Phrases used for proper first or last names?

Question

I stumbled onto Clark-7006 which stumped me for a bit. After scratching my head for a few minutes I did a search for profiles with the word "children" in the first name slot. The result came back with 189 profiles fitting the criteria. The search engine only allows you to see the first 100, but that was plenty.

Most aren't too bad, but "Aelia Pulcheria (stepmother w/o children; took vow of chastity)" whose last name is given as "The_Eastern_Roman_Empire-1" seems extreme . . . . and this practice carries on for her entire family. {as this involves pre-1700 royalty maybe it needs a specialist to look at it?}

I also found 47 instances where the LNAB contains variations of short phrases with the word "children" rather than a name (only one instance of Children as a proper LNAB).

I guess 236 instances of this isn't too bad considering the size of the WikiTree, but it shouldn't be ignored either. Some of the profiles shouldn't be too hard to fix (Mrs. Eastern_Roman_Empire for example), but many of the other first name oddities give me a bit of a pause. They cannot be fixed by merging as they supposedly indentify multiple children without names, let alone any documentation. I know that it is policy that profiles should never be removed once created, but maybe this is an excepton?

Would it be possible to set up the proper first name and last name at birth fields so that they will not allow phrases or multiple words to be entered? I don't know of any reason to allow an underscore in either the first or last name at birth fields, such as The_Eastern_Roman_Empire's.

Comments

I'm speechless after surfing that family a bit!

That Jane Martha Clark looks like she could outdo any current day soap opera or reality show for shock value!

That family with 20-some-odd children would sure envy her with all the named children in addition to the linked one covering presumably many more.

Then I looked at two children, both named James.  They were born a year apart, but to different fathers!  The father of 1 of them had several wives (some that appear to be duplicates) but none of the wives were good old Jane.  What a Jerry Springer show that could make!

Answer 1

That's a doozie, John! I'm thinking profiles like this need some sort of maintenance-cleanup category, so that they can be worked through over time.

Category:Absurdly Named Profiles  ??

(can't we have a little bit of fun?)

Note that probably most of these profiles were added to WikiTree before some checks and balances were put into place.

I suppose it's technically feasible that it could still happen -- Eowyn??

In any case, these should be changed.

Comments

Jillian,

Ilike your idea. I have run across a few of them myself but could not find out any information on the profiles and had no idea about what to use for better names so I just left them alone.

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That is how I "handled it" Dale, (for want of a better term) . . . but just leaving them alone cannot be the final resolution if we are trying to stay true to the Honor Code. I wouldn't think it was an issue if the phrases were in the preferred or nicknames slot as indicated the style guide, but they should not be left "as-is" in the FNAB or LNAB slots.

I like Jillanie's category idea as a joke among friends, but I'd worry about the managers who created the profiles getting upset about being the butt of the joke. Besides which I'm not at all sure just putting these profiles in a category like that would get them corrected, along with the possibilty that some people would actually seek out the chance to get added to the category by creating totally deranged profiles.

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John B's right... sigh. I'll have to find my fun elsewhere. ;-)

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The worst part is most of these profiles have managers who are at least somewhat active and have the privacy levels set to some form of the private setting so we can not do much anyway.

Answer 2

John

I just did the same search and took the first open profile I found to try to do a search for more information. Unfortunatly it was named Seven Children Dickirson and just doing a Family Search using the last name, parents first names and a birth year range starting at the fathers 20th birth year and streching 20 years I found more than 13 names that could apply. I could start entering profiles but being unsure if they belong to these parents I am hesitating.

Comments

When I first started looking I was of the mindset that, Hey, I'm an aborist . . . there are "only" 189 profiles like this, shouldn't be too big of a project to tackle. Then I opened up a few of the profiles . . . .

Nope, not alone will I enter this fray! 

 

 

As a side note, we really need a larger selection of smilies here. I chose "indecision", but I'd rather have used something indicating "confuzzled".

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John I am not an Arborist and I am somewhat limited on time until after the first of the year but I will try to help as much as I can.

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Answer 3

On this particular profile, I'm unconvinced that this profile actually represents a PERSON. Given that there is absolutely no further info about this "person" AND we already have a list of the children for this couple... why don't we just merge it away into one of the other profiles?

Also, I tried to find SOMETHING substantive about this family (Benjamin Clark and his wife). It looks like most of what's out there is based on Ancestral Files, IGI, Ancestry.com GEDCOMs. I.e., NOTHING decent. It's a horrible set of profiles.