Editing Profile Biographies that were copy-pasted from another source

Question

Hello everyone.  I've got quality, sourced information to add to several profiles from research I've been doing over the past few years. This research corrects a lot of misinformation that's been perpetually duplicated over the years - we all know how that song goes.

I have noticed that several Profiles of ancestors have information that was simply copied and pasted from other sources (such as Ancestry life stories, Find-A-Grave, and even other people's research papers and books). These all contain the perpetual errors. Looking at these people, it's obvious that the data in the Profiles was simply copy-pasted from the awful trees on Ancestry and FamilySearch. There's no research going on for them.

Since WikiTree is all about proper genealogical research and "growing an accurate single family tree," is it okay to get rid of the bad, copy-pasted information in the Profile and replace it with real research? I have edit rights on these pages, but if I have to ask permission of a profile manager to delete bad information and replace it with the accurate info, then it seems to me no one should have edit rights except the profile manager.

Thanks for the guidance.

Comments

my opinions:

For profiles you solely manage or which are orphaned, I say "Yes, you should feel free to remove all current text and start from scratch, especially those with copy/paste text which doesn't cite the original author (basically this practice is plagiarism, which is against style guidelines)."

For profiles that have actively contributing managers, you should consult with them first before making wholesale changes.

For profiles that have non-actively contributing managers, you still should attempt to consult with them. If you do not receive a timely response, you should follow the Unresponsive Profile Managers procedure, if you would like the profiles orphaned (potentially, but not always the result).

Answer 1

If it's prevalent in other places, you might want to consider leaving it in a Research Notes section with an explanation that this is widely mis-stated, and corrected here. That way you're addressing it so others would be less likely to just add it back in.

It's considered good form to let the profile manager know if you're about to make major changes, but if you have sourced information for those changes and no valid sources for whatever is being changed, that shouldn't be an issue.

For Project-protected (or pre-1500) profiles, the recommendation is often to use a free space page to show what you want your final edit to look like, so the manager can then review and say "yeah I agree with that" or "whoa, where did you come up with that?" easier. That may be a good approach here.