What does a project protected profile actually protect?

Question

(a bit of a follow up to a recent slightly different question)

I click on the project protected banner and it says that this profile is managed by a project.  Why protect a profile before resolving obvious issues?

This  profile is just one  example that I've encountered recently http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Sackville-11  . (see my comments at the side )

( Missing first husband,  sons born before she was, one 'born'  within the right time frame , too many sons, no daughter, I found no evidence that she died in Wales, her burial place  was in Wiltshire where  her husband lived and she made her will. I don't know where she was born but  the Sackvilles owned lands and property  in Southern England so why Wales? )

It really didn't take long to find the sources in my comments and I found others (her sister in law http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Clifford-293  for example wrote a diary which mentions her ) 

I simply  wanted to  link  this lady to her daughter who also has a profile  though at the moment has no parents .I ended up needing to research her mother, yet at the same time,  feel  constrained from making any alterations (someone else  commented on the dates of birth of  a son almost a year ago but there have been no changes or answer ) 

(sorry sounds negative but am feeling a bit frustrated)

Answer 1

Project protection prevents the profile from being merged away (by merger into some other profile) and it prevents the LNAB from being changed.

It also limits who can change the parents who are connected to a profile (parents of a project-protected profile can only be changed by a Profile Manager, Leader, or Project Coordinator).

Profile protection does not limit who can edit the profile, add or remove spouses or children, add sources, change dates, etc.

Comments

Profiles should only be protected if and when the info in the profile is correct and sourced as well as it can be.  Some reasonable time to edit makes sense, probably 30 days; but there are PPP that are not actively being edited. Not unusual to find PPP on here that are protected junk, even some with WT staff as PM.  The arbitrary nature of what profiles are protected also reflects bad on WT.  And the PPP status does serve to scare off potential contributors, so if you're going to use PPP, don't just set it and forget it.

(Comments not targeted at Ms. Smith.)

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I beg to differ, Mikey. Project protection is particularly important for the profiles of long-ago people who have many living descendants and have been subject to a large amount of erroneous and/or fraudulent genealogy. Because these people have many descendants, they also typically have had a bunch of duplicate profiles created here at WikiTree, and those profiles often include a lot of junk information.

Project-protection is applied to those profiles after someone has made a determination regarding an appropriate LNAB, and has identified the lowest-numbered profile with that LNAB. After it's applied, projection ensures that future merges will go in the direction of the appropriate LNAB and that bogus parents that have been disconnected from a profile (for example, parents found in a fraudulent published genealogy and widely propagated on the Internet) won't get reattached over and over again. PPP status should not be misconstrued as an indication that the profile itself is anywhere near perfect. However, project-protection is a step toward increasing the quality of a bad profile, as prevention of bad merges and false parents makes it much easier for contributors to work on improving the content.

The project-protection template is hyperlinked to http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project_protection. Would it help if the template was edited to include the words "Click here to learn more about project protection?"

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Thank you, Ellen I know that what you are saying is correct.What I am concerned about is that in spite of it's aim, it doesn't seem to prevent merges with bad consequences,   nor does it prevent unsourced extra children and spouses being added. (and  quite often these are from those fraudulent genealogies, because established 'aristocratic' pedigrees are what they seem to 'want' to link to.)
It looks as if the extra husband and at least one of the extra sons was as a result of a merge  just after the project protection was put on,

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Now I understand your question, and your frustration. A profile that appears to represent a completely different person was merged INTO a PPP profile, and some of the profile information seems to have been changed to correspond to this other person. Project protection won't prevent that.

I have some suggestions, but I'm typing from my phone at the moment, and it would be better to do this from a regular computer.

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The most important thing we can do to prevent bad merges (or at least mitigate their effects) is to thoroughly document the sources and inferences upon which the profile information is based.

As for this profile, the merge was done last October, before profile-protection started preventing changes to the parents. The page history indicates that RJ Horace proposed the merge, which was completed a couple months later by a contributor who apparently was just trying to be helpful. Thus, it doesn't look like there are profile managers who were committed to keeping the profiles together.

The edit that merged the other profile into this one is documented in http://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Sackville-11&diff=29015048&oldid=27347318 .  That history information  should help you restore the correct mother to this profile and pull out the information from the other profile to package in a new separate profile.

Answer 2

If you have or can easily find sources to improve a profile -- even a project protected one -- you should go ahead and add it. As Ellen says, PPP does prevent editing.

If you don't have the sources or time to find them, you could ask for help by linking a g2g to the profile. "Can someone help me clean up PPP Mary Jones-123 ?" And perhaps say: "this PPP is in need of some love and care. I could use some help tracking down sources and cleaning up dupes associated with her. Thanks so much."

Comments

Jillaine, as you can see, I still need guidance on the actual mechanics of cleaning up these profiles, especially since we are supposed to collaborate!   I'm perfectly happy to add sources  and add  her first husband and her daughter  but what  does one do with the extra children and husband ? Simply detaching them and leaving them to float in the ether doesn't seem right either!

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Helen, if you've perused g2g lately, you'll see a variety of posts such as "Can we detach Nathaniel Hayes as husband of Alice (____) Bouton Marvin?"

I'd recommend you create a similar g2g along the lines of "Proposal to detach three undocumented children of John Smith-123" and make your case for doing so. I'd also add a comment on the profile in question linking to your g2g thread as additional encouragement for profile managers and TLs to read and discuss the issue. Let me know if you need help.

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thanks Jillaine.(have to wait a few days though as will be offline)