Australian maintenance categories, including Wikitree+ stats, October 2020 [closed]

Question

In June 2020, I wrote my first of a series of G2G posts checking in on Australian maintenance categories, using Wikitree+ statistics. In June (or maybe a month or two earlier), I had started improving a bunch of Australian profiles by adding scant biographies to profiles without one (see an example previously referred). The idea was these profiles are now ready for sourcing (for an example, sourcing as simple as this), and for extra information of a more familiar/interesting nature to be added (these sorts of morsels).

Australian maintenance categories, I thought, were a great way for a Wikitreer interested in contributing to improving Australian profiles to organise his/her/their work. Maintenance categories mean a Wikitreer can target the type of work fancied in the moment, to improve our shared tree. I'm a firm believer that we don't need to do everything at once, but if we use categories we can flag to come back (I 'flag' all the time - especially if I'm looking at Wikitree profiles on my phone! I'd much rather do research/serious writing on my PC!).

I'm also a believer that maintenance is no-one's 'responsibility'. As Wikitreers, our only 'responsibility' is to adhere to the Honor Code. For this reason, and because I think location-based improvements are valuable, I'm now firmly against the idea that personal categories should be the only location-based maintenance categories for Australian profiles. So I'm sad that this post will be one of my last to mention a few categories that I use/d a lot to organise and drive my improvement activity:

• Category: Australia, Needs Biography was decommissioned in mid September, and will  make way for Australian 'profile improvement' categories. I am aware that many Australian profiles still exist that do not have a biography, but now, if a Wikitreer wishes to add Aus biographies, this process must start with sorting through a higher-level category: Needs Biography (currently contains 7760 profiles). Location-specific categories remain for France, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand and more. 
• Australian maintenance categories of the type '[state/territory], Needs [birth/death/marriage] Record' are being deleted (see related G2G post from 23 September by Margaret Haining). By now, all have been depleted of profiles and deleted except the Victorian versions of these, which currently hold the following counts:
  • Category: Victoria, Needs Birth Record has 3072 profiles
  • Category: Victoria, Needs Marriage Record has 259 profiles
  • Category: Victoria, Needs Death Record has 1865 profiles
• New categories in place of '[state/territory], Needs [birth/death/marriage] Record' are '[state/territory], Needs [birth/death/marriage] Source Researched', but we're not to use these unless we have searched for the source and failed to find it. Which means if a Wikitreer is browsing Wikitree (say on their smartphone) and spots profiles that need maintenance, but does not have time/browser capacity to research and add the source, they must use generic higher-level categories. Similarly, if that Wikitreer wished to do a blitz adding Victorian marriage records, they would have to gingerly search through the higher-level 'Needs Marriage Record' category (not an easy task, so I can't imagine this will get done at all anymore?). The higher-level categories I refer are: Needs Birth Record (currently 2930 profiles), Needs Marriage Record (currently 1538 profiles) and Needs Death Notice (currently 1180 profiles). 
• There are some Aus maintenance categories that have not been updated and are soldiering along:
  • Category: Australia, Needs Profiles Created has 1661 profiles for building on/connecting!
  • Category: Australia, Needs GEDCOM Cleanup has 120 profiles for dedicated cleaner-upper-ers
• A new category that I noted for the first time last month is getting big and is already generating some very interesting category improvements: Category: Australia, Immigrant Needs Voyage Category Added (1208 profiles)

Lastly, a shout-out to the Source-a-thon for profile improvement. According to a 7 October G2G post by Gillian Thomas, Australian team members sourced 2349 profiles, wow! 

Previous related G2G posts:

• June 2020, Aus maintenance categories
• July 2020, Aus maintenance categories
• August 2020, Aus maintenance categories 
• September 2020, Aus maintenance categories

Answer 1

"if a Wikitreer wishes to add Aus biographies"

If they go to this Australia Project page, they'll find:

Where to Find Australian Profiles Needing Improvement

• Australia and State Unsourced Profiles
• Australia, Profile Improvement - Orphans: A category for adding to orphan profiles we come across that need or could do with any type of improvements. Any Wikitree members can add this category to any orphans and any Wikitree members can work on these profiles, using the guidelines outlined above.
• The Australian Suggestions List, see the following sections and suggestion numbers:

• Biography: 802, 803, 811, 853
• Profile Completeness: All numbers, particularly 467 (Short Biography)
• Wikidata: All numbers.
• Other specific profile improvement categories 

With over 14,000 profiles in the Unsourced categories, related to Australia, there's plenty of scope there for anyone wanting to add sources and biographies to Australian profiles.

"Australian maintenance categories of the type '[state/territory], Needs [birth/death/marriage] Record' are being deleted (see related G2G post from 23 September by Margaret Haining). By now, all have been depleted of profiles and deleted"

Those categories were renamed to the new categories, and the profiles were transferred across to the new research categories. Currently 397 profiles for Australia and 6 states for the 3 b/d/m research varieties.

Comments

Margaret, I had a go with the suggestions list - it was nowhere near as good for me as the maintenance categories. I did get to add biographies to a few profiles, but many more were privacy protected so there was nothing I could do about them. The numbers of profiles in these categories is quite small.

Regarding the profile improvement orphans, most already had a biography.

I figure if there are biographies for profiles that exist, when new profiles are created they're more likely to be created modeling existing standards. I KNOW there are bunches of Aus profiles out there without biographies, but with these changes, it's far hard to find them to address this. The new categories may suit some better, but I don't agree that the old categories needed to be scrapped, even if I was one of the few people using them at this point in time.

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I guess it may be relevant here. I'm starting to, at Margarets suggestion, add to all of my Australian profiles. Not adding the word DONE of course, until it is done.

==RESEARCH NOTES==

* BDM Check DONE

* Grave Check Not Done

* Parent Check DONE

* Children Check Living

* PROV Check DONE

* NAA Check DONE

* Trove Check DONE

* ADB Check DONE

'''Updated! This is what I'm doing now.'''

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Sorry Clare, I'm a bit confused, if you're looking for profiles to add biographies to, I would have thought the 14,500 plus Unsourced Australian profiles would give you plenty to choose from, (that's why it's at the top of the list). I would think there was a lot more candidates in there than was ever in the old Needs Biography category.

If you're looking for somewhere to put profiles you've flagged, to work on later, as you mentioned in your post, wouldn't a personal category be more useful? Why would you want to put them in with 100s/1000s of others where it would be hard to find them again? Wasn't that why you set up your personal category for needs biography, (where we transferred the ones from the old category into), so you had somewhere to park ones you'd flagged to work on later?

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Ben, that's particularly useful where you've added one you have trouble finding a source to one of those research categories. The person looking at it then knows where you have already looked.

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Hi Margaret

Thanks for the suggestion, but many of the profiles in the Unsourced category actually already have biographies, just no sourcing. So if I'm in a 'biography' mood, the wading is no fun :(

And regarding the personal categories, I don't want the burden of personal categories of the maintenance/scut type, I just want to be able to pitch in and help out in a collaborative way.

And Ben, Margaret, your research notes idea is a good one, helps people know where has been searched when trying to improve a profile, thank you for sharing.

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I have to agree with Clare.  The unsourced profiles don't always need a biography (although some do), but require sources to back up whatever facts are stated.

I feel it is wrong of the AP to dump this category and to require us to instead use personal categories for it.  By the time we have added personal categories to the profiles needing biographies (and we should not be adding PCs to profiles managed by other people), we could have written the biography twice over.

As someone who is on the PI Team for the AP (without ever being told I was), I am disappointed in this path being taken by the AP.

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Not my original idea, I cannot take the credit, Help:Research Notes

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There is no restriction on using personal categories on profiles, only for Pre 1700 or Project Protected profiles. Any subcategories must start with the WIkiTree ID, ie. not be "normal" categories. Help:Personal Categories

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It's never too late to change it back and re-introduce the 'needs' categories at the state level for Australian profiles. I would be thrilled if this was the path taken. Is there any way that I can influence the Australia Project to make this change?

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I'm working on a family, which I want to put in, as a G2G opportunity for people to come and say what they do, so we can firstly, share what we do, to get a better idea, and secondly, give newbies an example to follow.

I have learned so much already, and can see that there is still more to learn, so hopefully this should help a lot.

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I sware you're practising for another A-Thon Clare. I can't believe how many profiles you have gotten to today.

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I've had a look around G2G questions, trying to find a starting point for Newbies to take advice from how to build a profile from scratch, and I'm not really finding one. So I have created a real family, put the absolutely basics in, with all the basic BDM sources I can find, and I am just about to phrase a G2G question, to try and get people to come and give advice on how they like to build profiles. I have gotten 31 children or grandchildren in, to give us an option of possibly creating a competition, for Aussie wikitreers to adopt one of the profiles, and try and see who can make the best looking profile, out of a basic one, so that newbies have a place to come and look at what can be done.

Thoughts???

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The Profile Improvement Project has information on this topic and examples of well written profiles.
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:Profile_Improvement

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Fair enough. Never mind.

Actually, it isn't fair enough. All of these projects and menus are buried where no one sees them, and they are so hard to find. At least if it was presented as a G2G, then people have an opportunity to look at different ideas. I like on your example profile, how you put a bold heading on every source. I don't know when I first saw that,  but I have implemented it everywhere. I like to someones full name in bold at the beginning of their biography, rather than just a first name. I don't see anyone else doing that. I just noticed over the weekend that people are listing their children using dot points. I hadn't seen that before, yet I think it looks better, and I will copy it. To do something like I have suggested above, will give lots of people the opportunity to see better suggestions, and copy them.

How is the profile improvement project going, when virtually no one knows where it is?

And in case anybody wonders, the family I just put in, is a random family I found on a cemetery listing, which I have no connection to.

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put a bold heading on every source

commented by Ben Molesworth

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I've been doing that for ages .. not to the degree in Leandra's example profile, but still bolding to make them obvious which source it is.

I number the children when it's more than five, use : indents for others, and simply name them in a sentence if it's only a few.

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There's a post in G2G about the Profile Improvement Project and how to join. It comes up in my feed regularly.
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/583757/profile-improvement-project-pip-what-we-do-and-how-to-join

I've recently stopped the bolding on my sources. I go through phases and try different things when I get ideas from the profiles of others.

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I have my own "templates" for adding frequently used sources -- Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, New Zealand, GRO UK, Scotland's People, Ryerson, Aus Cemetery Index, etc.  (I used to also have one for Trove, then I started using the MLA  citation as provided, because it best fits the style used by fs and FreeCen (which claims to be WikiTree preferred).)

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I have a list of citation examples that I use as a template too - called my Cheat Sheet.

I've also recently started using ORA (the Online Repository Assistant) and it's the Cat's Whiskers. As I review my profiles I'm improving the sources and at the same time, I'm also fixing sources in my offline Legacy file. It saves a lot of time.

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Well, both of you have thrown me on that. I have no idea. As is, I'm going to have to try the auto bio generator, now that I've just found out about it this week.

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Well, I have no "cheat sheet" for when I do things such as this one : https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Rodgers-5683, but I still bold the (what I see as) important source notes (birth, marriage, death, census year), so they are easier to see in the wall of text that are sources at the bottom of a profile.

Annie, on the other hand, only got census and death highlighted, because I haven't done too much using Papers Past (New Zealand's version of Trove) and have yet to figure out the best way to have the news items stand out.  https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Kells-296 

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We have spent a lot of time trying to do research on https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Morris-20373 , I have done the bold on all the sources, which I have been doing with all my profiles. But I also bold the important people in their lives, even though without the bold it would at least be green & underlined. I have just changed the children to dot points for the first time. I haven't worked out how to space them in yet, but may need to. I'm in two minds about bolding family members, because without it, it looks like it needs to be broken up somehow, but with it, it looks like it might be too much. Eventually, it would be nice to go through all the profiles, and break them up with pictures and maps, etc. But I don't know how yet, and it'd be a lot of work. This is how I've put the Trove articles into a lot of profiles. The only ones I haven't done like that, are when the number of Trove articles is rediculous, like https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/molesworth-184 , and have summorized what the articles are about, and linked the typed out articles in the sources below. There are so many, I haven't finished them yet.

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For the news item, how about creating an image with it? Then you can play with fonts and coloured backgrounds to complement the rest of the profile.

This was directed at Mel, btw. Nice profile too. :-)

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I could certainly screen shot news articles. I like the idea of that. I've just started playing with putting pictures in, but don't understand what I am doing yet. And I'm not sure about fonts and coloured backgrounds yet either, but it sounds great. I was quite taken, earlier in the year, when I looked at the profile of another wikitreer, and saw all the boxes they had in their profile, with different information or photos in each box. But, because they were living and active, there was no way of working out how they did it, because you can't click edit on someone you aren't on the trusted list for.

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Ben, what do you mean by "space them in"? Are you referring to indents? If so, put : at the start of a line to indent, or :: to indent further.
It's easy to read as it is. I like it.

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Ben, instead of those humongously long Trove links, try using the MLA citation as provided by Trove. 

For your #14 :

"Family Notices" The Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954) 31 July 1952: 8. Web. 13 Oct 2020 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article206221340>.

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For the news item, how about creating an image with it? Then you can play with fonts and coloured backgrounds to complement the rest of the profile.

This was directed at Mel, btw. Nice profile too. :-)

commented by Leandra Ford

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Thanks.

I have created copies of newspaper items, and gravestones (especially when I don't have a photo of them), but was pretty tired after hunting down that family.  Then finding Annie's tragic story -- I didn't go to bed because I was doing up her profile.   (Yeah, yeah, I know I'm certifiably hooked on "getting it right".)

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Took me a little bit Melanie, to work out what you meant, but I've worked it out now. You're right, that's much better.

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When Leandra and Margaret share a story it's gotta be worth looking at. Who can resist the Cat's Whiskers?