As Project Coordinator for the Scotland Project, I work on their Suggestions weekly. The majority of Scotland suggestions are for profiles that have a Scotland location that are managed by PMs, not Project Managed profiles. The statement has been made that most location oriented projects will not be affected, but I don't agree. Most profiles are probably also covered by at least one project that is location based.
Based on my review, the count for Scotland total suggestions for the 'main' group, that includes Locations, will double in size, with an additional 20 to 30,000 new suggestions!!! If that is what some people will also see happen, I expect a lot of people will mark them as False Suggestions because they don't want to be bothered with them. I have seen it on other suggestions that were added recently.
Creating suggestions to try to enforce that a location should be entered does not seem to agree with Wikitree requirements for a location. The suggestions will continue to increase because profiles will continue to be added with no location, either because no source has been found or the person adding the profiles doesn't want to look for one. There are no birth / baptism sources for many people because they were not required at the time or they may have been lost. Death sources can be just as difficult to find in earlier days.
Searching for profiles with no entered locations may be a problem, but if a 'phrase' is added, or Earth, Europe, Asia, as examples, those will be 'estimated' generic locations. Searching for United States is worse because there are so many variations of what is in use, IF USA has even been added to profile locations. Possibly there should be an Estimated Location template, similar to the Estimated Date template, which would be more obvious on a profile. If location is included to check for duplicates when a profile is being created, as many have complained about, entering a 'phrase' or Continent will not find the duplicates if the actual country was entered.
I have been running a Scotland Challenge for January that we did not post publicly on G2G because we are concerned about people just entering a birth or death location in a profile that has none, without properly sourcing it. This challenge is similar to the new suggestion 142.
For Scotland, using wikitree + Queries, we have:
- At least 10,300 Open profiles with a 19th Century date with a marriage location of Scotland, but no birth or death location. We have added locations to about 350 similar profiles this month.
- If I exclude those with no birth or death dates, it would only exclude 315 profiles
- At least 24,300 Open Profiles (all dates) with only a marriage location. This will be Scotland 142 Suggestion, if all dates are used.
- Excluding those with no birth date would only exclude 800 profiles
- Reviewing the 142 Suggestions for 19cen in the table above and searching for Scotland, it could be 15,000 suggestions, which is more than the query above.
If these suggestions were to be added to the weekly suggestion report, it will increase our suggestions substantially, so I would suggest that it be done initially for 19th century profiles only, or a portion of those, because there is a better chance of finding records for the more recent profiles. Sources have not been found for many of the earlier profiles, as Michael said earlier. A substantial increase in Suggestions to a member or a Project can be very depressing and be counter-productive.