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Building the Wiki could be compared to a barn raising.

Barn Raising.jpg

A barn raising is accomplished with volunteers of all expertise levels -- from total beginners to master craftsmen.

Like a physical barn raising, a wiki barn raising needs a variety of people, those who can:

Search for good record sources, find information already available regarding a topic that could be linked to
Correct spelling mistakes and grammar, add headings to articles
Design the information architecture, the look and feel of the content section, the elements of a good article, and the way in which the various pages will interlink
Help care for the Wiki by combining duplicates, adding categories, and more

Whatever your expertise level, there's a place for you in a wiki barn raising.

Get Started

To get started, we need to know a little about you, your interests and genealogy or research experience. Please fill out the Volunteer form and we will contact you. Work on state articles will typically be under the direction of the moderator for that state. We will arrange your introduction to them.

Volunteer Form

In the meantime, create a FamilySearch account if you don't have one. Set your account preferences and create your user page.

Projects Needing Help

Help Wanted - United States

Want to help on a specific U.S. State? Click on a state on the map below to go to its Help Wanted Article.

Additional Help Needed On The Wiki

Outside of State and Country Projects, the projects below involve work that a volunteer can work on with minimal training:

Add information to your county and/or city pages.
Prepare county histories - county section of each state.
Repositories - what's in a repository of genealogical interest ... U.S. Canada.
Outside company providing content ... we are putting in the wiki for formatting.
Write about Migration Trails - Which Counties and Towns they went through in both the U.S. & Canada.
Write articles for links that are in red.
Write articles of little known research methods for various parts of the world.
Need Moderators to run projects for places around the world
Join our support team.
Wiki Projects seeking contributors
Wiki Cleanup Projects
Add Categories to articles

In addition to these projects, additional projects that volunteers can easily do are listed below:

Add links to the David Rumsey Map Collection for the state or county in question. For an example, see the Pennsylvania.
Add each state or county's creation date and parent states/counties. This information can be found using the Place Search in the Family History Library Catalog.
Add links to digitized state and county histories. A large collection of such histories is Brigham Young University's Family History Archives. A shortcut to searching it for local histories is on the BYU-FHL Digital Books Collection page.
The Research Wiki is also available in ten other languages. You can help by translating pages into one of the other languages.

What tasks could a beginning contributor do?

Start simple

Find pages that could use some TLC, such as Stubs, or Short Pages. There might be a section in these articles that you could enhance by adding content, or even just spell-checking.
Are you interested in a specific area? Could you add research tips to pages in that area that are in a specific section of the article, such as cemeteries?
Another possibility would be to watch genealogy blogs for press or news releases that could be added to the Wiki, if they're not time sensitive.
Could you check for broken links or add categories to pages?

US County pages

Is there something specific that is missing from several of them?

Examples:

Suppose several County pages are missing information about local libraries. Could you use an internet site, such as PublicLibraries.com to locate the libraries for each county and add the link to the page?
Add links to the Family History Center pages, if they're missing.
How about looking for county histories on Googlebooks or Internet Archives and then adding them to the County pages?

Projects

There are several on-going projects in the Wiki. There will be information for areas where help is needed. Many of the tasks would be good for a beginner.

Other Help Wanted Projects

Add information to your county and/or city pages.
Prepare county histories - county section of each state.
Repositories - what's in a repository of genealogical interest ... U.S. Canada.
Outside company providing content ... we are putting in the wiki for formatting.
Write about Migration Trails - Which Counties and Towns they went through in both the U.S. & Canada.
Write articles for links that are in red.
Write articles of little known research methods for various parts of the world.
Need Moderators to run projects for places around the world
Join our support team.

In addition to that, here are some simple ways you can add information other researchers need!

Add links to the David Rumsey Map Collection for the state or county in question. For an example, see the Pennsylvania.
Add each state or county's creation date and parent states/counties. This information can be found using the Place Search in the Family History Library Catalog.
Add links to digitized state and county histories. A large collection of such histories is Brigham Young University's Family History Archives. A shortcut to searching it for local histories is on the BYU-FHL Digital Books Collection page.
The Research Wiki is also available in ten other languages. You can help by translating pages into one of the other languages.

If there are other areas of the FamilySearch Wiki you would like to volunteer for, we have a Wiki Help Wanted page that lists additional projects and areas where help is needed.