Privacy Conventions - Thoughts?

Question

This is the convention I have been using on setting privacy for the profiles I manage:

If the person is living, privacy is set at "Private". (I have also been manually entering profiles, and have chosen to leave out most living individuals rather than include them as "unlisted" or "private", for instance cousins of my own generation).

If the person is deceased, but has living children, privacy is set as "Private with Public Biography" and I have limited the profile to information that is publicly available from obituaries, wedding and anniversary announcements, etc.).

If the person is deceased and has no living children, privacy is set at "Public".

What do others of you do?

(PS - Is there anyway to  organize this message board so there is one "sticky" thread for topics that recur, e.g. privacy?.  It's awkward to search and scroll the board for past thoughts, which may be very helpful).

Comments

You might decide to include living individuals, cousins. Its a great way to invite them to see there ancestors directly. Privacy here, helps. I had always wondered how I was to get all my information out to all my cousins. Printing a 10 volume set of books for each seemed a lot of work. Wikitree has solved that problem. And collaboration brings lots more documents, pictures and stories to the family tree. I would suggest keeping all profiles as open as possible and holding back some info were appropriate.

---

When looking at your question here to enter a comment, noticed Related questions on right. Search function top right might just do what you wish or are looking for.

---

Great question, Ellen. Regarding keeping topics together on G2G, we could set up a category for Privacy. That is, instead of a general "WikiTree Help" category we could have categories for Privacy, GEDCOMs, etc. But like Michael said, the keywords will do a fair amount of this. Narrower categories would have a lot of advantages, but they'd make asking a question harder.

Answer 1

I actually prefer Private with Public Biography and Family Tree for non-living relatives who have living children. Actually, I also like that level for active WikiTreers like myself. You can see what that looks like on my profile: http://www.wikitree.com/genealogy/Lavoie-Family-Tree-74

Also, you haven't mentioned the Open privacy level. Open is the default for profiles of people born over 200 years ago, and it's required for people over 300 years old. It's really important to use this privacy level, because it allows WikiTreers to work together much more easily on ancestors they have in common.

Answer 2

Thanks for the thoughts. They are helpful.

As to organizing the board, I suspect that subcategories will be helpful (possibly even with moderators), but it may be better to let the board mature for a while.  The suggestions that pop up are helpful, and the search function is fine if a bit clumsy, but neither are conducive to promoting ongoing community discussion over time on topics of continuing interest to veterans as well as newbies, such as privacy, the honor code, citation conventions, etc...

But everything in the fullness of time.