What are you comments on Categories for Swiss Sources [closed]

Question

I am working on a project which I may be using categories with. The scope of the project is over a single Swiss Province.

This is a project that is about transcribing source documents.

Each family name (ie REGLI) has a book which contains families from around 1600 to 1900's. The families are numbered.

My plan is to create a Category for each SURNAME Stammbuch.

Further, I would like to create a category for each family. 

SURNAME Stammbuch FAMILY#.

The profile of a father would go into a family with his parents and a separate family with his wife and children. He may also be listed with his wife's family and her parents and siblings. 

The reason this structure works for me is this: By looking at the main SURNAME Stammbuch I can identify which families have been transcribed and which ones have not.  I will also be able to navigate from one family to the next by number which is very important when navigating these records. IE Often the number of one's family is given in their spouse's family book. It is much easier to find Joesph Walker family 53 than to simply find Joseph Walker born around 1710-1740. As the record does not contain birth information for spouses, only a family number, a duplicate may have to be created until the family can be identified by opening the book and hunting through it to find the family then identifying a birth and seeing if the individual exists. If I was able to create a new key (category) I could easily see if WALKER family 53 had been created and who was in it. 

I am planning on nesting these categories under both One Name Studies if they exist and the Uri Province categories. 

I experimented with creating a listing of families on a page of its own, but I can see it will quickly become too large and unwieldy to be of use. 

Please let me know if this is problematic and if it is, why. 

I believe it is a similar approach to how we categorize the US Census pages. 

Please see the Regli v. Goschenen Stammbuch for an idea of what I have discussed.

Comments

might start with the Uri Canton as OPS, and as you progress in this you could refine it with sub-cats that warrant it by number later, not an extremely big change then to move profiles to lower location category.  Or might simply leave it as a study of the Canton and add specific location categories to the profiles as pertinent.

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OK. I think I have it fixed and named correctly here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Uri_Province%2C_One_Place_Study

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IS it a place study, though? I don't see a free-space page for it. Categories are not what a place study is. You have some pieces of a place study, but not an actual place study.

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Not sure, but as Daniell said, they fit best in a place study.  At least the categories are named correctly and if a place study gets started, the sources will be there correctly named. Rome was not built in a day, piece by piece. At least the foundation is correct.

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I have decided to use the advice of Natalie and Danielle and nest the sources under a One Place Study.  Thanks for all your input.

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I guess all you are still missing from what Natalie said is a page for the place study, the page explains fully what it's about and gets linked to appropriate OPS category.  Categories as such should only have a brief blurb about what they are for.

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https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:One_Place_Studies

Perhaps contact the leader, Lance. She can guide you along.

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@Natalie: Strangely, the Switzerland Project setup their individual canton pages as category pages and not as space pages. So when I offered to coordinate Valais, they said to put stuff on this page:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Canton_of_Valais

It seemed unusual to me, but I went with it. Does this go against a WikiTree policy?

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not sure if it goes against a WikiTree policy, but looking at it, it has a fair bit of data on the category page which would be better in a space page, from my understanding of what Category project has been asking for.  Minimal data should be on category page, source links etc would belong on space page.

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That is correct Barry. They had us set them up very differently back then and I think they are in the process of changing them to the new format.  They need a leader in the Swiss project to coordinate it.

Answer 1

If the categories are part of a name study, there needs to be a name study and the categories end with ", XXX Name Study'' so that they are identified as name study categories.

Surnames are part of name studies, obviously, but not all surname categories are part of a name study.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Regli_v_Gosch_Stammbuch that category should be named [[Category:Regli v Gosch Stammburch, Regli Name Study]]

Comments

The problem with that renaming is that if there is not a name study associated then the names would not be consistent.

this is more a place study of the uri province but if there is a name study they can be added to it as well

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The problem here is that the Census categories are not really anything official and these categories are surnames. If they're not associated with a name study or a place study, they're your own personal project, really. There is a category for surname research. Perhaps the categories belong there.

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What do you mean the census categories ate not anything official?  Are they being taken away?  I was just contemplating today how useful they would be in transcribing and creating profiles for people on a census in a certain area. This is important to cast a net for brick walls.

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Perhaps if the problem is the name is not long enough or needs to belong to something other than the province maybe I should create a nee  project called the stammbuchs of uri province?

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Each family name (ie REGLI) has a book which contains families from around 1600 to 1900's. The families are numbered.

This is a source. You should create a free-space page for that source and include it in the name study by categorizing it as such, and you can categorize the page to the province. Then you don't need a bunch of categories. 

I'm throwing out all of these options because the way you are naming the categories at the moment is not correct.

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He categories are necessary to show where in the source the profiles fit and which potions of the sources have been indexed and profiles created

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I created a category to follow the rest of Europe for [[Category:Switzerland, Sources]] and put the Stammbuchs in it.

Answer 2

I don't know how strict the categorization project is about creating such categories, so someone else can weight in. But another option would be to make them personal categories, which won't show to other users:

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

These are not generally used for pre-1700 profiles, but it sounds like most of your profiles will be later than that.

Or you could arrange this all with space pages. You can create a space page for each family number, say, and then one or more "index pages." That is the organization of some one-name studies -- thousands of family group sheets, with indexes, like 

• family group index, that lists each family group, sorted by number
• given name index, that gives the names of heads of families, which would give something like 501:07 if they were the 7th child in family group 501. If the person also heads their own family group, that number would also be listed in this index. Does each Stammbuch have a numbering system within each family number? 
• spouse/partner index: for each person in the study, it lists partner's name, dates, and the family group number for the family of the partner's parents

I guess it would have to be modified, since I've seen this with individual nuclear families as the numbered units, but it sounds like your numbers apply to much larger extended families with the same surname.

Comments

Natalie if you worked with the records at all, you would understand how it works. It was why I made an example of the Census records. Imagine you have a brickwall in small town in Indiana. You could use the Census category to narrow the 1880 census to that town, or better yet, to every page in that town's census. Then, you can begin a project of entering everyone in that town into wikitree by creating a profile and also adding it to the page of the census. Every time you returned to that project, you could see where you left off. If you had a team of volunteers that was also interested in that town via a one place study, you could coordinate the work of entering the profiles of the 1880 census.

 A free space page for the source sounds like the right path, with the source listed both on the surname study page if they exists and the one place study.

The question is, creating a category for the Stammbuchs themselves seems to be the sticking point. The category tool works for this application and it seem that it is better to leave these categories outside of the purview of the categorization project so as not to complicate the naming structure for official categories.

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Here is a linked census, done on a freespace page rather than with categories.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:1774_Rhode_Island_Census_Project:_Warren

Someone created a more general "census project" and started doing this with US census records, but you'd need a huge team of volunteers to get very far.

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Yeah. I tried this approach and saw that it would become unwieldy very quickly.  The data does not need to be retyped as the census information there is, as wikitree has fields for all the information (birth, death, marriage, locations). The only information missing from wikitree is family number which is needed to navigate.  Putting the family number in a profile biography or listed as a source does not make it easy or practical to find a family that has been created from these sources.

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When I spoke about census categories I was referring to something like this which I would divide further into towns and pages.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:1900_US_Census%2C_Humboldt_County%2C_California

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Since this is for your personal use, does it not make sense just to throw all of the information into your own personal spreadsheet, so you can sort various ways and query various things? I have lots of spreadsheets with Wikitree data, like Wikitree IDs, etc.

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Re census categories: yes, but those are officially recognized with a vetted category structure. My point was only to illustrate how people have also organized census data using a space page approach.

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This is not for my personal use. This is for people who are researching families in Uri Province. The Stammbuch are public official records and the family numbers are unique to each family.  The goal is to get people who are interested in this area of Switzerland to work together in a methodical manner to index these records. I do have other wikitreer's interested in this project.

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Then it makes sense that you posted, so that you can go through the standard vetting process of the category structure. Since you have tagged both the Switzerland project and Categorization project, hopefully someone from the latter will chime in about whether your suggested structure looks reasonable. I think what you just wrote will be helpful for the Categorization project people to understand exactly what you are suggesting.

I wish Wallis had such an organized collection.

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Yes. that is Natalie

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@Barry Smith, no the census categories are not standardized by any means. Someone created a space page to explain the naming, but it was never approved and is not official.

Answer 3

I have decided to use the advice of Natalie and Danielle and nest the sources under a One Place Study.  Thanks for all your input.