Help:WikiTree Team
Categories: WikiTree Help | WikiTree Team
The success of WikiTree is based on its community of volunteer genealogists (see the member gallery for a few of them) but there is a small team that supports the community.
Contact the WikiTree team at [email protected] or use this Private Message form. Please note that this is not for "customer service." As a free, volunteer-based website, we don't have a customer service team to answer questions. If you have a question ask it in our community's Genealogist-to-Genealogist (G2G) Forum. For more personal one-on-one assistance, a volunteer mentor may be able to help you.
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| WikiTree Team and Community Members at RootsTech 2020 |
Paul Bech, Project Assistant
Long before becoming a team member, Paul Bech was one of our earliest active volunteers. He helped pioneer the usage of free-space profiles and categories, created the Genealogy Help section, leads the Australian Convicts and First Settlers project, and took it upon himself to create this video introduction to using WikiTree.
If you're dealing with an Unresponsive Profile Manager or a 150-year-old profile that isn't being openly shared, Paul is the man to contact.
Paul has been tracing his genealogy for over 40 years. He focuses on his Oxley and Standen lines (both from Kent, England; came to Australia in 1839 and 1841), and his Hayes, Wall, and Bech families (from Korsor, Denmark).
His wide range of other interests include photography, astronomy, "bushwalking" (that's Aussie-speak for hiking), cycling, bowling, and science fiction.
Abby Glann, Wood Owl
Abby is a wise WikiTreer with seven years of experience in our community and five years of experience on our team. You may not see her, but she is always working to help members with account problems and advanced community issues.
When not on WikiTree, Abby works as a small-town librarian. Her family maintains a small hobby farm and homeschools their children.
Abby is a big sci-fi/fantasy fan. So much so that she gives the farm animals names like Chewbacca, Thorn, and Princess Pi, and came close to naming her daughter Eowyn, for the Lord of the Rings character. (It's a good thing she didn't. Can you imagine a poor girl growing up with that name?!)
Eowyn Langholf, Forest Elf
Eowyn Langholf, whose parents named her for the Lord of the Rings character, is our "Forest Elf."
Calling her a Forest Elf enables us to be vague about her responsibilities. This is important because she does so ... darn ... much ... including an overall responsibility to make sure that things that need to get done by the team get done. If we wanted to be more professional-sounding we could call her a team manager or general manager.
Using some sort of elven magic, Eowyn somehow finds time to edit and write for our blog ... host our Facebook and other social networking pages ... greet and mentor new members ... act as an Arborist and G2G integrator ... initiate and lead a bunch of projects .... We've stopped trying to track everything she does. It's a fool's errand for a mortal.
Eowyn has many years of genealogy experience, starting at a young age when she was tagging along with her mother who was volunteering at a family history library, and including three years as a professional genealogist.
Jamie Nelson, Community Technology Assistant
As a volunteer, Jamie created two useful apps: the brick wall finder (accessible from your Tree and Tools page) and the missing link finder (accessible from links on Special:Unconnected). She has also been a star community member who leads projects, helps others, and generally exemplifies the WikiTree spirit.
As a team member her main responsibility is to lead the WikiTree Apps Project and encourage the creation of more independent apps that use our API. She is also in charge of tracking and prioritizing improvements and bug fixes, and helps with pre-release testing.
For more about Jamie see her blog interview.
Sarah Callis, Community Assistant
Sarah is the newest member of our team. She joined us in March 2019.
Sarah has helped resolve member problems for years as a volunteer Mentor and Mediator. Now she's also helping to resolve the toughest escalated conflicts.
Julie Ricketts, Community Assistant
Julie has been heavily involved in essential WikiTree projects such as the Greeters and Mentors for years. She now helps administer Mentors, Rangers, Moderators and Mediators and supports the people who work so hard to keep the tree safe and fun.
When she's not answering emails, you can usually find her wandering around the tree and falling down the occasional rabbit hole.
For more about Julie, see her "Meet Our Members" interview from shortly before she joined the team.
Aleš Trtnik, Independent Project Developer
Aleš's contributions to WikiTree have been immense, and he's opening up new possibilities for the community every day.
Aleš has leveraged his background in big data to analyze WikiTree's public database in creative ways. The center of his work here is WikiTree+ and the Data Doctors Project. Although the project is based entirely on Aleš's work, it's not just his exceptional technical abilities that make the project special. He listens to other members and attempts to give them what they need to improve our shared tree.
Aleš started the Data Doctors Project as a volunteer with no official connection to WikiTree, and is continuing to run it independently.
As a team member, he's ranging across the entire landscape of our operations. He's finding innumerable ways to contribute, including with GEDCOM processing and search. We don't know where his work will lead, but we expect that when the history of WikiTree is written, Aleš will be described as a transformational figure.
Chris Whitten, Founder and President
Chris has been leading online communities since 1994. The first was a non-profit organization for connecting libertarians called Free-Market.Net: The Freedom Network. In 2002 he started the collaborative Q&A site FAQ Farm, also known as WikiAnswers, which later became Answers.com and, for some months, one of the top 20 websites in the world.
In 2008 Chris dedicated himself to the ideal of a free collaborative family tree — something to connect the human family and to make learning about your genealogy completely free and accessible to everyone. This is a lofty ideal, but it's not just puffy fluffy rhetoric. The WikiTree community is now making it a reality, and Chris has pledged to keep WikiTree free. He works hard alongside all the WikiTreers who share the mission.
Chris's own ancestors are from New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland — before that, all around Northwestern Europe. He grew up in Massachusetts and has lived in New York, Chicago, and London. He now lives with his wife and daughter in the far northern suburbs of New York City.
Brian Casey, Chief Technical Guy
Brian is our system administrator. Our lead programmer. Our hacker-in-chief.
Brian's programming experience goes way back to his Commodore 64. He can proudly boast that programs he wrote for that system were published in COMPUTE!'s Gazette. Literally, published. This 1980s print magazine published programs in their machine-readable form.
If you only read human languages you're probably more familiar with Brian's other published works, such as "The Spectroscopic Orbit and Subsynchronous Rotation of the Herbig Ae/Be Star TY CrA." Not human-readable enough? Then you've certainly seen his bestselling novel, Eclipsing Spectroscopic Binary Systems in Love. (Just kidding.)
Brian has a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin. Lest you think this genius never gets outside, he's also an avid soccer player. And he enjoys time with his family researching their Irish roots.
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| Jamie, Aleš, and Brian |
Contacting Us
Contact the WikiTree team at [email protected].
For personal messages you can also use abby@, ales@, chris@, eowyn@, julie@, paul@, or sarah@. Please do not send the same message to more than one of us. If your message isn't for one person in particular, use info@.
If your message doesn't have to be private use G2G instead. G2G, our genealogist-to-genealogist community forum, is where most questions are answered. Since we're such a small team — and we have to keep it this way to be a 100% free website — members generally answer each others' questions.
This page was last modified 11:01, 22 November 2020. This page has been accessed 39,606 times.