Categorization- 9,000 profiles in a name study category?

Question

Again another WikiTree member is adding hundreds of profiles to a name study category without proper followup. A profile should be worked on to see how it matches the name study. Then, theoretically, the category should be removed from the profile. I propose there be a limit to how many profiles one can add to a name study.

Comments

@Ros Haywood: Instead I do need to work out the connection to a one name study so I can properly manage the profile. I don't blindly accept changes or additions to a profile. I need to verify why changes are made to the profile and if they are correct. You can't just add anything to a profile without a valid reason. By the way, I found out the connection.

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I would like someone to state a specific concrete example of what a one name study has accomplished for any profile of your choice. Please include the profile identity.

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Take a look at my Haywood Name Study. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Haywood_Name_Study

Scroll down its space page, and you will see many Haywoods who are Notables, or Early Namebearers, or orphans, or others.  They are linked, so you can take a look at those profiles.  What the ONS has done for them goes from creating a brand new WT profile, through to images, connecting them to their families, and more.

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I just remembered that no more than 5 category tags can be placed on one profile. Please correct me if I am wrong.

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It is five stickers maximum on a profile. There can be any number of categories on a profile.

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I would like someone to state a specific concrete example of what a one name study has accomplished for any profile of your choice. Please include the profile identity.

See Hollenkamp-13, together with Hollenkamp-45, Hollenkamp-15 - YDNA study ascertaining a 1620s patrilineal relationship.

See further the profiles listed on https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Hollenkamp_US_Immigrants for a fairly complete list of US immigrants by that name (still WIP)

Also check out Hollenkamp-245, and Hollenkamp-123 for two deeply researched profiles, and also the pair Hollenkamp-34 and Hollenkamp-268 for whom their relationship was proven, which was not known to the individuals at the time according to a newspaper article.

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I don't understand this thing about finding the connection to the ONS. It should be the LNAB. That's all, right?

Edit - possibly last name by marriage or apparently by ancestor, but I can't find any specific guidelines on that, including in then ONS guidelines page. When I started my ONS, I thought I read something that it had to be LNAB only.

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https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:One_Name_Studies_FAQ_Page#Should_I_include_females_and_adoptees.3F_What_about_for_those_that_married_into_the_family.3F

I suppose there could be another exception.  Tracing the DNA of a surname will sometimes turn up a different surname.  There are DNA studies on WT, but I don't know enough about them to be able to state anything authoritatively.

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This has been a fascinating read for me.  You all are so much more advanced than I am.  I have a question/comment to add:

There is a ONS for Urban. I have Urbans in my immediate family (mother) and earlier and as I've worked on their profiles using the fabulous WikiTree Sourcer tool and the AutoBiography function to do a first pass at the Bio,   WikiTree Sourcer (I assume that's what is doing this) adds ONS:Urban category automatically (presumably because it indexes the surname with the ONS list).  However, there is no Manager of the Urban ONS and when I first visited the Space Page for it there were about 5 or 6 profiles until I started entering my family tree.  Now I make it a point to add the category on my own when editing Urbans already on WikiTree or ones I add.  

My question is:  Am I wrong to add the category and/or sticker if I'm not on the ONS project membership?  Or is it good WikiTree practice to add new profiles you create to ONS if there is one?  OR do I need to read the space page before I do so?   It's all very confusing.

As for my novice two copper......I like seeing every possible profile that appropriate to a ONS as it's fascinating to see the distribution graphically on a map of a given surname.

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5 stickers.  A profile can technically have an infinite # of categories.  There is a help page that explains it.  I'll find it and add it when I get to my computer.

Answer 1

The whole point of a One Name Study is to study ALL the bearers of a specified name.  You can hardly do that if an ONS is to be limited. And even if a profile is categorised, then studied, it would be counter-intuitive to remove the category, because the technical process of the WikiTree system is that a category includes the profile into the ONS.

I would be only too glad if I had 9,000 profiles in my ONSs.  A girl can dream, right? LOL.  I know of one Guild member who has 52,000. (The Guild of One Name Studies is an organisation separate from WT.). There are probably more than 9,000 of that particular name in the world, and an ONS is worldwide.

Answer 2

If you look at the One Name Studies Project page, you will see a few things that a Studier looks at:

• Name origins (or earliest references);
• Name meanings (are they matronymic, occupational, patronymic, toponymic, etc.);
• The relative frequency or distribution of the surname;
• Patterns in migration; and
• Name variations and specific name branches.

Not just individual profiles. :)

Answer 3

Why should the ONS category be removed from the profile?
What harm is it doing that it needs to be removed?
ONS can be limited to people with the name by birth, or by marriage, or include all descendants, as decided by the ONS.
 Common names such as McDonald will have a massive number of potential profiles, other names like Frankish (a regional Yorkshire name) will be comparatively tiny, how can a realistic limit be set? and what is the justification?
 Your post doesn't even follow the change proposal process.

Comments

@Gary Burgess: Thank you for your answer. What is the change proposal process?

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https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Developing_New_Rules

But I wouldn't recommend that you propose limiting the number of profiles that can be contained within an ONS.  It's like asking a tennis player to play without a racquet, or a racing driver to drive without a car.  Just not workable.

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@Ros Haywood: Thank you for your answer. Now I understand about proposing a change and limiting the number of profiles. I just hope people are playing, driving and studying; not just collecting.

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Actually, collecting is the first and arguably most important step, and one that's continually ongoing. Thomas MacEntee is credited with developing "The Sevens Cs" for genealogical investigation, and for the studies I've undertaken I modified those slightly into "The Seven Cs of One-Name Studies": Collect; Curate; Calculate; Create; Connect; Conserve; Continue.

I believe something fundamental in this Question is a possible misunderstanding: one-name studies can include genealogy and pedigrees (you probably won't find any of the Guild's 2,254 registered studies on WikiTree that don't include pedigrees), but that's only a portion of what one-name studies are about. Here's an example, as an image file, of a Venn diagram I did for the Threlkeld ONS. Family histories, pedigrees, and artifacts (like unique documents, photographs, audio recordings, etc.) comprise only one of five elements of the study.

The foundation of ONS really began with the Guild of One-Name Studies and its start in 1979. Here's a good, but brief, introduction to what one-name studies are: https://one-name.org/one-name-studies/.

The Cliff Notes version is that one-name studies are not equivalent to genealogy. They really have nothing to do, explicitly, with WikiTree profile improvement or individual biographies, and aren't even solely focused on pedigrees or descendancy.

I first joined WikiTree because of my Threlkeld ONS. It offered a free toolset and collaborative environment for the pedigree and genealogy portion of the study, something for which I'd previously been using an application called WebTrees. For an ONS, this is a notoriously difficult aspect to manage for collaboration (understandably so, since most volunteers are generally interested in their own family), and WikiTree, for me, offered the best solution. It was several years later that WikiTree implemented its own version of one-name studies and, happily, it was designed with a great deal of flexibility for the administrator to define how a study would be structured and where its efforts would be focused.

I agree with many that utilizing the sticker on profiles for one-name studies can be intrusive and should probably be restricted only to those profiles of some particular interest. I admit that some profiles in my studies still bear stickers because, in the early days of WT ONS, that was the standard practice. But since the Categories were moved a few years ago to the bottom of profiles, I can see no reason that name-study categorization should be an issue.

That said, I'll also note that there are differences of opinion about whether or not individuals collaterally associated with the surname (e.g., by marriage or adoption) should be considered part of the actual ONS. In my case, I opt not to include them; only those born with the surname or known variants.

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@Edison Williams: Thank you for your thorough answer. I understand what you said. I now understand why a one name study is unfortunately not always confined to one surname.

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Without collecting information about the daughter's descendants using DNA triangulation to provide some confidence or corroboration of the researched tree becomes much harder.
 Two of the ONS I manage are family names that trace back (so far) to restricted geographical areas, in one case a parish in Cornwall. The DNA results from descendant's of the daughters are potentially quite valuable for tracing the spread of the family and fitting missing branches into the structure of the names dispersal.
 For that reason I have seperate geographical subcategories for those who have the ONS name, and those who are descended from the name.

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I include females who marry into (say) the Haywood ONS.  For example: say Jane was born Hill, then married a Haywood at age 17, then died aged 77.  She has spent 17 years as a Hill, but 60 years as a Haywood.   All of her children were Haywoods, and her life events after marriage were as a Haywood.  So in she goes.

Answer 4

Name Study categories are in place to group together profiles of interest to researchers for a surname. This is an important part of each study.  Putting limits on or removing categories defeats the purpose of the study altogether.

Answer 5

"Worked on to see how it matches the name study"?

Isn't the criteria of matching a name study that the surname matches the study?

There's not a lot of work to determine that.

I've flagged every profile that with the surname "Garrigues", "Garrigus", or "Garrigue" as part of the Garrigues One name study. Some of these individuals are orphaned with the hope of connecting them to the tree. Some of them have been connected to the tree due to research that I've done. It's been valuable to know that I probably have every Garrigues in a given time and place in the study because I can figure out by a process of elimination who might be related to who.

Comments

@Chris Garrigues. Thank you for your answer. What you are saying makes a lot of sense and I am glad you are helping the profiles named with variations of Garrigues.

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This is much harder to do with a more common name. Different one name studies work in different ways, largely depending on how common the name is.

I have some Smiths in my tree for whom I wish someone would do what I've done for Smith, but it would be totally impractical.

Answer 6

Karen Brubaker perhaps could have done a better job of stating her concern in her question.

I'm not sure if my understanding is correct, but it appears that the closest "Skinner" ancestors of Sinclair-2486 were born hundreds of years ago.

I agree that every Skinner profile can and should be added to the Skinner one name study. But 10,000 (or whatever the real number is) Skinner 9th great-grandchildren who haven't carried the Skinner surname for generations should not be added to the Skinner study (unless it's to a very specific sub-project).

Caveat: I didn't find how Sinclair-2486 descends from a Skinner - so either I misunderstand the relationships or Karen's point is very well taken.

The solution isn't to set new rules, but to educate the user who was adding extremely distant non-Skinner-surname descendants to the Skinner one name study.

Comments

The relationship does exist: eighth great granddaughter. See

https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Special:Relationship&action=calculate&person1Name=Sinclair-2486&person2Name=Skinner-232

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Thanks, Jim. In this particular case, then, the closest Skinner is five generations away - a third great-grandmother. Assuming no pedigree collapse or duplicate surnames, there are thirty-two different ancestor surnames at that level per profile.

While I don't think WikiTree needs a new rule to stop this, I would consider it very rude if somebody started adding one-name study categorizations to my profiles that are five generations distant.

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Maybe the person was doing a DNA study?

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Not necessarily DNA, but it looks like there are four specific "descendants of" subprojects in the Skinner ONS: descendants of Britton Skinner, John Skinner, Richard Skinner, and Thomas Skinner.

Since the subcategory can't be added without the ONS category also being in place, it looks like this particular Question actually deals with the subprojects chosen by the Skinner ONS to pursue; that it isn't really about one-name study categorization per se.

Because WikiTree allows considerable latitude on the part of a ONS to establish particular areas of interest or focus, it seems any type of guideline change would be one surrounding that latitude of choice, not about a numeric limit on ONS categorization.

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Perhaps a suitable addition to the guidelines could be something like the following:

So as to ensure that other WikiTree members will understand why profiles they manage are being categorized by your study, it is important that the study free-space page fully explains the goals of the study and the criteria for and purposes and benefits of categorization.

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yeah....if you're adding people who never carried the name to the ONS, then you're not doing anything useful with regards to a ONS.

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What is "useful" is up to the people running the study to decide. My point is that they should think carefully about it and document what they are doing, so other people can understand it and know why categories are being applied.

Answer 7

@Karen - you might like to have a read of this page to answer some of your questions:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:One_Name_Studies_FAQ_Page

Answer 8

The manager of each ONS can choose which profiles they want included.

• For the studies I manage, one of the things that I'm trying to determine is whether the surnames I'm studying each arose in one place and spread, or whether they arose independently in multiple places, so I ask people only to add the ONS sticker (and therefore category) to the first profile in each line, so it's east to remove it from a head of line whose line gets connected to one with earlier ancestors.
• One of the managers of a ONS for on other the other surnames in our family tree asks people only to add the sticker for ancestors who migrated from Europe to North America.

But yes, I am one of those who assumed that only people for whom the name being studied was their Last Name At Birth would be included, yet I found a bunch of people for whom it was their married name added to one of my ONSes. So I removed them, and explained why in the change notes.