Why are so many new profiles lacking sources

Question

I worked on the Source a Thon and found a lot of profiles without sources.

Many of them were added in the last year and you find managers did this as a pattern of all their profiles.  Profiles were mostly good but too lazy to add a source ,

How can this be fixed?

Answer 1

Sometimes it is simply time. For instance, I had a large family of 3,000+ people that needed to be split into several GEDCOMs for import and the splitting did not result in the best possible arrangement for work flow to clean up the profiles. At the same time my old software made a mess out of my sources. That import happened in 2014 and I am still working on it today. As a result there are still profiles around that are unsourced but not abandoned.

Answer 2

I don't think it is necessarily laziness Arthur. I think it is more likely organisation. I've done it myself. If a family has for example 8 children, then it seems sensible to put all the children in first and then go back to each one and fill in all the sources and history etc. It's just a logical way of doing it and avoids mistakes. I have been working on the Source-a-thon and although it has achieved an awful lot and we've all worked very hard on it, the profiles still don't have all the information on them that they should have. I (only) did 33 but it took me quite a few hours out of a busy weekend, but now each of those profiles has one source. I still have to go back and fill in all the other details individually and I will do that, but it takes time.

Comments

It is great that you did that too. Some of the ones I found though are over 6 months and no updated or additions and every one of the Managers profiles lack a source. I understand doing that and I avoid it myself because you tend to forget.  I check my non sourced profiles with my name every week, mostly to see if a profile I adopted lacks a source. I then work to clear it..

Answer 3

Sometimes it isn't laziness. Most of the time it isn't.

People who join for the first time might want to rush to get as much of their tree in that they know as possible. Others might rush to connect themselves to the main/larger part of WikiTree, so they add profiles as needed.

I remember making (... I forgot which surnames, my luck) a whole bunch of profiles at one point based off of a book from the 1800s I had gotten my hands on and have as a PDF. I would have sourced all of them if there was a way to select multiple profiles and add a single source to the sources section for all of them. Currently that doesn't exist.

It would be great if it did, however... so many genealogy books to go through that would make being able to mass-source an easier process for adding sourced profiles...

Comments

I like your Idea to be able to source a bunch at a time. One of the ones I found all the family was in the same source and went through the grandparents, parents and sibling using the same source. One by One

---

I like that idea too for adding one source to multiple people at once!

---

I like the idea as well. To simplify sourcing a lot of profiles to one single source, you can make a Wikitree Free-Space Profile for that source and link to the free-space profile. You only need to place the link in all profiles, the actual information is in one single location.

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Free-Space_Profile

---

That isn't a bad idea at all, Jorris. I might just do that for some of these PDFs I have of "Ye Olde Books." And shove the Chicago citation in there too.

Answer 4

There are a lot of people here at Wikitree, who despite having signed the Honor Code, do not understand the importance of sources, do not know how to find, and have no interest in adding them. To them it is sufficient that the Ancestry trees say it is correct.

There are also the gedcom importers, who upload their gedcom and totally abandon wikitree right after they import. I know several people who have done that.

Answer 5

OK, I'm going to vent here... The sad fact is (and I say this with a great deal of affection and respect for the Wikitree community) that inadequate sourcing is more of the rule than the exception on Wikitree. Believe me, my standards aren't that high - I just want profiles to explain in some intelligible way where the information comes from. But there are huge numbers of profiles with no sources at all, or cryptic references to Ancestry.com trees, or GEDCOM garbage, or sources that only provide evidence for some of the information in the profile. Many of these profiles are years old and I don't believe for a moment that their managers are ever going to come back to clean them up. One of the key aspects of Wikitree that differentiates it from all of its competitors is its theoretical commitment to good sources, but it's discouraging how frequently this theory is not borne out in practice. Surely we can do better?