Does the Wikitree identifier have a GEDCOM equivalent.

Question

My primary local family tree database is done in MAcFamilyTree (V10) - but I am also trying to keep it synchronized (Manually) with Ancestry, FamilySearch and Wikitree.

MacFamily has the ability to add "facts" to a person - including things like bloodtype, height/weight email address and others - it would appear that many of these have GEDCOM equivalences - I was thinking about adding the unique Wikitree identifier (i.e. Quodling-1 - me)  into my MacFamilyTree database, using the "add facts" - this gives the ability to tie this to a GEDCOM tag - Is this identifier already in the GEDCOM definition, so that I give it the right Tag?

Answer 1

Probably not. You can read the Gedcom specs here.

I personally doubt it will be feasible to add any software identifiers to a standard. What if that software package is no longer developed? Also note that some (like me) consider Gedcom to be dead: it no longer serves a good purpose with modern technology.

A common way to go is to create a fact/field and add the WikiTree ID in there. Note that the name identifier at WikiTree is not stable; the URL will redirect to the current identifier though.

Answer 2

Hi Peter. I believe you could use something like

0 INDI

1 REFN Quodling-1

2 TYPE wikitree.identifier

I think both the REFN and the TYPE fields are user-defined and free form, possibly with a maximum length (20 characters for TYPE? REFN, 40 for TYPE). This would be similar to the GEDCOM files downloaded from WikiTree, which use subrecords like

1 REFN 123456

2 TYPE wikitree.user_id

1 REFN 987654

2 TYPE wikitree.page_id

Study of the specs Michel linked may give more information.

Edited to add: character limits, from GEDCOM 5.5.1 spec pages 63 and 64 (PDF).

Comments

I also had the same idea and started adding the url to my data. However I found that there was little value to do this and I stopped.