Genealogies of Bahá'ís on WikiTree

by Donald Osborn and Vicky Majewski

About: WikiTree is a free-to-join site built on a modification of the MediaWiki software with a relationship database plus a separate discussion section. The bio sections of profiles permit free text (in Wikipedia-style markup) entry of biographies, research notes, and references to sources.

The premise of WikiTree is a collaborative single family tree in which every person profiled has only one profile. This differs from sites like Ancestry, where people build their "own" family trees and there may be multiple instances of one individual in different trees, sometimes with differing information. There's already quite a number of profiles of Bahá'ís on WikiTree, mainly from the 20th century. Most of the work on those has been done by Vicky Majewski, who did an intro to her work in a podcast on Graham Hassall's YouTube channel.

A recently emerging challenge is how to appropriately handle profiles and genealogical information about the Central Figures of the Faith. It always was inevitable that the Central Figures would be featured on genealogical sites, and this has happened mostly in a respectful manner on geni.com, for example. [-D.O. & V.M., 2022]