I fully agree that a genealogy website needs structure (parent/child/sibling/event etc), though there should be room for free-form narrative as part of any individual's page.

Familypedia has been using Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Forms (which will, we trust, be upgraded eventually by our host so that it has the current name "Page Forms") since 2009. It has over 60,000 articles about individuals and tens of thousands of subpages automatically displaying people's ancestry trees or descendant tables for four generations (subject to data availability). Example at http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Charlemagne/tree It can do complex-looking searches such as tabulating (in a way that allows sorting by a particular column) all Familypedia people born in Pennsylvania whose father was stated to be born between 1849 and 1875: http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki/demo_query-subquery And it has pages for several thousand places (villages, counties, nations, etc) automatically tabulating the people who had events such as birth and marriage at the place.

However, I also agree with one or more correspondents that such a wiki should be able to handle GEDCOM files. Familypedia people have tried, with little success.

So on the Demo wiki I've asked for semantic extensions to be made available and I will start agitating for programmers to work out how to import GEDCOM files and siphon their data into individuals' pages with minimum duplication. A tall order, but several big genealogy websites have ways of doing it, generally by alerting the contributor to apparent duplications and offering to merge the individuals' pages. The WikiTree experts may be able to help there. Probably WeRelate people can too.

Robin F. Patterson, Plimmerton, Porirua City, New Zealand

http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/User:Robin_Patterson

(I hope you folks are pleased that I cut off all of the earlier stuff; I hope other contributors will similarly trim so as to leave little apart from the points they are answering.)