Please do not make personal comments on prominent profiles!

Question

This is just a general reminder for both old and new WikiTreers: if, through either your own hard work or through the relationship finder, you discover one of your ancestors was an important historical figure....your own profile page is a perfect place to celebrate that connection. You can perhaps put a list there of your most favorite and/or famous ancestors. The comments section on the profile of the historical figure, however, is intended to aid collaboration by the sharing of concerns about possibly unreliable sources, research questions, and additions of new sources as they are discovered. Most of these historical figures had thousands of descendants! If even a small percentage of them posted a comment that "this is my xxx great grandparent" on the profile, then comments with actual research questions are likely to become buried and liable to be overlooked. Please reserve these personal comments for your own profile page.....it would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

If you want to note on your own profile that you have x-person as an ancestor, you can always use the descendant sticker.  Examples using my own ancestors :

{{Descendant|id=[[Paul-5414|John Paul (senior)]], and [[Hughes-16131|Tempest Margaret Hughes]]}}

or a single ancestor :
{{Descendant|image=Paul-5402.jpg|id=[[Paul-5402|Judge George William Paul]]}}

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Great idea, Melanie!

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People might review my post from three years ago about this exact topic.  There were some good comments.

Answer 1

Besides the suggestions made by others, members can always create free space pages to list some of the ancestors they have, and celebrate their connection with them.

I usually archive comments of the kind Jen Hutton mentions if a Project I lead manages the profile, so that they do not get in the way of seeing comments that contribute to work on the profile.

Answer 2

:You could also put a link to that person's profile.

Answer 3

This has been raised many times and I often write personally to people to ask them not to do it. Many simply continue and there are so many examples of this that I can understand why they think that I am the one who does not understand Wikitree.

I think it is important to confirm whether Wikitree agrees with the many of us who keep posting these requests.

Comments

As a leader of both the Wikitree European Aristocrats Project and the Medieval Project, I send numerous PMs to people to let them know that we don't use the comment section of other people's profiles to note our personal relationship.  As Jen noted in her post, these HSA (historically significant ancestors) have hundreds of thousands (or millions) of descendants.  The place to note your relationship to someone is on your profile -- not theirs.  I posted about this three years ago:  https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/428097/noting-your-relationship-on-someone-elses-profile-dont-do-it

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Beautifully said! Maybe we just need to give this a bump every few years!

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Maybe this policy, if we can call it that, needs to be pushed out more prominently to new editors etc. But honestly, although I have never seen much disagreement when it is raised on G2G, we all know G2G agreement does not make something a policy. So I still wonder if this concern is being supported by Wikitree as a whole.