There is a perennial question that pops up on G2G regards quantity or quality.

Question

I find that the perennial question that pops up on G2G regarding quantity or quality usually misses the mark.  Quantity and quality speak of two different and separate issues.  To me, quality refers to the profile AFTER the collaborative and bio-building processes, whereas quantity refers to the profile BEFORE those processes.  Both are needed on WikiTree.  Having said that, the quantity issue and creating profiles very much requires sufficient detail for others to identify who that profile is: Unknown as surname is almost impossible to identify, as are profiles that give no hint of basic location.  Whilst not being able to list a town or suburb, at least include the state and/or country even if not marked as certain. What are your thoughts?

Answer 1

No profile should be created without a source. But not everyone understands what you can consider as a source.

Adding a profile with just a first name because he or she was  in a christening record for a child isn't enough to confirm a birth,  marriage or death for the parent. But leaving the information on the child's profile is essential.

I have profiles created by a GEDCOM import in 2011 which I would not have added had I known then what I know now.

Anyone adding anything for someone who died before they were born should not be able to add personal knowledge as a source as they could not have been a witness.

Everyone needs to consider that if they've made an error they could have been researching the wrong family.

Would you really want to spend years working on a family with no connection to yours?

Adding locations is key to getting an accurate picture of who they were and where and how they lived.

Comments

Agree entirely with all you have added, Hilary.  I am guilty, however, of 'spending years working on a family with no connection to' my own.  Whether good or the opposite, I have time on my hands, having physical disabilities and living on my own.

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I spend too much time on here working on other than my own family but that is just helping others.

But if it is my own family I would be even more careful to add the correct information.

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I'm the opposite - when it is NOT my own family, I work 10-times harder to ensure everything I add is as accurate and as complete as I can make it.
Which is not to say I don't do that for those who are my family, because I work really hard on those, too.  I just may take a few "shortcuts" when creating the profiles, because the records are more elusive due to the privacy cutoff for public release.

Answer 2

Agreed and I think I should go back through my watchlist to see what basics I'm missing because I know I have some surnames, if not given names, missing in my database but I don't think I added them on WikiTree if I don't have basic info; especially profiles I've adopted.  Name, birth date and place, death date and place, although birth and death info, particularly of in-laws are often missing.  Most people show up, at least, on a census here and there.

Answer 3

Quality should never be sacrificed for quantity. That is not to say that every profile needs to be perfect in every way.

I agree with you to a certain extent. Where I disagree is about using "Unknown" as the surname/LNAB for married women. If you know almost everything about them except their LNAB and have multiple sources for them after their marriage (censuses, inclusion in Wills, tombstones), I think it is appropriate to add a profile for them using "Unknown" as the LNAB. If you just want to use "Unknown" because you haven't even tried to look for a LNAB or if you have no sources, that is a different matter.

Answer 4

I agree that WikiTree needs both quantity and quality.  I think the question comes up repeatedly because our virtually nonexistent and unenforced minimum quality standard overwhelmingly favors quantity.  The strategy seems to be "Let's get as many profiles as possible onto the site regardless of accuracy or uniqueness.  Our volunteers will swarm them and improve them and merge the duplicates and eventually achieve quality." 

In practice, unskilled or irresponsible members can create sub-standard profiles unimpeded, much faster than others can bring them up to standards.  A profile with no locations and a promise to provide a source tomorrow takes seconds to create, and one member can create hundreds of such profiles per day.  It might take hours for another member months later to figure out the locations and add a few solid sources.  In other words, it takes hundreds or thousands of times more work to fix a substandard profile than to create one.  We don't have thousands of volunteers available to clean up after every member creating poor work.  The inevitable result is that good quality profiles after collaboration become a smaller and smaller percentage of all profiles as time goes on.

WikiTree is earning a reputation for quality on par with FamilySearch and Ancestry trees, with an added aspect of "despite claims of superior accuracy."  That will only get worse as the rising tide of poor profiles drowns all the good work our volunteers provide.

Comments

I must admit that I do get a little annoyed when I find one of those "teleported" Swedish families in WikiTree. In my experience, when you look at them, they are usually part of of a tree sourced by "FamilyTree handed down to PeggySue" or "Source will be added by Peggy Sue before 31 August 2020" (unless it's an Old GEDCOM). It would be easy to believe that this is only done by Peggy Sue with Swedish Roots or Swedish Inlaws, but in the latest case, which I  have fresh in mind, I looked it up at MyHeritage, where I have a research subscription, and the exact same misconnection was repeated in about fifteen trees with Swedish managers. Smartmatching systems don't seem to encourage critical thinking. And people copy each other. In this case I believe that a brickwall for one family (with sources hard to find) had been grafted by smartmatchinto a same-name family in the other end of the country with easier-to find sources (somewhere at the beginning). A couple of wise managers had left the brickwall a brickwall.

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I've got a family tree constructed in 1934. As I incorporate it into my main tree I check it against reliable sources. It's such a radical idea.

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Sourced profiles are generally easier to check for accuracy. Good quality citations also train good attention to detail. That's a very valuable skill in genealogy.

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If I read correctly, another reason not to require people to source profiles is that they might get it wrong.  In the examples given, it seems to me the incorrect sources highlight the nature of the problem and help suggest how to solve it.  They therefore do add some value, and at least the members who added them tried. 

This "sources could be wrong" rationale is not currently part of the official guidance for not requiring sources.  Is there any discussion of adding it?

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Not very long ago a person edited information for a profile I manage, when I looked at what had been done, I was not happy, then I looked at what seemed to be the reasons for the edit.

The end result was adding a 3rd daughter to a family based on research that was done because of the errors made by the person who made the edits.

I had the parents and sources for the other daughters, and a profile for the person who became the 3rd daughter but nothing that connected them.

So, yes on some occasions mistakes can lead to positive results.

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If I read correctly, another reason not to require people to source profiles is that they might get it wrong.  In the examples given, it seems to me the incorrect sources highlight the nature of the problem and help suggest how to solve it.  They therefore do add some value, and at least the members who added them tried. 

This "sources could be wrong" rationale is not currently part of the official guidance for not requiring sources.  Is there any discussion of adding it?

If you think that page is official guidance on not requiring sources, then no, you are not reading correctly. A source on WikiTree is where someone got the information, even if that source is something like a family tree that doesn't cite its sources. Disagreeing with WikiTree's definition of a source does not mean that the guidance is for not requiring sources.

But that page does explain what I've been trying to say -- the reason WikiTree does not require "good" sources for pre-1700 is not that it values quantity over quality, it's because it wants people of all genealogical skill levels to be able to use WikiTree to collaborate with their cousins. Sources are important so others can check how accurate the information in the profile is, but including a source or not on a WikiTree profile has nothing to do with whether the data in the profile is accurate.

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I stand corrected:  the page I cited is not the official guidance for not requiring sources.  In fact no such guidance appears on any Help page I can find.  One can only see it by attempting to save a new profile without a source, at which time a system-defined (therefore officially acceptable) option is to promise to provide a source tomorrow.

Whether or not I agree with WikiTree's definition of a source, a promise does not fit the definition.  In practice, a promise suffices to satisfy WikiTree's sourcing "requirement."  Once a profile exists, no one is accountable for providing any kind of source.

Thanks for the opportunity to correct my error.

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is not that it values quantity over quality, it's because it wants people of all genealogical skill levels to be able to use WikiTree to collaborate with their cousins

Sorry, but those are two ways of saying the same thing. Why does WikiTree want people of all genealogical skill levels to be able to use WikiTree to collaborate with their cousins? Clearly, to get a large quantity of profiles on WikiTree. If WikiTree truly valued quality, it would not have such loose guidelines (not to mention nonexistent enforcement).

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Why does WikiTree want people of all genealogical skill levels to be able to use WikiTree to collaborate with their cousins?

Because even people who are just starting out may have information handed down to them that could break down a break wall, unique photos, newspaper clippings, etc. that someone else doesn't have. Those people still want to share their family history, even if they don't have the experience yet to know where to find "good" sources or how to create a complete source citation. No matter how many times people parrot the line that "WikiTree cares more about quantity than quality" it's not going to make it true.

You don't need people to add more profiles -- bots could add profiles. But you can't have collaboration without people.

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Unique photos and clippings...that's the best argument I've heard yet, Jamie.  Those things are priceless.

Answer 5

I have just finished working on a profile for Beau Nash (not related), dandy and celebrity in the days when Bath was a fashionable resort for high society.  I created him yesterday with one source and an image, then attacked him again today and filled in the rest.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Nash-10018

Comments

And now to connect him to the tree ...

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May be difficult.  He never married, had no known children, probably no siblings, and all we know about his father, another Richard, is that he came from Pembrokeshire in Wales.  Don't know his mother, don't know his ancestry further back. :(

Answer 6

I agree, Kenneth!

To put it perhaps even more simply, you can't even talk about the quality of a profile unless and until it actually exists.

Another thing to consider is that - theoretically - there are only just so many profiles to create. Undoubtedly, WikiTree has less than a percent of the ideal - the ideal being a profile exiting for everybody who has ever lived within recorded history. But if WikiTree were to grow substantially in the decades to come, eventually "quantity" wouldn't even be a thing anybody talks about any more.

That being said, there's kind of a false dichotomy about "quantity". The way I look at it, if you create a profile for John Smith, without any additional information, like birth or death years and places, of his parents, siblings, or children, then you haven't created a legitimate profile at all - it's just junk. Even an unsourced profile needs to have sufficient identifying information to tell you exactly who you're actually writing about. If I'm not mistaken, WikiTree has no mechanism to get rid of profiles for such "phantoms".

Even a completely unsourced profile can be remedied - usually easily - if there's at least enough information to identify who the person is. It's of ZERO quality, as far as sourcing goes, but is not harmful at all, really, as long as it represents a real, identifiable person. Sources can always be added.

So the problem isn't "quantity", at all. It's about what I'm calling "phantoms". That is, it's about profiles that cannot be associated with a real person, and that's actually a "quality" issue.

In other words, it isn't about how MANY unsourced profiles get created, it's about all the profiles - regardless of how many - that are of such poor quality that they are useless junk. "Quantity vs Quality" isn't real - it's all really about having a minimum quality to all profiles, where the quality is judged by more than just whether or not there are sources.

Comments

All those who source carefully deserve a pat on the back.

Today I found this quote in a book I'm reading;

" We are measured not only by our triumphs, but by our persistence" .

A new motto?

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There is some inconsistency applied to these profiles. A few months ago I submitted a UPM to have a green locked profile opened so I could connect to it. The PM's account was closed and over 100 green locked profiles were deleted, including the one I wanted opened for connection. These profiles really were valuable - they had dates, locations and most had at least 1 reliable source. I did not notice any inaccuracy in them. How can keeping gedcoms of old profiles without dates, locations and sources be justified when all of those useful profiles were deleted?

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Green locked profiles should not have been deleted. 

Private and Unlisted profiles of modern people present a different problem. We cannot allow them to be adopted by anyone who is not already on the Trusted List. We will delete these after six months unless there is someone else on the Trusted List or extenuating circumstances.

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Plus, it says deletion will occur after 6 months, so those profiles should still be in the system.

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@Julie: The orphans are our responsibility because they are here. You know very well that profiles hardly ever get deleted here, so it is the community's (aka our) responsibility to get them to a good condition.

@Leandra: Those profiles were deleted because profiles that are in a locked status "will be deleted when your account is closed." See this Help page. So it is according to WikiTree's policy to delete those profiles, no matter the quality of them, when they are locked and the PM decides not to contribute anymore.

I'm off to bed now, everything coming from now on will be answered "tomorrow" morning.

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Hmm, Jelena.  If I could make decisions for all of WT, then maybe I would take responsibility for all of WT.  But I can't, and I don't.

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Jelena, that section of the help page you cited is talking about profiles of living people. Further down it says

Public and Open profiles of non-living people that you have created or edited will not be affected by your account closure...

(Public = green-locked.)

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The official WT position is that no one has to do anything.

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That's a silly policy. Green is already Public. It's just that the PM doesn't want anyone collaborating with him/her. If the PM no longer is able to remain on WT, the profile ought to be opened (if the profiled person is alive, it shouldn't be Green but Unlisted, in which case delete).

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Actually, why delete any profile (other than junk ones). Why can't they become Project Protected so that the data and connections remains on WT, even by some new Project?

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@Jelena - Those of us who work on the GEDI Challenge have cleaned and sourced over 10,000 profiles to date. 

@ M Ross - I like your new motto
"We are measured not only by our triumphs, but by our persistence".

Answer 7

My initial take on this question was that where I can set quantity in opposition to quality is in how I distribute my own time. I can produce more profiles per unit of time if I choose to add their data from a single source than if I get interested in where and how they spent their lives between the cradle and the grave and chase them up in the sources. I guess I have worked all along this scale, and would think that the latter at least produces a better-quality biography. It certainly takes more time.

Actually, come to think of it, we have some pretty high-quality, "one-step" original sources in some places and periods of time in Sweden, where the vicar entered complete personalia in the death records, so that you get birth data, marriage info and death info in one package. These are, of course, primary only for the death info, but at a first glance they contain all you need for a profile connected to relatives.