WikiTree and Geni: Sharing a GEDCOM to a Collaborative Tree

WikiTree and Geni are structurally different from every other platform in this series: both maintain one single shared tree across all their users, rather than separate private or public trees per person. That single detail changes what "importing a GEDCOM" even means on these two sites, and it's worth understanding before you try to upload a large file to either one.

Why neither platform does a bulk import

On FamilySearch, Ancestry, or MyHeritage, uploading a GEDCOM creates or replaces a tree that's yours. WikiTree and Geni can't do that in the same way, because the tree you'd be adding to already has millions of other people's ancestors in it, potentially including some of yours. Importing your file wholesale would risk creating duplicate profiles for people who are already documented — which is exactly the failure mode both platforms are built to prevent.

WikiTree: GEDCOMpare, not upload

WikiTree's tool for this is called GEDCOMpare. Rather than importing your GEDCOM directly, it compares your file against WikiTree's existing shared tree and shows you the most likely matches as you go, adding people to WikiTree one at a time after you confirm or reject each suggested match. This is slower than a bulk import, but it's the mechanism WikiTree uses specifically to avoid the duplicate-profile problem described above.

There's a hard limit to be aware of: GEDCOM files with more than 5,000 people cannot be uploaded to WikiTree and need to be split into smaller files first — see the Tree Splitter if your file is over that. Separately, if you're exporting your own connected data back out of WikiTree rather than importing into it, that export is capped at 10,000 profiles or 15 generations, whichever comes first. Uploaded GEDCOM files are also automatically deleted from WikiTree's servers 60 days after you last used them to compare, create, or edit profiles — don't treat an uploaded file as a permanent backup on WikiTree's end.

Geni: generation-limited import with match-and-merge

Geni's GEDCOM importer works on a similar principle but with different mechanics. On a typical import, only the first five generations of ancestors from your chosen starting person are brought in initially, along with their siblings, and the import will not go back further than the year 1600 under any circumstances. As the import proceeds through a branch, Geni checks each person against profiles already on the site; when it finds a likely match, the import pauses and sends you an email notification, and you have to resolve that match — confirming a merge or rejecting it — before the import continues into that branch.

Export limits scale with account type: Geni caps GEDCOM export at 5,000 profiles for Basic accounts and 50,000 profiles for Pro accounts. If your goal is extracting a specific line to bring into Geni rather than your entire file, keeping the import scoped to a single branch — using the Tree Splitter to isolate direct ancestors or a specific descendant line — will generally get through the match-and-merge process faster than pointing Geni at a large, broadly-branching file.

The common thread: expect a matching workflow, not a file transfer

If you're used to platforms where a GEDCOM upload is a single, mostly-automatic action, both WikiTree and Geni will feel slower and more interactive by comparison — that's a deliberate design choice tied to maintaining one shared tree rather than a gap in either platform's tooling. Before starting an import on either site, it's worth reading Duplicate Individuals: How They Happen and How to Find Them — understanding how duplicates form in the first place makes the match-confirmation prompts on both platforms faster to work through, since you'll recognize which suggested matches are genuine and which aren't.

Sources: WikiTree — Help:GEDCOMpare; WikiTree G2G — GEDCOM limit of 5,000 names; Geni Help Center — Is there a limit to what I can import into Geni with a GEDCOM?; Data Mining DNA — How to Upload a GEDCOM to Geni, and Avoid Pitfalls; tamurajones.net — Geni adds GEDCOM.