A One Place Study category should be the category for the place

Question

I am not sure if this problem is because of the fact that it is a one place study and is set up wrong or if this is an inherent problem with the one place study template.

This study is for Carrowreagh Townland and there by it's very definition should encompass all the profiles associated with that location.

What in fact we have is a location category for Carrowreagh Townland and an additional sub-category of Carrowreagh, Kiltimagh, Mayo One Place Study

This appears to me to be completely unnecessary.

I cannot see how the template can fit this situation

{{CategoryInfoBox OnePlaceStudy
|place= Carrowreagh Townland, Killedan
|parent= Ireland
|type=community
|location= Carrowreagh Townland, Killedan Parish, County Mayo
|coordinate= 53.8281, -9.0091
|startdate= 
|enddate= 
}}

The template would be pointing the Location at itself. See the example One Place Study for South Pool, Devon. Here again we see a category for a place with a sub category for the same place. This does not appear to make sense. Should people be categorised in both? Obviously not one has to assume. For a community place, at least in Ireland, this is always going to be a townland or a town and occasionally a civil parish. It is completely illogical to have a parish one place study category as a category of the parish and the same goes for townlands and towns. One place studies for smaller entities such as houses, institutions, cemeteries and localities up to streets are fine and there is no problem but the minute you start on towns, parishes or townlands the system makes a sub-category of it that is the equivalent of the location category.

This needs to addressed so that the category for a OPS for anything from a community upwards uses the location category for the community and not a sub-category of it.

Please, of course, tell me how this is achieved in the example I have quoted for Carrowreagh if the facility to use the location category rather than a sub-category already exists.

Answer 1

Are you suggesting that the One Place Study category should replace the location category, where the area covered is the same?

Comments

Rather more the other way round but in essence, yes.

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I agree with David - the Location category should be the constant, as people not involved in the study will keep adding profiles to the location, but if they are separate, I assume someone needs to regularly check for new profiles in the location and add them to the study category. Either way, they then need to integrate the new profiles into the study

Answer 2

The reason there are two is because if there is only a location category (but not one for the OPS), then the profile will not be included in the OPS.  The OPS category *has* to be there for the technology to work.

Comments

Precisely, so what I am saying is that where a community covers the same area as the OPS the technology is wrong.

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It's the same as a One Name Study.  Just because a person is called 'Haywood', does not mean that they are automatically in the Haywood Name Study.  A specific category has to be placed on the Haywood profile for that to happen.

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What seems to me to be required is that the OPS can be set to Location whereupon the OPS acts as the location category, preferably with the name of the location rather than One Place Study but that is a minor point perhaps. All that is needed is that the template gets added to the profile and this adds it to the location category. Nothing different from now except that I assume adding the category to a profile directly should also add the template. Perhaps, maybe....

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There needs to be two categories because they have different parents.

1) location category example: South Pool, goes via Devon, goes via England and the England Project

2) OPS category has a Category InfoBox which links it to the One Place Studies Project

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Yes, I understand that is the current situation but it would be perfectly possible to arm a location category template with a One Place Study parameter, for example an optional oneplacestudy= , to achieve the same result. I still maintain it does not make sense to have two categories doing exactly the same thing.

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They're not doing 'exactly the same thing'.  One is categorising geographically, and the other is placing the profile in a seperate Study.

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Explain then Ros how the One Place Study is not geographical? By the way, if the OPS category is purely a study and not geographical then perhaps it has no place having a location parameter?

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A One Place Study does not just cover 'profiles who lived here'.  It deals with statistics, genealogical patterns, trades and occupations, and much more.

An OPS researches the residents of a particular place by gathering a full range of historical records, memorabilia, and stories that mention those individuals, and analyze them to gain insights into the social and economic workings of that place...and would generally have as its aims to identify local families and analyze issues like occupational structure, life expectancy, and geographical mobility." [Society for One-Place Studies]

A location category merely groups people who were born, married, and/or died there.

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If a profile is categorised to the location, and not the OPS, you are saying that in fact the study is incomplete as it does not contain the profiles that are categorised to the location even though the 'study' is the same 'location'. You cannot separate a townland location and a townland one place study. they are the same thing.

I fully accept what you are saying if for example you were doing a study of a particular street in a town, or an institution. In that case yes the OPS does belong IN the location category but NOT when the OPS IS the same place as the location category

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That is the purpose of the associated space page. The category contains none of that additional data.

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You are correct; I am saying that if a profile is categorised to the location, and not the OPS, then the study is incomplete as it does not contain the profiles that are categorised to the location even though the 'study' is the same 'location'.

It is purely a technical thing that the system needs.  No OPS category, then the profile won't be included in the OPS.  As I said earlier: "It's the same as a One Name Study.  Just because a person is called 'Haywood', does not mean that they are automatically in the Haywood Name Study.  A specific category has to be placed on the Haywood profile for that to happen."

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See what I said about oneplacestudy=

I can see that you are not going to be swayed. There are logical reasons for saying the two categories are the same and of course I understand the technology as it is at present however exactly the same could be achieved with this simple parameter so that a single category for the location is required.

I agree that just because someone is called Haywood does not mean they are in the Haywood study. ONS is NOT the same as OPS. Anyone in a single location is by definition, or rather should, a part of that OPS.

The technology is simple to change if someone has a mind to do it.

/fin.

Answer 3

When you add subcategories for the place category which is the subject of your OPS, it makes a lot of sense to keep the OPS category and the place category apart. See for instance Category: Solum, Telemark, Norway and Category: Solum, Telemark One Place Study.

From the start five years ago I used a slightly non-standard approach where I used the OPS template to place profiles in farm categories, but have recently changed my routines to put everybody in the OPS category as well as in the individual farm categories. This is a much tidier approach, and with the new category functionality you can keep a much better watch on the profiles.
 

Comments

This would still work perfectly well if the OPS category and location category were the same.

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No, that would clutter up the place category. As is said on high-level category pages, "Add profiles to the narrowest category possible."

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@Lief. How can that mess up the place category when they are the same thing. That IS the narrowest category when we are talking about OPS for locations (communities) not buildings, street etc. At present the dual unnecessary category is cluttering up the place category.

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There needs to be two categories because they have different parents.

1) location category example: South Pool, goes via Devon, goes via England and the England Project

2) OPS category has a Category InfoBox which links it to the One Place Studies Project

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Regardless of the "clutter" point of view: Physical locations and studies about them are two different things, and as Ros says, they belong in different parts of the category tree. You are mixing apples and oranges.

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The placing of a profile on an OPS category is absolutely no different from placing it in a location category. Both are Oranges. The mere act of placing ANY profile in a category is a study of the location and in the case of the OPS the spaces holds any other data. We also have spaces for parishes and some for townlands in the Ireland project. Whilst not named as such they are indeed one place studies. There is no obstacle to the location category routing to both the upper location categories and the one place study. Several location categories have more than one parent, which is handled in the location template. This is not some sort of magic, it is simple programming.

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I disagree.  Merely placing a profile within a location category just means it's somebody who was born, married and/or died there.  You can study the profile, but only one at a time.

A One Place Study is much more of an umbrella:
An OPS researches the residents of a particular place by gathering a full range of historical records, memorabilia, and stories that mention those individuals, and analyze them to gain insights into the social and economic workings of that place...and would generally have as its aims to identify local families and analyze issues like occupational structure, life expectancy, and geographical mobility." [Society for One-Place Studies]

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See my response above to exactly the same text.

/fin

Answer 4

Completely agree. I don't see the point of an OPS category which is basically a duplicate of the location category itself. The worst of it is seeing profiles removed from the location category to be put into the OPS.

(Please don't try to explain me why OPS should be like that,  I won't understand).

Comments

Thank you for your input Isabelle. Much appreciated.

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I agree 100% with Isabelle.

Answer 5

I agree! IMO, the place study is a free-space project and that study page and all its included profiles should have the location category tagged. The OPS sticker should suffice on a profile, but it should not have been set up to add a category. I have seen many profiles that have the OPS cat and not the location cat.

Comments

Thank you for your input Natalie. Much appreciated.

Answer 6

I agree with David Loring. It's a bad idea to have separate categories for a place and a one place study. I would make an exception for the situation where the one place study (OPS) has a narrower scope than the place category, in which case the OPS category should identify its scope (e.g., "Mytown Pre-1900 One Place Study").

Several years ago. I questioned this dual categorization regarding a separate OPS category for a fairly large town where some of my ancestors lived. The OPS apparently was intended to cover the entire span of town history. Some of the profiles for people who lived in the town were in both categories, but some were just in one of the two categories. Also, I recall that the OPS creator had made a free-space page for an historic church that was only in the OPS category -- and the OPS manager did not want to allow it to also be in the town category. I questioned the arrangement and was crisply informed that this was all necessary and appropriate for an OPS. This experience gave me a dim view of OPSs, which took me a long while to overcome.

I think one category for a locality makes great sense.

EDITED to correct typos in post I wrote on my phone.

Comments

Thank you for your input Ellen. Much appreciated.

Answer 7

Although this sounds like it may make sense, I think I need a bit more information to be certain. Are there absolute rules set out about precisely which profiles should be included in a One Place Study, or is there some room for discretion by the person running the study? Similarly are there absolute rules set out about precisely which profiles should be included in a location category, or is there some room for discretion by the profile manager?

I'm sure there would be a great deal of overlap between the OPS and the location category, but I can think of a few cases where it is not obvious to me that a profile should be in both. For example:

1. A person who was baptised and/or married and/or buried in the OPS location, but was actually born and spent their entire life in a nearby location without its own church. They may qualify for the OPS study because of their connection to the church, but personally I would only add the location category for where they were actually born and lived.

2. A person who was visiting or passing through the OPS location on the night the census was taken, but otherwise has no connection to it. Again they may qualify for the OPS study because they are listed as being there in a census, but personally I would not add the location category for somewhere they were only passing through or temporarily visiting.

Comments

Paul, I find the distinction between someone passing through on the night of a census (did they or were they there for longer perhaps 9 years and moved just before the next census) only being relevant to a one place study and not to the location somewhat odd. In fact personally I cannot see how the two can be separated. Either they were or they were not at that location. Their presence at that location on the night of a census has no qualification for a OPS if it has no qualification for the location always bearing in mind we are talking here of 'community' OPS and not the lower levels of study.

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David, there will certainly be cases where a family had children born in place A both before and after a census and they had no children born in place B, but in the census they are recorded as visitors in place B. While it isn't possible to say if they were in place B for one night or for a few months, it is certainly reasonable to conclude they weren't long-term residents. As a profile manager, my preference in that situation would be not to add the location category for place B.

Your statement "Their presence at that location on the night of a census has no qualification for a OPS if it has no qualification for the location" sounds like you must have found the answer to the first part of my reply. I had thought that the manager of the OPS might only consider it was complete if it included everybody recorded as living there, even if only for a short while. But it sounds like there is no discretion for the person running the OPS about which profiles to include and no discretion for the profile manager about which location categories to add and that the criteria are identical? Are you able to point me to where the criteria are set out?

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@Paul, as far as I am aware there are no criteria set out. The inclusion of someone in a OPS is at the discretion of the person adding the template or the category to the profile.

Answer 8

I agree that often it might make no sense to have both the OPS category and the location category.

Apart from the mentioned reasons to have two categories, I could think of using the OPS category for research purposes. For example, the Italy project has some "needs ..." categories on country level and some on region level. But none at municipality level (which makes sense, as there are just too many). But for an OPS, I would find it very helpful to have a "needs ..." category, to find those profiles quickly.

Answer 9

ah, but you are missing this point:  OPS is for anybody who lived there etc, over all time.  Location categories can change names over time, due to political changes etc.  For example,

 {{One Place Study

| place = Neuville, Québec

| category = Neuville, Québec One Place Study

}}

The people in that study fall under a series of location categories: Neuville, Canada, Nouvelle-France , Neuville, Province of Québec, 1763-1791, Neuville, Bas-Canada, etc to present day.  These were deliberately set up that way, so the time period would include profiles who lived there then, and so on.

So the OPS category is another thing entirely, it's for a STUDY of the location.

Comments

If a location changes it's name then surely the category would also change it's name? There are examples of townlands in Ireland that have changed, not so much their name, as their location appellation, i.e. been moved from one county to another. This happened to several in 1898 in County Sligo which were moved to Mayo. Same happens with townlands and population centres that change civil parish over time. Many of these happened in Ireland around 1862. This in fact mirrors your example because actually the 'place' did not change name. In each instance it is Neuville.

The reason that location categories have

|startdate=
|succ1next
|enddate=
|succ1prev=

is to deal with this changes of title of a place. If people are not familiar with the parameters of the CIB please allow me to explain briefly.

startdate and enddate control the date parameters of the profile outside which an error will occur. So if Fred was born in 1750 and you add him to a category that has a startdate of 1799 a database error will occur. I am sure the logic of end date will be apparent from that.

succ1next and, not displayed succ1next1, control the NEXT category in the hierarchy or rather chain. If the parameter is filled as succ1next1= Neuville, Bas-Canada then that is the next category in the chain as indeed you Danielle are aware since you programmed that category. This will show in the CIB. If you use succ1next the name of the next category in the chan will not show but a link called Next will be shown.

So if the OPS relates to the place, which has actually not changed name but has changed appellation only due to political changes in the authority, how is this any different from the location which has also done exactly the same?

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To add to the above:

So the OPS category is another thing entirely, it's for a STUDY of the location

Can you please, as no one else has managed to do so yet, explain how the names of the profiles in the OPS category are any different from the names of the profiles in a location category?

I entirely accept that a space for the OPS is where the actual STUDY, i.e. the analysis etc, of the place is done but the category is just a list of names associated with the study.

It is in fact the dataset upon which the study is based as the profiles in a location category are the dataset for that location.

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From the One place study page:

 "An OPS researches the residents of a particular place by gathering a full range of historical records, memorabilia, and stories that mention those individuals, and analyze them to gain insights into the social and economic workings of that place...and would generally have as its aims to identify local families and analyze issues like occupational structure, life expectancy, and geographical mobility."

So the point of the study is not just to lump everybody who lived there together, which location categories can do, but also gather data on all sorts of other relevant data.

Plus, it goes under modern place name, and could not show the time differences, which were pretty major when you consider that Neuville, to continue with that example, was established at the time this was a French colony.  The English conquered the territory and it was formally ceded to them in 1763.  Very major difference for the people.

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Thinking about this further, I believe the OPS categorization as such is what should be eliminated from profiles.  The sticker should lead to the study page and not to a category.  The study page itself should be categorized with the location categories, whether a single or multiple as in the above example.  

That way, if one is looking at the study and wants to know about a particular time period and who lived there then, one click to the relevant category would be sufficient.

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I completely agree that the sticker should lead to the Study page. Some people seem to be confusing the 'study' with the 'data' for the study.

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I completely agree with Danielle: The sticker should lead to the study page and not to a category.

I just checked my OPS: the link on the sticker leads to the OPS space page, which makes sense. But the sticker also automatically creates a category to the OPS. Same as the ONS stickers does, but there it makes sense.

Answer 10

I have mixed feelings about this. I have two one-place studies, Martinique du Nord and Comte de Nice. Both are time limited studies. Martinique du Nord covers the communes in north Martinique prior to the 1902 eruption of Mont Pelée, and Comte de Nice is limited to the time before 1869 when Napoleon consolidated the area into France. Neither of these areas had place categories before I began my studies, so I had to create them myself. Now the France Project has reorganized the categories, but my studies need to remain outside of these categories because of the time restraint. I don't know how this could work if the OPS and place categories were the same.

Comments

Duane, thank you for your input. Please see my response to Danielle above which I believe covers the situation you describe.

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Duane, thinking further on your example the answer is simple. In the hierarchy of OPS your examples would be Localities rather than communities. This then brings up the naming of these which in my opinion is completely topsy-turvey. A community should be smaller than a locality since a locality can be a village or larger as in a location. Both could be quite confusing I suspect and are probably set in stone so I am not suggesting changing them.

The addition of a sticker and inclusion of the parent OPS can easily be handled in a location with a parameter in the CIB. A simple oneplacestudy=yes on a location category could achieve this.

Answer 11

A few years ago OP studies were supposed to encompass the whole community within all time frames. If a OP study is indeed designed to cover all times and an exaxtly similar location then I'd agree that one isn't really a subset if the other. They both should contain the same profiles.

  I actually didn't start an official OPS on wikitree under the original conditions. I was interested in 17th  Dorchester, England, and it's people and their influence on  English and American history . I'm going to a lecture tomorrow on a study of Dorchester in the time of Thomas Hardy.  Two different time frames, different sets of people.

  Things have changed. The project, rightly in my opinion,  doesn't stipulate that a OP study covers all time within a location. We have OP studies  covering time periods or  small areas, even down to street and institution level. Occasionally an OPS may  cross location boundaries. My 17th C Dorchester OPC would now be OK but it would certainly  need a separate category to the location category for Dorchester.  It would be quite different  including members of the Dorchester company who never lived in the town.  It would include  people who actually lived next door in Fordington but were members of the wider community who emigrated. It wouldn't contain Thomas Hardy and his neighbours who lived 3 centuries later.

In the case of the OP study mentioned in the question. The study is  focussed on the community in the  mid 19th to early 20th C https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Carrowreagh%2C_Kiltimagh%2C_Mayo_One_Place_Study .One could perhaps argue that it needs a more precise name but unless the Township was only founded in the 1840s the OP study will will only contain a subset of those in the location category.

Comments

The study says "Carrowreagh Townland One Place Study" and as I have been involved in providing photos from the cemetery I also happen to be aware that the study is not limited to a narrow time band, it is just that the time span mentioned is that where data is commonly available.

This does not detract from the fact that IMHO if a OPS is for a location such as a town or townland or parish as a whole it should be using the location category.

With regard to your Dorchester OPS I am not sure I understand what you are saying? It would seem that your OPS is in fact a time constrained OPS and thus should state the in the title. That would make it a Locality OPS since Fordington was not originally a part of Dorchester whereas if you were including all of the current environs of Dorchester the OPS would legitimately belong in the Category Dorchester, Dorset as a location, or in the nomenclature of the OPS hierarchy a Community OPS.

Please be clear we are discussing Community OPS categories here and not Locality, Cemetery or Build and Institutions. I am NOT saying the current system is incorrect for the latter levels.

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It might be called a One Place Study, but your example is both wider and narrower, so clearly not studying the same set of people as the full set of profiles associated with the place.

Answer 12

They should not be mutually exclusive, being in a location category does not inherently mean it should be in the one place study or vice versa.

Comments

@Jonathan. I agree with OPS which are Category: Building and Institutions, Cemeteries or Localities but that is not what is being discussed here. This discussion is about what are IMHO incorrectly called Category:Community, PLaces Studies. Personally I think those two names should be swapped round as a street or neighbourhood is a community where a location, say a town or townland is rather broader than that. Your response is valid for the lesser levels.

Answer 13

In my OPS the place I am researching has multiple sub-location categories which I want to assign manually. assign the main place category would be somewhat confusing, rather than helping. In my case.

Comments

@Sven. Which probably means yours would come under Localities rather than Communities.

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Mine is on the community level. The modern community consisted of smaller hamlets, and those hamlets are the subcategories i would like to assign.

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There is no reason why you cannot have a category for the locality with sub-localities however if the main one is a community then assigning a location category to it alone would not work. In fact if you wish to assign sub-categories then in reality which ever model you use it does not work which is why these categories should all the linked on the free space which is the actual study and not as assigned categories because of the page. If someone adds the template under the current scenario they get put into the main category which is not what you want.

If the categories were not created by the template then whichever sub category the profile was in it would be linked to the study FSP.

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Hi David, thanks for your reply. Is there a page that explains how the template works? Thanks, Sven

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https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:OPS_Template#Display

Answer 14

This makes perfect sense to me. Any time I open a location category to see who's in it and do something about them, I am doing some kind of informal study/analysis on that place.

I might pick a place, and click the "my connections" button to sort them on distance from me. If I see four people with the same surname, and their distances from me are 5, 5, 6, 12 I might look further to see if the 12 is missing a connection to the other three.

My understanding of a One Place Study is more in-depth, but would be recorded and developed in Free Space Page(s). The place category provides a pool of profiles to include in the analysis.

To people who argue that the location and OPS have different parent categories, I point out that a category can have multiple parent categories.

I haven't tried, but in the absence of enough switches in the CIB, is there anything to stop a single category from having two CIB templates - one Location Category Infobox and one OPS Category Infobox?

Comments

@Scott. Thank you for your input. Re two CIBs for a single category I don't know. I would imagine that it would be a no-no but I guess Ales could answer that one.

As the discussion progresses it seems more and more to me that all One Place Studies that relate to a location (rather than the, IMO incorrectly defined, Locality or lower levels) should be handled with a location category which has the switch oneplacestudy= that generates a link on the CIB to the Study FS page.

Answer 15

I stopped working on my one-place page because this situation was so annoying.

Comments

Thank you for you input Jane. Much appreciated.

Answer 16

I’m not disagreeing with any of the comments and concerns in this discussion because I’m not sure I understand the issues. 

Some thoughts/questions, I am currently working on a cemetery project, which will of course include all the people buried in a cemetery in a particular place. And will, when finished, show all the connections between the people buried in that cemetery. 

Because the village is now and was previously such a small place, prior to 1940 almost everyone in the village was related to each other, my plan is to use all the info in the cemetery project and create a One Place Study. There is lots of historical information so that part isn’t a problem. 

This is where I’m getting confused, some people buried in the cemetery lived close to the village (within 5km) but did not live in the village, but were members of families that did live in the village. Plus, some people who lived in the village were buried in other local cemeteries, sometimes because of religion, other times because of family history in another specific place. 

Or am I overthinking the issue? Do I call the OPS, Alton Village One Place Study which could include everyone whose family is/was associated with village since its founding in the 1830s, regardless of where they were buried or if they actually lived within the official village boundaries which were very small. Or do I call it something else? 

The village is part of the historical Caledon Township which was dramatically larger than the village and no longer exists. It is also part of a county, which will cease to exist next year. 

How would or could David’s ideas affect how the OPS would be categorised?

Comments

My view would be that Alton Village is a location and thus the location category for Alton Village would be the category used for the OPS. The cemetery is in fact a separate OPS and that would probably have a location of Caledon Township if there is a category for that. These are two separate OPS despite the fact that they are in almost the same area. The cemetery presumably has a free space page and the village would also have a free space page. A profile of someone who lived in the village and was buried in the cemetery would be categorised to the cemetery and, in my ideal world, to the village location category. 

[[Category:Alton Village Cemetery, xxxx]]
{{One Place Study|Alton Village One Place Study|Alton Village, the county or whatever}}

Not available now but if there was a parameter on the OPS for the village oneplacestudy=Alton Village One Place Study which would add a sticker for the OPS to the profiles within it automatically. The two OPS, the village and the cemetery, could be joined together on the space page for each.

Those who lived in the village and were buried elsewhere would still be in the OPS for the village but not for the cemetery. Similarly someone buried in the cemetery would be in the OPS for the cemetery but not for the village.

All this assumes a level of Community for the Village and Cemetery for the cemetery.

Not being familiar with the administrative structure of the area you are referring to pehaps the Village category should be Category:Alton Village, the next level up administratively to get round the county vanishing next year.