A different approach to "protect" profiles for Projects [closed]

Question

There have been several threads over the past couple of months on ideas of how to "protect" project profiles from malicious or just accidental damage.   The focus has been on how to lock down parents or spouses.   All of those ideas have been great, but work against the basic premise of an open "Wiki" environment.

So, what are we really trying to accomplish, well, yes, we would like to make sure that changes made are valid, so what if each project could have a "feed" of changes to their PPP profiles?   Then the team could review those changes and immediately see anything that was suspicious and investigate or provide guidance to the person trying to do the edits.   What if, just like the feed you get for your Family Activity, we could get a feed on the PPP profiles of a specific project.  Thoughts?

Comments

This is an excellent idea .. maintains the wiki collaboration and can provide an avenue to prevent damage... This is one that I think will have a cjance at getting admin's stamp of approval.

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Sounds great to me - it's kind of like each project having its own mini-rangers.

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I think this is a better approach than locking down profiles, even though it is only 'damage' mitigation rather than prevention.

In either case (additional privacy controls or this approach) I feel it is a very narrow and difficult line that gets walked between protecting a profile from inadvertant (or malicious) errors and simply engaging in multiple-editor ownership (aka tag-teaming).

I recognize the problem that is faced for certain profiles that repeatedly have the same misinformation, or new unsubstantiated (often fictitous) information added to them - I still worry when we talk about having groups 'monitoring' or 'controlling' profiles that groupthink will take over management of profiles and shut out dissenting interpretations of the facts. This is not a reflection on the people in those groups, simply a common phenomenon - like asking people to answer some math questions, say 2 + 3 x 2, then  3 - 1 x 8 then name a vegetable. Even though there are hundreds of vegetables to choose from, for some reason a large number of people will have the same instant response that starts with car. Anyway, that's my comments.

To recap - I like this idea better than 'locking down' profiles from editing entirely.

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As far as the biographjy ... not relatives ... goes, the answer is trivial:

have a locked biography section that require agreement between at least three

owners, and an unlocked section that is open to all. Of course, one could use the

commenst as that, but as I understand it, they are not forever.

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I really like that James.  But I also like Robin's idea where there is a feed to "follow" PPPd profiles within the project.  IF it has a project identified with it, why can't those project members get an update ...separate or part of the daily feed indicating changes to project profiles?

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I'm really excited by this idea. Thank you, Robin!

 

I imagine the way forward is exactly what Robin suggests in her answer below: user accounts for projects.

 

If a project has an account, it can be put on Trusted Lists, and if appropriate set as the manager of profiles. This gives it a Watchlist. The Watchlist would essentially be a list of all profiles covered by the project, and the Watchlist Activity Feed would be a feed for all the activity in them.

 

One issue with this approach is that we have a rule against accounts being set up for anything other than a person. Person profiles on our tree and member accounts are inseparable on WikiTree.

 

But I think we just need to establish when and how it's acceptable for something other than a person to have an account. We can still have the general rule against it, and be careful about how we do them. (This is on the top of my mind today because of something completely different: edit bots, i.e. programs that automatically make changes to profiles on a member's behalf. Much more to come on this later/separately.)

 

Maybe we can start an account for one project and see how this would work? The first question to address would be the e-mail address associated with it. It needs to be a new address, not one already associated with an account. We could set up an @wikitree.com address for these, e.g. euroaristo@wikitree.com. It would have to be an "alias" for info@wikitree.com and mail would come to the team.

 

Chris

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never mind just realized how old these are

Answer 1

Maybe there is a way to create a Pseudo user for each project, we add that user to each profile and now we have a Family Activity Feed for the project.   That would allow the projects to at the vey least see all the changes being made to PPP profiles and take action from that point of view.

Comments

I think you're really on to something here, Robin.

I'll post more in a comment on the original post above.

Answer 2

Good Idea.  It is a worthy starting point.

Answer 3

It would give me great peace of mind as a project leader, and editor of many historical profiles, to have such a feed for projects.

Great if project leaders would have a report like family activity reports for just their own projects.

Comments

Ditto that April!!

Answer 4

This might be the perfect solution to our dilemma. At least we wouldn't be blindsided next time we go into a previously perfect profile only to find that it was obliterated months ago...

Answer 5

Like everyone else, I think it's a great idea and a start in protecting these profiles.  I'm just not quite sure I've got my head around how it will work in practice.  Particularly thinking about the EuroAristo project that must have hundreds (thousands?) of PPPs.

Does anyone know if it's possible to get a list of the PPPs in a particular project?

Comments

We are just starting with the Dutch Roots Project, so not that many PPP's , yet. But we created a free space page (unlisted) especially for the PPP's (use the boxes for it ) all PPP's get added to the box ''profiles with PPP'. So this way in the end we will have a list of PPP's , Just a few managers that are working on the PPP's and they have access to the page at all times if needed (in case someone is on Holiday or sick or whatever) Of course if you have thousands of PPP's you might need or have to use several boxes, and /or limit the number of PPP's added to the different PPP boxes . I'm adding the links with the # in front so this way you know the number of  PPP's as well.  

They all, if  the project templates are added are listed of course, maybe a list of PPP's by project ,could be made/produced somehow, without having to check each and every one of them ?

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John,

In theory, the only relatively simple way I can see of making lists of PPP by project is for the admins to create a variable that indicates if a profile is PPP (similar to the name variables that already exists) - that variable can then be used inside the project template to add a category for "Project ____ PPP" to all the profiles where the variable returns true. Then the only thing left to do would be to create the category pages for each project and wait for the template updates to propagate across the system.

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Rob, you used my favorite saying "Theoretically" (well, I've been known to say "ideally" a lot too!).  Great idea!

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The way I think we'd do this is what Robin suggests in her answer, with user accounts for projects. Then they can be have Watchlists with all the PPPs and feeds that show all the activity in them. I'll post more in a comment on the original post above.

Regarding John's point about projects with lots of PPPs, maybe the thing to do is to keep any one project from growing too large. When one does, it would need to be broken into sub-projects. Would that work?

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The EuroAristo project has been split into 5 sub-projects so a separate watchlist for each of these is probably going to be more manageable,  The other avenue might be for projects to review when and why PPPs are added to a profile.  Has it just become an automatic response to all project profiles, or is that extra protection actually needed?

I'm also wondering if that project profile/email address could be use in other ways?  For instance the profile page could become the project homepage, and perhaps the email address could be used as a generic email for someone to contact the project, rather than contacting individual leaders?  Or am I overthinking this?

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If we just would create a category for example for the Dutch Roots project, we have three sub-projects , so if the PPP profiles of these different subprojects would be categorized like for example ''category:Dutch Pre-1700 PPP '' and this done for all PPP sub projects. Than we would have them all listed in the different categories already isn't it ?

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Bea, The category solution (if PPP is exposed as a variable) is better for actually making and maintaining the list of PPP in a given project or sub-project. This was a response to John's question about the availability of a list of PPP'S in a project. It does not however create a feed where people can see what profiles were changed and by whom which is what the 'project profiles' addresses - categorization doesn't address this. Unfortunately, unlike applying categories by template which can be changed in bulk from the template code if a redivision is needed (assuming the right parameters exist as the Dutch Roots template does) dividing a watch list will require more or less manual effort on a per profile basis

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Thanks Rob and indeed thought this might be the easiest way to create lists for the PPP profiles in the many sub projects and especially for the Euroaristo project. Maybe the categorization project can help with listing the PPP 's for the projects with large amounts of PPP profiles?

And yup I know, so the feed is yes it's indeed a great idea, but thought they were working on the ''purple PPP profile'' with some parts locked as well ? So maybe it's time to vote?  The project PPP feed for sure beats no action at all

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I think PPP should be left out of this.  It's got its own job to do, which is LNABs.  A profile might contain nothing else worth keeping, but you still want to say "this is the final ID for this person".

Answer 6

Great ideal! At least that would give a person, that thinks they have a legitimate correction or connection with the profile, the ability to add that information. Maybe Not to Delete, but to add or suggest information.

Answer 7

Robin this is a great idea. As a project leader I would to be able to quickly look at a feed for changes or problems. NNS as well as many other projects would truly benefit.

Answer 8

There is a way to see the recent changes to all profiles in a given category. I think that is close to what we are looking for, right?

Here's an example for the Acadians category:

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Acadians

Comments

That works for projects with a single category...for the US Presidents project, as an example, we have Presidents, vice Presidents, spouses of presidents, parents of presidents....I would like a list that covers all the categories.

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It's the same with all category operations.  The only way to make higher-level categories useful is to put them on profiles.  We're told not to, but the implementation doesn't match the theory.