Why is the Project Profile being moved to the trusted list when merged into a massively merged protected profile?

Question

I have noticed this before - the whole purpose of creating Project Profiles was to have massively (or in some instances not so massively but with the potential to become that) profiles under custodial Project Profile Protection where the Project Profile becomes the manager and the rest of the managers are delegated to the trusted list.

See this feed and this feed. There are good arguments for having this system and it works well as far as communication through the google group system that can monitor any changes and or where questions asked for example in the comment boxes are seen by everyone who makes the effort to read the mails.

I merged two profiles this morning, both into protected profiles. One had the project as active member on the protected target profile and the other one did not but had it on the profile that went into the target profile.

In this latter case the project profile was delegated to the trusted list and made inactive while the two managers remained active managers.

It has no priority as far as fixing bugs or other pressing issues are concerned, but it would be great if this can be fixed so that the leader should not every time have to de-activate the other members but the project profile at least be not the one to be delegated to the trusted list.

Comments

Philip, the notion was that the Project Profile should become manager of the project-protected destination profile before the merge happens. That may require the involvement of a Leader who can adopt the profile and edit the Profile Managers. That can still be done after the merge...

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Also note: I don't recall an indication that the Project Profile needed to become the only manager on a protected profile. The list of other profile managers should be judiciously trimmed, not eliminated.

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It only works if the project is the sole custodial manager. I.e. protection of the parental connections. This setting / concept was not meant for protected profiles with individual profile managers. Thus also the parental settings / connections can be safeguarded. I have go to have all of the near 2000 ppp'd profiles "secured" this way. See the old feeds (when Abby G. was still project leader).

Answer 1

OK, I think we need the team to weigh in....the purpose of the Project Profile when I tested it our with the US Presidents Project was to MERELY create a feed so that the project could monitor changes to the profile.   In cases where there were no active profile managers, I made the project the profile manager in order to do merges.   I guess I did not realize that the purpose had been changed.

Comments

Robin that was my understanding too although I have noticed that almost every profile for some projects has the Project Profile as a PM whether or not there is an active PM. Seems to be standard practice now.

My complaint is with merging a non PPP with a PPP profile, that the PM of the non PPP profile appears only on the Trusted List and not a PM like with merges that don't involve a PPP profile.

I know why this is done but still don't like it, because to me it can mean giving up control of a family member profile to a Project, where the members of that project may not know as much as the family member. (e.g. who the correct parents are).

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So far as I know, the info on http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project_Accounts is up-to-date. (Is it, Abby?)

As that page notes, the usage of Project Accounts isn't completely settled. I think it's still good if project leaders experiment with them a bit and figure out what works best.

The help page says "The central purpose of project accounts is to make it easier for project members to monitor activity on project-protected profiles."

That is essentially what Robin is saying. But there are plenty of other open questions on that page.

I think I'd agree with what Ellen says to Philip above. Setting a project account as a profile manager doesn't necessarily mean removing other managers, but after a merge that should always be considered.

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Hey Melissa, As the leader of the US Presidents Project, I have had people request to be put back on the Profile Manager list so that they, too, can monitor the changes made to their direct Ancestors.   I usually comply with the request....and while they are not project leads or project coordinators, they are active project members.   I would suggest this approach.

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Hi,
Everything's up to date as far as I can tell. It is definitely not necessary to remove all other managers. The main goal was to create a feed and watchlist of the profiles within a project, which can be done by the project account being either a manager or on the trusted list. We have pushed to have the account be manager on Project Protected Profiles so it is clear which project protected the profile and can be contacted for questions. I hope it isn't being used to limit the contributions of others but to help keep an eye on member contributions, rather.

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I do request being put back as PM for my family profiles.

As I said, I know why it is done this way just seems like an extra step even though it is necessary one.  Just one of my pet peeves that it couldn't be done at the time of a merge by asking whether such and such should remain as a PM or be on the Trusted List.

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If you are speaking of family members of a 200 year or older profile, then that will include countless "descendants". That is why there were / are socalled Massive Merged Profiles in the first place. With all the name variations included. Endless duplication. And even disconnection of validated parent profiles because of faulty secondary sources.

In this specific project (COGH or Dutch Cape Colony project) we try and source the spelling of the LN'AB in the first place by if possible both an image of baptism and transcription thereof. This includes the parents (and the Dutch were also so prude as to include who was "the supposed" father or who was not ["onecht"]).

The "settlers" [the socalled A-generation] have roots in Europe or the far East. As far as those go, we try and "fix" the spelling of the LNAB as near as possible to the original spelling until such time as we can source the baptism or primary Dutch, German, French, Danish [etc.etc.] records properly.

Active profile managers have a vested interest to be part of this validation proces. They are eager to be part of this and help. We relinquish our individual familial claim of managerial "ownership" in favour of a project that through it's connection to a forum [Google-group] becomes the custodial guardian. Everyone can still post and edit away, but there is a monitoring system in place. We thus build the trees downwards from the first settlers, and validate them, profile for profile, generation for generation until we get to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when things become murky again with huge families on the move with multiple wifes and complex naming conventions.

This has been said over and over again - nobody loses the right to add or edit (even if pre-1700 certified or not). Only the exact spelling of the LNAB and the parental connections are protected. If needed (through collaborative discussion and consensus) the protection can be lifted and the needed changes done.

What will eventually rest is a framework of validated family lines from the start of the Dutch Cape Colony settlement in 1652 until the British invasion in 1805-1806. This way duplication will be made redundant (because the intention is also to have an index at hand with name variations - much like the Acadian project has).

This is were curation comes in.

This is for me specifically important because I have DNA "evidence" that I belong to a certain haplogroup of one specific Huguenot ancestor from the mid-1650's [just one of many South Africans with the same issue - we are all cousins]. Because of the state of the nineteenth century profiles with it's endless duplication and faulty sourcing, it is paramount to create the trees downward as validated as possible, which also implies the correct parents. This implies scholarly validation through extensive collaboration and communication.

But then South Africa [as a colony] grew from a few thousand to about 19000 at the end of the 18th century. And there were many many records kept. So it is perhaps why we South Africans and descendants of South Africans have less of an issue giving up some sovereignity [which as we all know in WikiTree does not really exist because nobody owns a profile let alone one that is 200 years old or more] in exchange for better sourced and validated profiles.

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Abby, we only move active managers to the trusted list [not altogether as managers] from the A-generation(s) profiles and the validated protected profiles of their descendants. This has been the agreement and understanding from the start. This is the way we not only protect the LNAB, but also the parental connections.

As soon as we let individual managers remain [it has happened in an individual case or two where the manager is unwilling to share] they have the power to remove the project profile as custodial manager. And we do not want that.

In the end we are all going to die as individual managers. But we live forth in the project.

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There have been people in the past that were creating duplicates only as a way to become manager of an already present profile for that person (very often these are PPP or project profiles many people have as ancestor), that is why at some point the change was made that if these profiles are merged the manager of the duplicate will no longer automatically become a manager so creating duplicates only for this reason now is a useless method, and it's a bit confusing for everyone I guess, because it was said that all PPP profiles only should have the project profile and just one or maybe two active managers maybe could stay and all other managers could also stay of course but just on the trusted list ?? (many times duplicated families/profiles sometimes had and some still have, more than ten managers, and this of course is not really necessary if by the profile feed we all can keep track of the profiles ?

These early profiles have probably hundreds of descendants who maybe would like to be manager...

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Exactly my point.

Also, I came across the conflation of two Louis van As person's through another forum on Facebook. In the process of untangling them, I inadvertently myself created a duplicate. That's how this specific duplicate was created (I did look but not well enough or too late). Anyhow, in order to prevent another conflation of the two persons living at the same time with the same name, it is important that they [both profiles] are protected in this way from being merged into the wrong profiles all over again.

I'm quite happy to have my own progenitor being monitored and eventually even curated by others through the project profile: Geelis (Andriesz) van der Walt (abt. 1705 - 1757)

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Like so often happens a few spoil it for the rest of us.

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I'm sorry you feel this way. I see that you are part of many projects. I'd presume that you'd feel better with having validated profiles than endlessly having to repair them because of lack of understanding of context and content. I'm also member of the New Netherlands Project just as you are. I do not know when you joined, but I was part of it around if I can remember 6 months even before I initiated the Dutch Cape Colony project. If I compare the New Netherlands Project to what I came across 2 years ago, there is a huge - a massive - improvement. In some aspects despite not even always having the same amount of primary sources available, it is even better than the COGH project. I have the utmost respect for all the Project leaders and for the endless toil of certain project coordinators I will not name. We can all learn from each other.

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I think it must be clear that at WikiTree we just don't ''own'' profiles, the projects just are the most easy way and make it possible and more easy to share the earlier/ deeper ancestors with hundreds or thousands of members if needed . Because we only have one profile for each person, this means we need to share, so projects were not started to take away or hijack ''your'' ancestors or the control you have about their profiles, they are thought of and started to make it easier to share our deep ancestors with hundreds or thousands of members and to get them all merged , corrected if needed and sourced and improved a lot faster and easier than if all this work had to be done by maybe just one or two members..

And maybe this explains it better ? 

 What if Your Ancestor is Protected?

This is a good thing ! It means your ancestor's profile is cared-for by experienced WikiTreers.

If your ancestor's profile is project-protected, it may mean that you can't be the Profile Manager. (Although you might be, if you're the member of the project who's managing it.)

You don't need to manage all your ancestors. In fact, you may not even want to be on the Trusted List for all your ancestors. You definitely want to be on the Trusted List for close family members. You're likely to have information you want to add and when someone else adds or changes something you want to hear about it in your Family Activity Feed. But you might not want to monitor all the changes to the profile of Charlemagne, for example, even if he's an ancestor of yours. Those changes would crowd your Activity Feed so it's harder to watch the profiles you care most about.

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Philip what I meant was as Bea "There have been people in the past that were creating duplicates only as a way to become manager of an already present profile for that person"

That's what I meant those people spoil it for the rest of us.

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Bea what you say is true but as you know sometimes the Family member knows much more than the members of the project.  Maybe I am unique in this respect.

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I apologise if I misunderstood you Meliissa. And no, you are not unique. My progenitor alone has hundrends of thousands of descendants ... many of them feel that they know more than the project. And many times they do, and have something to add. This is "crowdsourcing". Not even mentioning those whom I'm not even remotely related to, as regard their family names in this shared project. It's all in a day's (project)work. It is exhausting, but while I participate, I choose to do it with passion and with diligence - care, in so far as I am humanly possible to do so.

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Well most project and also a lot of WikiTree members that maybe are not member of a project, all are trying very hard to find and add primary sources (birth,- baptism-, marriage-, death- records and if possible the original image or scan or a link to it ) to all profiles we have here at Wikitree, each and every member is valuable and of course unique in his or her own way, and if all these unique members for example would like to be added to just this one profile as manager, because it's an early ancestor they all share I think you can imagine how crowded the profile in no time would be eeh ;)  

But if there are no other active project members managing the PPP profile than of course it's no problem if you are added as manager, just let me know or send the links of the ones for you are important and I'll try and add you in.