Review of FamilySearch Family Tree
I've been using FamilySearch Family Tree for almost 9 years and have posted a review at https://genealogytools.com/should-you-contribute-to-the-familysearch-family-tree-a-review/. I invite constructive input from this community, especially anyone who works for FamilySearch. There are many good things about Family Tree but several drawbacks that prevent it from being a good option for those who want to contribute to a collaborative family tree. I hope that FamilySearch will adopt some of the best practices of similar collaborative family trees, such as profile managers and curators.
Keith Riggle
Answers
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It's perplexing to me that you consider FS's sourcing to be one of its drawbacks. I find the source attachment methods available here to be vastly preferable to every other online tree service I've tried, both collaborative and individual, and both free and subscription.
From what I can tell, it's basically impossible to attach sources on Geni. This is one of several reasons I've given up on that site completely.
On WikiTree, you have to learn (or remember) their flavor of markup. In other words, it's coding -- the polar opposite of "easy" or "user-friendly". (I have to switch back and forth between keyboard layouts to do anything there. It's tedious.)
MyHeritage's and Ancestry's source setup is similar, I think, in that both expect you to enter each source before you can cite it, which is confusing at best: what constitutes a "source"? Is it the website (FamilySearch), the collection (Hungary Funeral Notices), the index ("Hungary Civil Registration"), the church or registry office (Felsőlövő, Vas county, Lutheran), the film number (or digital image group, now), or something else?
And most importantly, not a single one of these sites offers anything even remotely like FamilySearch's "Attach to Family Tree" button on unindexed images, which allows you to attach a citation to everyone in someone's immediate family, in one fell swoop. (And if you remember to save it to your Source Box, then you can also attach instances of the same citation to all of the in-laws and witnesses and whatnot, saving hours of retyping, and meaning that if you find and correct the typo when you're on Uncle Bob, it'll be fixed on Grandma, too.)
Granted, there are things that FS needs to fix with its sourcing setup. Tagging is the most glaring gap: the current framework only applies to the Vitals box, meaning that neither relationships nor conclusions under Other Information can be properly sourced. (Another gap is in the aforementioned linked-citations setup, which is neither properly labeled, nor extendable under most circumstances.)
All in all, though, I put FS's sourcing setup firmly in the "plus" column.
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