Bio Check App - Version 1.2.0 New Features

Question

Bio Check App Version 1.2.0 is now available. This is a tool to help you find profiles to improve.

A full description of changes and new features is provided in the Bio Check Help. Major new features include:

• ability to check descendants for a profile
• ability to report either profile status or source details

What are profile status and source details reports? The profile status is one line per profile, with the Sourced? status and style issues. The source details report includes one line per "source" for each profile. Each line has a Count. The count is -1 when the profile has no lines that might contain a source. The count is 0 when the line contains a possible source that does not include a clear identification of where the information came from. Otherwise, count is the line count for a line that might contain a source. Since the app considers each individual line as a possible source, old GEDCOM imports may have a number of "possible" source lines that are not really sources.

If you have questions, find bugs, or have suggested enhancements, please answer rather than comment -- thanks!

Enjoy but be forewarned that this may send you down some rabbit holes....

Comments

Here is the link to the prior discussion (versions 1.1.0 to 1.1.2):

Prior Discussion

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 Saw this in the Wednesday FamilyTree Family News and clicked on the thingie ... go-to thing ... and it checked my watch list, open profiles only due to the option I selected, and it found ONLY 13 items I need to look at among the 3,100+ profiles 

Not sure what I should be more impressed with, your skill in developing this app or my profiling skills ... let's go with your app development skills, that's an impressive tool, Kay 

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Thank you so much for this great App Kay. It makes it so much easier to maintain 'good practice'.

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Love the descendant checking now. Thanks.

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Kay, Many thanks for developing this app. I found it excellent to use.  I gained in confidence as I worked my way through the names.  What a great help.  I really value your input. 

Answer 1

Kay, thank you for your continuing development of the app. I have found it useful already, and now I’ll need to try out the update!

Answer 2

I have been using this to identify which profiles I manage need fixing and/or updating it is very useful.

I use it in conjunction with WikiTree+.

Answer 3

Thank you for the improvement. Can't wait to try this out.

Answer 4

Question to all:

Check Open profiles only is selected by default.

Would you prefer that this not be selected by default?

I know that I find myself unclicking this a lot.

Comments

I think having that as a default makes sense. There's plenty of profiles to fix that are open. Maybe a user setting to set the default?

Answer 5

That is fantastic Kay. Thank you for connecting it to the watch list, that gives me some profiles I can work through this time. Great Work!!

Answer 6

Love it!! :) Thank you for all your effort to get this working.

I checked. Then I tweaked some profiles. Then they no longer appeared on my report. Nice one

Answer 7

Follow-up on use ... the first time I used it got a list maybe 1.x dozen and I've just finished dealing with those items 

So having added umpty profiles in the last 5 days or so, I ran it again and no list was generated. Oh?

So I tried it again. Either it is functional and miracle of miracles I have no profiles to "fix" ... or it isn't functional  There's no message says "Temporarily defunct. Take an aspirin and try again tomorrow."  so I assume it is functional. And I've gotten Good News!! 

Marvelous app, easy to use click on the go-to and the rest, barring a login now and then, is a "cake walk" 

Comments

Sounds good. Maybe a bug, maybe not. When you run the check, there should be 2 lines below the buttons that tell how many profiles it examined. This shouldn't be 0. If it is, let me know and I'll see if I can recreate this.

Also make sure that Check Open Profiles only is unchecked.

Another way to check that everything is tested is to change Profiles to report All profiles -- or Sources for All Profiles.

And, if you are checking your Watchlist and it's fairly large, well glad you have the patience to wait for it... I think you will probably get the more recently created profiles if you change Check starting at to something like 2000 (assuming you have about 2900 on your watchlist).

Then you will be almost ready to move to another way to check fewer at a time -- for How to find profiles select Check Profile, then put in a profile (e.g., Name-XXX) and check several generations of ancestors and/or descendants.

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oKay kAY Kay ... (I could have fun with that ...) I will run the test again and take note ... 

I am still convinced this is a wonderful app and still think Major Appreciation ought to be heaped upon you for devising it 

Answer 8

I checked this out and found it worked fine. In my case I feel that it is not that useful for me. I do search profiles on my watchlist and add sources as well as fix style problems but the system I use uses no apps and is easier for me to track.

It is a good app and I had no problems with it but I doubt that I will use it again anytime soon.

Answer 9

Hi Kay,

Thanks for creating this app. It's been beneficial for me in identifying/correcting style issues in profiles on my Watchlist.

Most of the profiles on my Watchlist get flagged with "Unsourced: Maybe", which I understand to mean possibly unsourced. The profiles that I've checked so far are all sourced, using in-line sourcing in the Biography and Research Notes sections, and all the in-line source citations are appropriately enumerated under the Sources section. And there don't appear to be any outstanding source/reference-related Suggestions on the profiles that I checked.

Here's an example profile: Georg Martin Haushalter (1801-1876)

The "Unsourced: Maybe" designation may be related to the fact that the app ignores content in the Research Notes section, which is where the source abstracts and named references are defined.

Is there a way to generate the report excluding the profiles that are flagged with "Unsourced: Maybe"? Both the "Unsourced and Maybe Unsourced" and "Unsourced and Style Issues" versions of the report appear to include profiles flagged as "Unsourced: Maybe".

Comments

Rick,

Glad the app is of use. Nice profile, by the way.

Yes, he shows up because the sources are buried under Research Notes. The app follows https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Biographies#Optional:_Research_Notes which says "share information about genealogical research, as opposed to information about the person's life". That way it will find those profiles for which there really are no sources, just some research. That is what you have under Research Notes before the "Source record abstracts"

So... you could either just ignore the report or move the Source record abstracts to the end of the Biography.

Sorry, there's no way to suppress the "maybe" unsourced from the report. The whole focus/intent of the app is to find unsourced profiles. Style issues just happened to fall out of the process for finding sources.

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Hi Kay,

Thanks for the response and the kind words.

I view the source abstracts as information about the genealogical research (transcriptions/translations of the source documents) vs. the story of the person's life. That's why I believe that they belong in the Research Notes section instead of the Biography section.

I'll just ignore the "Sourced: Maybe" information in the report for my Watchlist. The other report info is still useful to me. I can check periodically to ensure that the report continues to show: "profiles with 0 style issues; 0 marked unsourced"

Thanks, again!