Only one source? [closed]

+3 votes
213 views
Why is there only one source for the whole profile?  There should be sources for date of birth, for place of birth, for … any other detail.  GEDCOM 5.5.1 supports each level one fact or event having one or more sources.  (A flaw in GEDCOM is that it only allows a single source for birth when date and place often have different sources.)
WikiTree profile: Sophie Rothsack
closed with the note: WikiTree is not for me
in Policy and Style by anonymous G2G1 (1.7k points)
closed by anonymous
I'm confused. You created the profile. You added the single source. If you have more sources for the details mentioned in the profile, please add them.

OR, are you saying you uploaded a gedcom, that your gedcom included many sources, but only one was "brought over" ?  If that's the case, it may be something in how your genealogy software generates or records the sources; when you exported your data to a gedcom, did you tell it to include sources? (Some programs default to excluding them.)
Yes, I created it, but it struck me as peculiar that there is one source box that seems to apply to the overall profile.  I haven't seen that anywhere else for more than thirty years.  I cited my own website as a source, but people logged in there can see that each detail has one or more specific sources.  The webtrees software I use organizes the data pretty much according to the GEDCOM spec.

Upon creation of a profile, yes, there is a single box for sources, but that single "box" or window can contain many sources.

Your comment is the first one I've seen that has interpreted that single box to mean "place only one source here." 

Many of us use inline source citations to assign specific sources to specific data. But one could use that source box (at profile creation-- later, post-creation, biography and source boxes are contained in a single narrative "box" or window) to list, starting with an asterisk at the beginning of each line sources like this:

Birth: Certificate of Birth - John Smith (Buffalo, Erie, New York; 12 Feb 1924), certificate #12345; copy held by Jillaine Smith (address withheld for privacy)

* Marriage: Marriage certificate of John Smith and Miriam Sess (Buffalo, Erie, New York; 22 Jun 1946); certificate #987654), etc...

* Death: Certificate of death... etc.

Wow.  That's the way PAF did it long ago, and I marveled that the inventors of GEDCOM would create a program that had the worst implementation of it I've ever seen.
GEDCOM does not place just one source in a source box for a given person. At least the gedcom that my genealogy software (RootsMagic) generates associates specific sources with specific data.

Now, how *wikitree* takes what's in a GEDCOM and places it  into a profile is yet another thing altogether. I do not use that aspect of wikitree any longer (due to how it dealt with sources), but I see the results scattered all over the site. It has gotten better, however, since the introduction of GEDcompare.

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