WikiTree Community Blog

Here’s another interesting issue that Fay and Joanna brought up.

At the risk of sounding insensitive, Fay asked about what would happen “if some 80 year old comes in here and makes a massive tree then kicks the bucket?”

First, some background for new WikiTreers who might be reading this. WikiTree’s unique privacy and permissions system is based on “Trusted Lists”. Every profile (usually of a person, but it could also be for a pet, place, event, etc.) has its own Trusted List. Anyone on the Trusted List has full permission to view and edit the profile’s data.

One person on the Trusted List is designated as the Profile Manager. This is usually the WikiTreer who created the profile. The manager gets the request when someone new wants to join them on the Trusted List.

So, what happens if the Profile Manager dies? For that matter, what about the less morbid and probably more common scenario where a Profile Manager forgets about WikiTree when they change their e-mail address? Access requests start to bounce.

I’m ashamed to say I don’t have a good answer for this yet. The best I can say is that if you suspect a situation like this you can contact me personally and I’ll try to resolve it.

We will need a policy for this. Maybe it can be based on a certain amount of time going by without a response to an access request. If the Profile Manager ignores requests (for whatever reason) the request could go to someone else on the Trusted List. If there is nobody else on the Trusted List, it could go to me.

Any thoughts on this?

Fay and Joanna brought up a bunch of issues in their comments to my “Upload pdf files as images” post. I don’t have good answers to some of them and decided I should try talking them out with you.

Here’s one that I puzzle over. Joanna wrote, “I’ve come across bunches of people with birthdays like this (August 4, 1824/1825) and guess what? Yep, I gotta pick ONE year because WikiTree doesn’t let me put both years in. Sometimes I find ‘born aft. 1692′ and can’t add that either. GIVE ME SOME LEEWAY, CHRIS! You’re so inflexible with history.”

One thing WikiTree does have, that I haven’t seen on any other family tree tools, is a “certainty status” radio button by each field. That is, you can mark a date as certain, uncertain, or intentionally blank. This way if you’re not sure if a birth date was, say, 1824 or 1825, you can choose one and mark the field as uncertain.

Another thing you can do is use the free wiki space section to explain this in more detail. For example, you might write, “The birth date is marked as 1824 but it could also be 1825. It’s based on the self-reported age of 66 in the 1890 census …” or whatever.

All fine and good, you say, but how come the date field doesn’t just allow text like “1824/1825″?

My reasoning: real dates, even guesses, make automatic matching easier. Text fields vary so much (”about”, “abt.”, “circa”, “ca.”, “around”, etc.) that they’re tough to match.

In another post Fay and I talked about how to know whether one John Denman is the same as another John Denman. Birth and death dates, of course, are an important part of this. Our system will be able to compare “1825″ with other dates, but a text field that says “1824/1825″ or “abt. 1825″ won’t be interpreted.

We’ll also be working on other ways to use dates. You might want a timeline for your family. Or maybe you’d want to call up a list of all your family members who were born in the 1820s. Who knows. Having real dates will make all this easier.

That said, our system isn’t perfect. Handling of dates can and will be improved, I’m just not sure how yet.

In addition to the “about” and “after” type dates that Fay mentioned, I’d like WikiTree to be able to handle decades. You should be able to say someone was born in the 1820s if that’s all you know. Forcing you to choose a date like 1825 when you really have no idea of the exact year is far less than ideal.

Anybody have suggestions? Have you seen other tools that do this sort of thing especially well?