level-of-effort when merging profiles' "sources"

Question

I see a future that involves a lot of merging for me. I would like to and will eventually have time to return to the profiles in question and clean up their citations, removing references to Ancestry.com Family Trees, etc. and replacing with better sources.

But in the short run, I'm inclined to somwhat blindly combine long sets of non-sourced references into one list with a note that says that this is intended only as a temporary condition until time can be spent doing a "bang up" job on the sources.

The reason I'm inclined to do this in the short run is because it seems the lesser-of-two-evils (where the greater of the two is allowing duplicates to hang around any longer than it takes to identify them as duplicates).

Please don't confuse my putting off the merging of this type of reference with my intent to get the individual data points (dates/locations) as accurately represented a possible given the information at hand. The question is really just about what to do with all of the citations that come from gedcoms and point to people's personal trees as if they're sources of truth -- it seems a good chunk of the profiles that need merging are abandoned and of this variety.

Thoughts? Any particular strategies you all use or are recommended generally? I ask because anolther part of me is tempted to immediately ditch sources that are clearly just personal tree stuff and leave citation_needed notes.  Is it bad form to remove such crud that seems to have landed from other folks' casual use of GEDCOM imports when the profiles is unmanaged? What if some of the merging profiles *are* managed? Do we need to ask before removing these "false" sources? Or is the honor code strict enough to say, "just eliminate it, it's not even a source at all"?

Thanks!

Daphne

Comments

I would love to know the answer to this as well. Almost every merge I do, that is from the general pool, includes gedcom sources. I always combine the biographies and do the basic cleaning up, but I'm hesitant to delete gedcom sources since I don't want to step on anyone's toes.

Answer 1

I think, if you want to do the merge and just combine the list of junky sources as a temporary that's fine.

If you can take the time, check to see if the links take you anywhere and eliminate any that go nowhere.

I frequently combine them into one blanket statement, "This profile was created from unsourced Ancestry/Internet trees"

If you have legitimate sourcing, maybe you could add "The profile manager has better sourcing, not yet entered here, please contact her for sources." Of course if you're still working on finding sourcing don't add the last sentence

Comments

I recently 'adopted' a large number of orphaned profiles and almost every single one has citations form a GEDCOM. I am still trying to understand what they do let alone where it can or could take me. I am currently leavinf it up until I can educate mysle a bit more. At that time, one at a time, they will be updated. Thet were orphaned so I dont feel that if I do delete anything of the already existing information, I wont be stepping on toes. Im glad I came across this question!!!!

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(Anne, thank you for your answer!)

Kelly, if the reference is clearly to a primary or secondary source or some other thing which is not just someone's personal family tree GEDCOM, I'd keep it.

If the reference is to a tree and has a link, I follow it to see if it works at all and if so I look to see whether there is a clear and valuable source associated with key facts.

If none of those are true, I consider the reference to be in the category I described as problematic (ok, "cruddy") in my question. :)