G2G: Profile Protection in South Africa Projects

Question

Profile Protection in South African Projects

I joined WikiTree a few years ago, having decided it is the best place for me to "publish" my 40+ years of genealogy research. That has become a personal project which I expect will take many years. Partly that is because I am concerned with connecting my own direct South African ("European") Meintjes family members into the larger WikiTree and back to their South African progenitors. So, I get into the genealogies of those who married into the Meintjes family. Often, that means connecting two or three generations to reach a profile in WikiTree that is connected back to that family's progenitor. Then I often am stymied because I (for example) need to connect a child to a parent whose Profile is Project Protected.

For instance, Hendrik Adriaan Meintjes-285 married Maria Catharina Cloete-915 whose profile I created. A broken path through the Cloetes and van Blerks in WikiTree leads us to [[Van_den_Berg-1698|Maria Catharina (van den Berg) van Blerk (bef.1779-1848)]] and I cannot make the links because of PPP.

A quick look at SA Families for this last lady shows that she has 13 children, only 2 of whom are in WikiTree. And the capability to add the rest of these children is locked!

This is very frustrating, and has happened to me more times than I care to remember. So, this time I am bringing it to G2G.

Yes, I know. I should make a request for a Project Manager to do the links. That does not work for the project managers are unresponsive. Last year it took me eight months to get someone's attention on a request, and succeeded only because I appealed to others who knew the manager in question. In addition, it is very inefficient to have to explain a complex problem and solution compared to just solving it oneself. Besides, who gets the credit for doing the research?

So, I began to wonder why PPP was being put on these profiles. The result was this conversation: "Why?"  "Because!" The best explanation was "There is a reason."

Earlier this week I noticed a brand new profile that had been put under PPP. When I looked the profile had been accessed only about 5 times, so surely there was no history of controversy? I also noted that there were no husbands (SA Families says she was married twice) and no children. So I asked the reason for PPP on this particular profile, and was told: "All 1700 profiles are protected once the baptism record gets added." (You can see the comment thread here: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Louw-2726 .)

Wow! That is the polar opposite of WikiTree's tenet of being a collaborative self-regulating environment where individual contributors are trusted. Let's put these on the same line:

https://www.wikitree.com/quiz/pre_1700 | "All 1700 profiles are protected once the baptism record gets added."

It is interesting to contemplate the logical contortions necessary to reconcile or harmonize the ideas on the line above.

If this is indeed a policy, it appears to be a secret: There is no mention (I could find) of this in the Cape Of Good Hope Project description. I also do not know which South African projects are following this practice.

The WikiTree guidelines for PPP at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Project_Protecting_and_Merging state that four conditions must be met, including:

:''Four: They must be controversial or duplicated''

:''Project protection should be used only when profiles need protection — because they are commonly-shared, frequently-duplicated, subject to confusion, etc.''

:''There must be some sort of controversy or duplication problem, or reasonable expectation that there will be.''

In all the PPP profiles I have encountered, there is no indication or evidence that this fourth condition is met.

Furthermore, the guidelines are clearly directed at individual profiles. The idea of a blanket policy for PPP that would apply to many profiles is simply not evident.

As an aside, it is interesting to note the LDS' progression on indexing and metadata. Before familysearch, they had a systems called the IGI, International Genealogical Index. It was strictly controlled, with information entered only by experts (Church members). With the creation of familysearch, that was replaced by a strictly supervised system of multiple transcribers and expert referees to reconcile differences. There was a complex process to request changes to correct errors.

That has now evolved to familysearch Family Tree, where anyone can contribute and correct or change transcriptions without an approval system. In my opinion, this crowdsourcing approach has vastly improved fs Family Tree over the past few years.

Wikipedia is, of course, the preeminent example of how well such a self-regulated system can work.

I cannot imagine why there would need to be a blanket restriction on adding spouses and children to a profile. In the absence of an explanation, I can only speculate that the real intent is to protect the Project LNAB in a merge. If this speculation is true, then:

1. The problem can only arise if Project management is unresponsive to merge requests and they time out after 30 days. Then, possibly, someone else does the merge "incorrectly". In my opinion, the potential magnitude of such a problem is proportional to management's inattention.

2. The inability to link spouses and children then shows up as collateral damage. I think that price is far too great and is contrary to WikiTree's fundamental tenets and values.

Therefore I am proposing that:

1. The PPP guidelines be updated to state that if a PP is placed on a profile, an explanation of the reason must be stated in the profile.

2. Project Protection should be (immediately) removed from the South African profiles if

a) a reason specific to that profile is not provided, and

b) there is not reasonable proof (like a Death Notice) that the profile is complete in terms of spouses and children.

Finally, a number of profiles have the Project as the only manager. This is confusing to me, as it is unclear as to whether the Project is a person, and whether their Project emails are monitored and responded to, etc. I think that at least one real person should also be the manager on each Project Profile.

Keith Meintjes

Fellow, Genealogical Society of South Africa

Error received when posting:

That WikiTree ID does not exist ([[WikiTree-16|Cape_of_Good_Hope_Project_WikiTree]])

Edited for formatting (no preview available)

Comments

Just a brief comment on FamilySearch: since it became open source, a continual process of introducing errors is possible. As a result, I gave up trying to keep the South African Van Wyk/Van Wijk family tree accurate; the information changes every week on key profiles from the 1600s and 1700s that really should be locked. (This is particularly over confusion about the many Gerrits, Adrians/Arijs, and Willems.)

Answer 1

Hi Keith, Dit is baie maklik, skep net die kinders se profiele eers en dan as jy almal het pos net in G2G die skakels na die kinders en die ouers en ek kan dit vir jou in 'n japtrap koppel.

Daar was 'n praktyk in die COGH projek om die bestuurders van profiele te verwyder. Ek het daarteen beswaar aangeteken en die praktyk bestaan nie meer nie. Bestuurders word nie meer verwyder nie.

Comments

I'm glad that the policy has changed. The policy of removing active individual project managers and replacing them with the project inevitably meant that there were a large number of profiles overseen by a small number of members.

 Present project members may be monitoring comments  and changes to the profile as they are alerted to these. As they probably don't have  personal involvement, they may neither look for duplicates nor continue  research. This may be particularly  the case with non-contested individuals.

As a result of this question I checked the two profiles I previously disengaged myself from .(I'll be honest, I jumped before the 'request' ).One, managed by the project has had a probable duplicate for the last 18 months.

If it hasn't already done so, perhaps the project might benefit from asking those who were asked to remove themselves as pm whether they would like to be re-instated

Answer 2

I can only speak from personal experience and have no input as to the reasons for the PPP's (although I can guess), since that precedes my interest in the whole process.  Firstly, I don't agree that the PPP of the COGH profiles is a secret. Here the whole process is explained and it is clearly stated as point number 2 under the Specific goals of the process: Final ID locked, marking the profile as project protected (must be done by one of the Leaders) and again later in point 6 under Process.

I have had no problem in getting children or parents linked to PPP profiles. This is the process I follow: I create the new profile with enough primary source evidence that shows the link should be made. I then post a comment to both the new profile and the PPP'd profile indicating exactly what link(s) should be made and voilà, within a couple of days, or maybe a week or two at most, one of the COGH project leaders would have made the link[s].

You asked who gets the credit for doing the research? For me the answer is very simple: the person who did the research and added all the properly cited information to a/the profile(s). :). Even if there are no primary sources, one can still add a reference saying who added the information. I don't think that who actually makes the physical link between 2 profiles says anything about what research was done. The latter is (or, at least, should be) all in the Bio of the relevant profiles?

Finally, while the COGH project is not a person, there are people behind that project profile that are actually monitoring the project communications quite well in my experience. However, they are human too and sometimes something can slip through a crack and no response is forthcoming within the usual "day or two", in which case (in my experience anyway) a friendly reminder after a week or so would have the desired effect.

I will leave it to other, more qualified people than this genealogical noob to comment on the rest of your post. :)

May your frustrations by assuaged. :)

Answer 3

I know I experience the frustration too but understand the problem of random changes to key profiles too. I honestly haven't experienced long time frames to add children to a locked profile but would think it nice if WikiTree had a way we could link a child or parent to a locked profile with a status pending for the project team to approve or reject with reason and then at least you could move on with your work linked in a temporary way that everyone could see as linked but with a status pending review.

Comments

A status pending review option sounds like a fabulous idea!