I just hit 25,000 contributions and it caused me to pause to reflect.
I was a very active community member, contributing heavily to projects, doing a lot of work on orphans and general improvements, and responding to requests for technical help/information. Over a year ago, I cut myself off from community participation, but continued to work on my own family here. My only G2G participation was questions about how to handle issues relevant to this work.
I was happily oblivious to the etiology of the db errors project until it very negatively impacted my work, at which time I brought that issue here. Silly me - I thought that by posting in G2G, the problem would get solved, but I discovered that the prevailing opinion among members seems to be that all the good results from the project excuse the things that impede my work, as well as a few other bad effects. It's a shame, because the negatives could be easily eliminated, but the community seems so fixated on the positives that there is only a miniscule handful of members who even acknowledge the existence of the problems. The result seems to be that the list of "errors" keeps growing and, while many of them lead to improvements, the logic errors that creep into the new detection algorithms are also growing proportionally and nobody seems concerned about fixing them - my impression is that the priority is to add more and more potential detectable errors to the list with no concern for collateral damage.
Efforts to correct all the detected errors (whether or not they actually are errors) has now spotlighted the problems related to public (rather than open) profiles with unresponsive (or absent or a zillion other creative identifications) or uncooperative profile managers that impede collaboration. Instead of trying to deal with that problem, which has been begging for attention far longer than the errors project has been in existence, it appears that management's only concern is elimination of impedance to error correction progress and they decided that changing privacy criteria will provide an easy fix.
As I see it, WikiTree started as an amazing concept that grew rapidly as others discovered and embraced the wonderful thing it was. It evolved to fruition of its promise as a result, but it was inevitable that problems would crop up as the scale magnified. Viable solutions were implemented with well considered thought and planning and WikiTree continued to grow. I believe the complexity of new problems that inevitably develop is in direct proportion to the scale of WikiTree. Unfortunately the degree to which solutions are created and implemented is no longer keeping pace with the increase in problem complexity. The result is that when a problem is identified, a band aid is put on it. When that doesn't fix it or gives rise to another problem, there's always another band aid. My fear is that, after all the layers of band aids, WikiTree will turn into a mummy.
I have missed not being part of the community very much and have now decided that I will return to G2G but will pretty much limit myself to just social interaction here. As I said before, if you ever have a technical question, feel free to message me privately and I'll be happy to respond.
