where were we? Ok, everyone, stand up for a minute. Take one step to the left. Just so you don’t get dizzy, now take one step to the right. Bend you arms at the elbow and flap like a chicken. Aah … much better. We can all sit down now.

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