What is Wikitree going to do about the disaster pre 1200

Question

Dear Friends

Many Wikitree editors do not work on older profiles and those that do, mostly only occasionally, and yet they hope/expect that there are profiles which approximately reflect what is known to genealogists about ancestors further back. That is in fact surely one reason to join a "big tree" because it means you can attach your little branch to that big tree? Projects such as Magna Carta give a good impression. Magna Carta was 1215.

It is therefore very sad that for those of us who actually try to work on old profiles, that Magna Carta is like an island of sanity. Everything on Wikitree before 1200, or not related to the big players who signed that document, could best be deleted as it stands right now, and let me be clear about the bigger concern: it is almost impossible to improve because of the set-up. No amount of genius, hard work and good intentions will ever fix the problem as wikitree now stands.

This part of wikitree is made up of old gedcom merges with dozens of profiles managers, none of whom (quite rightly) normally feel responsible for the soup which has resulted from all the merges. The quality is determined by the worst gedcoms and most of these were merges of merges, of cut and paste work, from old ancestry.com trees and similar anyway, which people were not feeling responsible for long before wikitree even existed.

The Wikitree approach to profile management, which many editors will always understand as ownership, is perhaps understandable given the difficult aim wikitree has concerning living people. But for old megamerge profiles it simply DOES NOT WORK. I am not saying we should tweak it. I am saying it will never work. I am saying it is fundamentally inappropriate and impractical.

Alternatives include establishing bigger razor gangs with special powers, which I think is not necessarily going to work, or, much more simply and more wiki-style, getting rid of profile ownership (yes yes, "management", it is not supposed to be ownership).

If it is not possible to bring in new approaches then I think wikitree should give up pretending that it can handle that period and set 1200 as a limit so that those of us who want to work on a tree for that period can work elsewhere. We are only hurting genealogy now.

If you want to see examples of how this effect genealogy even outside wikitree try googling "Alan fitz Flaad" just as an example. One of the first hits I get is a profile which declares itself to be a holding position for bad material coming from gedcoms. Ironically though, the real profile called "Alan fitz Flaald" is not much better!

I recently posted about the years I have spent trying to edit a much less important family: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/372774/request-for-clean-up-of-one-pre-magna-carta-family

With all due respect to John Atkinson, the response was not exactly great.

NOTE ADDED: My last paragraph about John was not sarcastic. Anyone looking at the discussion will see that John's reply was a side question, and I responded to it enthusiastically. My point is that the main question went nowhere. Apologies to John if needed! :)

Comments

Hi Laura

I think the lines are not lining properly for me. Do you have a summary of what you found in terms of how it might help us consider the subject of pre-1200 quality issues.

Andrew

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Just checked. I still can not make the needed edits on Godith. How can it be that this is so impossible?

The edits needed are so obvious and have been flagged for so long, discussed in all kinds of places, etc etc.

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Sorry about that, let me try this again:

Years 0000-0000 (meaning no dates given) total of all errors 320,328

Years 0001-1499 total of all errors  39,173

Years 1500 - 1699 total of all errors  203,899

For this last time period the largest error was in 

633 USA too early in death location with  46,477

For both 0000-0000 and 0001-1499 the largest number of errors where in error 511 Unique names (spelling) I gave data for 1500-1699 also data in order of time periods is below:

47463 7387 12234

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https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Database_Errors_Project_2017-04-09

Scroll down to see the grid...  the column headings are date periods.

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100% agree with your recommendation John! My experiences show it is faster to start from nothing but one good source to create a profile, than it is to try to make sense out of the 'goulash' that is an

"ancestry.com citation redirect" broken link..

 

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Important point about those numbers for profiles by the centuries. The data I linked is from early 2016. I determined from that data and from tracking profile growth and genealogist growth that Wikitree is mostly growing tall. Most new profiles tend to be towards the past rather than towards the present, so I would expect that the 20k estimate is likely low.

A new statistical survey would be advisable to check the rate of change.

 

Regarding new vs repurposed profiles: the absence of data can be more useful than the presence of untruthful data. On FamilySearch, I often have to go hunting for incorrect profiles or married pairs or even entire family branches because they've sucked up sources that don't belong to them and block progress by incorrect inferences. It is easy to be misled when the available information is grossly misleading.

Here on Wikitree, I have queried a number of times now about policies regarding grossly incorrect profiles and how to handle bad merges. Blanking profiles for reuse (recycled profiles) is ill-advised in general; with near living profiles, we generally have a reasonable presumption of the existence of a person represented by a profile, so we are grossly concerned with the correct vital statistics of that person and not with the truthfulness or consistency of their presumed existence, but with profiles far from the living, we really do need to be more concerned with whether or not the profile represents anyone or anything real at all. The problem compounds when we do bad merge after bad merge of fictitious entities, and it is actually made worse when a bad merge happens between a real entity and a fictitious one.

There are some special cases where you might reset most of a profile and rebuild it, but those profiles are determinative; most bad merges are indeterminate in form and could represent or describe virtually anyone. The inconsistencies are important and for most people the method for determining the consistency of a system is well beyond their abilities or interests or the tools readily available. Not that I am necessarily an exception to the rule.

 

Re: existing profile managers.

I think it is advisable to send out requirements that all existing profile managers on pre-1700s profiles get themselves certified by a reasonable date. After that date, kick all profile managers who are not certified to the trusted lists with a notification that they can be re-instated to profile manager for the effected profiles if they become certified.

In general, I am in agreement with Andrew's assertion that something needs to be done because the systems are working against each other causing a kind of gridlock. The problems of the profile manager system are already myriad and much discussed for the near living profiles, and I believe it works against the accuracy of the Wikitree genealogy. I think a systematic review is in order for potentially abolishing the profile manager system where the certification system is at work.

For the profile managers themselves, I don't think it wise to relinquish profile management until alternatives are in place. If you really want to keep managing the profiles then you should get certified for those periods regardless of what happens next. It would be a show of good faith and in comportment with the honor code. As it stands, it is soft-exploitation of a broken system to continue managing profiles for which you lack certifications.

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Thanks Ian. 

After reading the feedback of others, perhaps apart from the privacy management in recent generations, another way that people at least argue that profile managers play a useful role is in monitoring gedcom merges, which often go wrong.

So a comment on that: bad gedcom merges are indeed a big problem and part of the cause of the problems in pre-1200, pre-1500, and all over (but the further back the bigger the impact, because each profile has more descendants). 

However this problems has slowed down or stopped in pre-1700 profiles. It is another case where changes have been made, but other rules connected to those changes have not been reviewed.

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Cheers for andrew and James input on this. Because my own scrutiny of SGM rootsweb discussions led me to respect Leo V input, I have been influenced. I was surprised not to see support as I grew into Wikitree

Just to set my own precedent, you can go look at Dunbar-27 where i got inspired by Wikitree leaders discussing pre1200 on the board and I launched some badly needed work on the Dunbar line. I happen to be the volunteer coordinator of the House/clan of Dunbar although the leaders never put my name in print afteraccepting my volunteer offer.

Forget the background, what I did was post an image on Dunbar-27 Expressly, giving the verbatim posting by Leo, and I ran it past the community. No comments so far. That was my initiative, so I thought it was relevant, to confirm my conclusion that, Leo was a big time collaborator

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I can not really follow the details, but in general I think wikis tend to work by allowing people to edit and even make mistakes. It was found that this works long as fixing those mistakes is equally easy. 

PROBLEM on Wikitree: reversing mistakes is harder than making them, so there is a ratchet effect going the wrong way.

Whoever makes a first edit has the advantage, an advantage they might not even want. Making merges, LNAB changes etc so hard, because of the protections and profile "managers" means repairing a mistake is harder than making them.

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I have starting drafting some concrete policy proposals on my to do list page: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Andrew_Lancaster_To-Do_List

Answer 1

You are right, only a small subset of enthusiasts will ever invest their time studying this period.

What if there were an effort to batch change profile management for pre-1200 profiles to a project account?

Comments

I am not an expert on which technical options would most suit the Wiki software of Wikitree, but that type of thinking makes sense. Just a question of finding the way. Bigger problem is agreeing that radical change is needed. (This subject has been coming up for years. Discussion always peters out.)

But note: one of the problems for now is that project protection also mainly just blocks editing. I think I am in the Euroaristo project but that never seems to help. It would need to really be practical for people to be empowered within those projects and able to edit.

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More information on project accounts: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project_Accounts

Since editing to pre-1500 profiles is already restricted, it seems the biggest advantage would be the activity feed.

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I just hope someone reading this discussion actually has the possibility to influence the things we are talking about. Funny we spend so much time on G2G about this subject, but I sometimes feel it is for nothing. :)

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Hi Andrew,   I think Julie posted this above but there's a process for developing and proposing new rules (or changing current ones).  See https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Developing_New_Rules.

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Thanks H., indeed adding the project profile as manager especially for these early shared by many ancestors is a great idea and many projects already are working this way.

It makes it possible we can work on and source and improve these early or project profiles with thousands of members if needed and we can all keep our own watchlist limited and within a for one person manageable size.

If the project profiles are added to profiles they will create a watchlist (feed) we all can watch and manage using the project googlegroups. Members join projects and they can join the project google group as well, this project profile googlegroup is just the same as our own watchlist or feed, all profiles that have the project as manager and all activity or posts are visible in the project googlegroup and gives us all a great overview of the porject, what people are working on and if perhaps someone could use some help.

So instead of just orphaning profiles, adding the project profile is a much better solution. So if profiles would fall under the Euroaristo project we all could perhaps work on adding the project profile as manager and only after that remove ourselves as manager or move ourselves to the trusted list ?

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I certainly think that the narrowly defined projects that I have encountered such as the PGM project work well. However when the gatekeepers ie  the project managers have a projects  with such a huge brief (country and period) as Euroaristo it must inevitably become impossible to mange.

I have been reading this thread with interest. I don't have any expertise on genealogy in this period but have  been finding very similar problems to those mentioned by Andrew even with  profiles from 3 centuries later. I find the lack of active managers plus the presence of project protected  profiles results in inertia.  For example,In 2012 someone decided that 'expedited merges of historically significant ancestors ' should take place and placed a PPP on several related profiles (none of which had any sources and I am certain that the historical significance is a suggestion that they were ancestors of an emigrant.  I don't think they had anything to do with him) . There were obviously good intentions, a name for contact and google group were given. The contact person is  no longer a member of wiki tree, the google group has a last post in 2012. The project  manager has so many profiles to manage(with  an error list of  well over 100,000) ,it is not surprising that they don't reply to comments and messages.  Asking on G2G results in no replies; not surprisingly because the question is too specialised.

But where does that leave someone who has done detailed research and wants to try to improve the accuracy of the tree?

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I think the answer is simple: no one can explain why wikitree has so many ways in which edits (including merges) are made irreversible or difficult to reverse. It brings no benefits. So end that experiment.

Let the wiki work like a wiki where edits (including merges) are easy and fixing edits (including merges) is EQUALLY easy.

You can then avoid mass deletions, keep projects, even let people call themselves profile managers, but just take away all their functions as gate keepers.

The registration/certification system can be expanded to for example have more levels, and that will cover everything. It is not unusual on wikis for different types of editors to have different levels of trust invested in them, what is strange is giving almost no editors enough power to fix some types of problems once they are done.

Answer 2

I'm not sure why you were flagged for this question/commentary but I do agree that any profile pre 1500 even is highly questionable. I have dabbled in a few profiles from the 14th and 15th century and found the work highly intimidating. Looking at Calendar Patent Roll, Fine Rolls, etc is not for the average family historian. That being said I'm not sure what you can do about it at this stage. Can we just take an eraser and remove all profiles before a certain date? Maybe just remove all unsourced profiles? What about profiles of 'King Arthur' types, which are mostly mythical, sometimes totally mythical,  with very little valid information? Who decides who goes and who stays? Should there be a rigorous process to prove you are qualified to work on these type of profiles? Does wikitree have the capability to do it, considering that most of the people here are volunteers. Would highly qualified researchers want to devote time to wikitree?

Comments

I agree with Jeanie, but just to add as Andrew touched on a handful of profiles like the Magna Carta/gateway profiles have a level of care but there  are plenty of others not connected to any narrow project that are forgotten. Some have been connected to my ancestors I can't fix them, and projects have ignored my request for merges and help on them, partly due to the fact the profile manager is old and peole have said it's not worth working with him or with those profiles.

 

Would it be helpful to have a broader pre 1500 project and pre 1200 project that could oversee all profiles famous or not and so the project could be added as a manager, it might relieve some issues - just saw H Husted posted simmilar

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I also replied to that, but just to point to one thing people will say: such projects already exist. Why are they not working?

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I think part of it might be they are very narrow focus on gentry, aristocracy, creating connections to Immigrants to America, lots don't fit in that, a broader overarching project would include all profiles in those times, and other people who are not interested in those narrower projects could have support for areas who are not currently well represented.

 

Also part may be people feel intimidated those projects as they have very complicated rules, and are not easy for people to get involved. So only a few people participate and then the focus is on a handful of profiles

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Not sure you are right about that.

I am a person who tries to work on that time period, and I want to be in whatever project I have to be in. But I can not get anything done in pre-1200, and 1200-1500 is tough work. I think this is more of a problem coming from the software settings which define editing possibilities, and they way they are set-up.

I think the distinction you make about interest in gentry etc is not necessarily the problem. In reality, in pre 1500 profiles we are always dealing with a small subset of humanity - the bit with clear family records that have survived. Most such records are interesting to someone on wikitree, whether it is because of money, land, military things, profession, politics, crimes etc.

Magna Carta was a politically interesting event, but one reason genealogists like it is that it was also a document. :)

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Your probably right about that : ), I don't have much experience with that time as it has never seemed to me easy to get involved with.

My experience has been with the profiles of "everyday" people, and the problems for those profiles appears to be there is no project support for them.

I think Magnus? Talked a few weeks ago about having talk pages?

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I think a project to manage these really old profiles and a mentoring system might be of great benefit. I would love to work on these profiles and think that with the help of a more experienced mentor I could do a better job.

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I have done "ordinary people" in medieval Scotland, back to about 1450.

Its possible, but extremely specialized. Documents are thankfully never in Gaelic, but in earlier periods in Latin, slowing changing to English. However most are in "secretarial hand" which you have to learn to read.

Some documents are transcribed but the critical points often have to be checked in the original handwritten form. The script is hard to read since its sort of shorthand. I found the occupation of one ancestors and read it as "coctorem corobesiae" which mean "cook of a non-word". One day I was staring at it, and realized that a little shape changing would change "corobesiae" to "cerevesiae" which made him a brewer!

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@A.C. Raper. I also often mention talk pages as a possible help. I notice WeRelate has them but does not use them much. On the other hand Wikitree is bigger and needing to grapple with more complex cases, while WeRelate is still picking lower hanging fruit and having fewer possibilities of editors bumping up against each other simply because it is less populated. So I still think they are worth considering. And another thing is that I find it sometimes frustrating that we can not easily analyse and link to editing histories of articles like on most Wikis. I am not sure why this was done.

@James. yes I love being able to find such records. Scotland sometimes seems to have more. Cities like London are also interesting places for non gentry.

Answer 3

I agree in large part. It think the problems might be solved by a threepart approach:

1. Everyone who has pre-1500 rights should be able to edit project protected profiles. It's frustrating when you want to correct an error and can't. Have trust in people.

2. Everyone who has pre-1500 rights should be able to modify an LNAB. Now you often see that to correctly merge two profiles you have to create a third with the right LNAB and then merge the two others in the new. That's a waste of time and creates an extra profile for nothing. Have trust in people.

3. I'm not sure how many pre-1200 profiles there are, but might it be possible in stead of deleting them to temporarily hide them untill someone trusted validates or deletes them? That way we could weed out the trash.

Comments

Please note I did not mean to say that deleting all pre 1200 profiles is necessarily a good idea, only that if we have no new way of working we might as well.

I personally enjoy working on the Domesday period and the generations just before Magna Carta. A lot of the people on Wikitree in that period are recoverable as long as we can make it easier.

You are correct that LNAB changes are one of the problems. Merges are also too difficult, and changes of parents etc also whenever there is too much protection.

Consider that when you need to rearrange a whole family you need to disconnect some people and then reconnect them to others. Each of the profiles however will have a different set of protections and managers. (See the Godith example, and also indeed the ancestors of Alan fitz Flaald.)

Answer 4

I'm not particularly interested in pre-1500 much less pre-1200 but I'm going to give it a shot.  I'm willing to go along with whatever the preponderance of those who are interested come up with, but there are some things going forward which need to be considered.  First genetic DNA/RNA studies may help in sorting out which connections are viable.  With increasing numbers of people taking the tests, either current or future techniques may let us sort out actual lineages far further back than we presently have.  So I think there is some value in maintaining present profiles until it's clear what can and cannot be done.  

Secondly, the textile-like nature of genetics means that having deep ancestors isn't particularly important for recent lines.  My AncestryDNA results for ethneticity is mildly interesting to me but knowing I have lots of vikings, apparently, in my distant past generations doesn't mean much to me.  So keeping putative lines isn't going to matter much.  (Perhaps that will change)

Finally, I'd certainly like to attract more serious (old?) genealogists if for no other reason than we'd have some access to older literature which either isn't online yet or so well hidden that it might as well not exist.  Maybe we could come up with some sort of way to put generalized sources in older profiles which would act as gateways to information which needs to be looked at; say "Vatican Library", "Royal Swedish Archives" or "Pre-Elizabethan English Tax Rolls.", etc. This would let let us have semi-sources which people, in universites, for instance, might be able to turn into actual sources in the future.

Answer 5

When I found WikiTree the one aspect giving me pause before joining was the state of a large proportion of medieval profiles. I do think, even though most people will never be able to go past the 16th century with their proven ancestors, these medieval families are important to genealogy and if we cannot get them right we cannot expect to be taken seriously. The problem is the large number of cobbled together internet pedigrees on the one hand and the very small number of WikiTreers interested and able to do the research to fix them. At least the pre-1500 certification requirement should stanch the influx of these profiles somewhat and create some breathing space for those interested in cleaning up the mess.

I have started to clean up some families in my area of interest and even though this is slow going due to my limited time able to be spent on this project I do think that I'll gradually be able to improve the mess. I do have to agree, though, that our present process is not conducive to this work. As an example I would like to bring up Charlemagne who has been in discussion recently here on WikiTree again. I have repeatedly pointed out that his birthplace is unknown and yet this appears to be of such minor import for the profile managers that here on WikiTree he is still born in "Aachen, Rheinland-Westfalen, Deutschland". I admit it sounds trivial but if we cannot get Charlemagne right how can we expect to be taken seriously? The page has been accessed over 37,000 times and has 7 PM's, only one of them being pre-1500 certified.

What can we do?

• PM's without pre-1500 certification shouldn't really be PM's for pre-1500 profiles.
• Every EuroAristo subproject could spent some effort to create a list of priorities, for Continental Europe one could start maybe with the families of the Holy Roman Emperors in succession (that alone could keep a lot of people busy for a long time).
• Ask for volunteers to take on a family and give them some degree of authority to fix the profiles.

Comments

Exactly. And that type of problem on Charlemagne is not only on pre 1200 profiles, as was recently discussed in another thread about a more recent royal.

But personally I question the profile manager system completely. I see no benefit coming from it all before recent generations (where it helps with privacy etc). And I think any proposal whereby we say (in effect) "people should work a bit more carefully" is not going to be enough because a lot of these profile managers are hardly even aware of what the frustrations and problems. They are mostly not reading this discussion and even if they were they would be unsure of what to do differently.

The small number of pre-1500 editors can do a lot more and get a big improvement.

Answer 6

The goal of wikitree is to have a well resourced genealogical database starting at the year zero AD (though historical research says 0 AD = 4 BC).  It's not supposed to be a guessing game, but with fewer sources the further back one goes, one wonders what happened to the pieces in one's genealogical puzzle.  On top of that there are fake genealogies out there confounding the problem and they get treated as if they were fact  by unsuspecting descendants. 

I don't believe mass deletion is the answer, but it will be a slow growing pains process to correct the "massive destruction" of the tidal wave that's been building for millennia.  Hopefully, I will be able to get pre-1500 certified as I am a profile manager for pre-1500 profiles that I entered before there was pre-1700 certification, let alone pre-1500.  I see some mistakes that need correcting, but I can only contact the profile managers or ask a G2G question or post a billboard message on the profile to hope someone will make the corrections and put in the correct "sources."

 

Comments

In the cases of the examples given there are good sources available. I know what is needed, and I am confident that once done it would not be controversial.

The problem is not lack of sources, or lack of editors.

Answer 7

I"m not sure there is much that "WikiTree" should do.  WikiTree, in the person of the Leaders, or some tech people, could, of course simply delete all files with a pre-1200 birth year.  I don't think any proposal to do that is serious.   

Beyond that, we are not talking about some entity comprised of others called WikiTree, but we are talking about we who are volunteers and members on this project.  So I think a question framed in terms of what "we" can do would be more helpful.

I do notice in the discussion so far, some unhelpful absolutes.  Everything could be deleted.  All are bad, etc.  The fact is there are real people with real documentation back there.  William the Conqueror.  Charlemagne.  That's enough to eliminate the absolutes.

So the issue is not that they are ALL bad profiles, but there are SOME bad profiles.  Yes.  A LOT of bad profiles, imported by GEDCOM and never touched since.  And because they went by different names, a lot of duplicate names that need to be cleaned up.  And they need to be cleaned up by real people who are volunteers on WikiTree.

Which takes us to another issue.  WikiTree is a collaborative site.  Others have to be involved, and others have to be respected.  That means WikiTree will never be a site like, say, Charles Cawley's Medieval Lands Database, which is a monumentally extensive work of one person -- and Ihave seen criticisim of Cawley's work because it is the work of one person.  So one will never be free of criticism, but we choose the criticism of being the work of many people, and that means you can be 100% sure (and here I am using an absolute!)  that even if only a very few of the world's top rated professional genealogists were allowed to work on pre-1200 profiles, even then you would find someone criticizing some profiles.  So I think that's not an ideal we need to aspire to.

What we have now is a site that people know is highly variable in quality, and people will go to a profile and say, "that's crap" or go to another and say, "oh, this makes sense and has credible sources."  I think it will always be good profiles that give WikiTree its reputation and not the opposite, Wikitree conferring a reputation on profiles.  Profiles on any site really have to stand on their own merit, not the sites's.

I have spent the last several weeks on a rabbit hole that caught my attention sorting out some profiles in the 600s and 700s impacted by a legendary figure called Makhir.  I certainly share with you the frustration of encountering profiles that are nonsense.  But I take pleasure, as I'm sure you do as well, in trying to figure out what the sense is and improving the profiles.

In the process, I don't find the PMs the barrier that you do.  Yes, there are a lot of PMs on pre-1500 profiles who are not pre-1500 certified, and if they don't want to become pre-1500 certified, then they really should take themselves off the profiles.  [And this may be a real problem -- I suspect they no longer have access to the privacy setting to do that, so they are stuck in limbo.]  

But the only thing you MUST have a profile manager or member of the trusted list to do is to merge a profile that is not PPP'd, and you can still merge a profile INTO a PPP"d profile if you're on the trusted list.  And I've had no reluctance from profile managers in adding me to the trusted list. So I simply don't see current PMs to be the barrier that you do.  

I've talked too long.  The short answer is simply, "yes, there is indeed work to be done.  And we are the ones to do it."

 

Comments

What benefits do you think the profile manager system brings Jack?

To be clear I have not proposed deleting all pre 1200 articles but I do think as a mental experiment it is thought provoking. It would initially increase the average quality of Wikitree. What I propose is changing the reasons for that, so that profiles can be improved.

And I would also like to know how you would handle example cases like the early de Lancaster /Workington family and the fitz Flaad family from Brittany. All the advice one gets about just being patient and writing messages in every direction has not worked over the years I have been trying to get that family just to a basic "non crap" level of quality.

Also, concerning your comment about Charlemagne, see Helmut's post. Pick any famous person. It is in fact true that MOST pre-1200 profiles contain crap, even concerning basic things. Just because the people might have actually existed does not seem a reason for too much satisfaction! :)

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Bravo, Jack! An excellent answer!

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Andrew, I'm not committed to the idea that every profile needs a profile manager.  I'm on record as saying -- which I still believe -- that profile manager-ship should expire after two years unless you renew it, so that the default would be that profiles would eventually lose their connection to a person who has lost interest in them.

I can speak best to the value I find in being a profile manger, which is that, with respect to a profile that I've spent some time and energy on, I get notified if someone has changed it or wants to merge it.  WikiTree is pretty wide open for anyone who wants to do something -- we really do tell people, "change any profile you like, if you make a mistake people can undo it with the changes feature, or even restore the profile to what it was."  So the role of the profile manager is really a conservative function, to act as a brake -- literally to get in the way of people who want to make changes, if they're active.  

I think we really do agree on most of what you've written.  There really is some horrible stuff that's pre-1500, and it needs individual attention, which is going to take time.  I find the inattention that some profile managers give as frustrating, they obviously haven't touched the file since the GEDCOM loaded it -- but I'm guilty too, I loaded up one GEDCOM and created an array of files I haven't touched, and I'll NEVER NEVER do that again and wish nobody else would!  But I've found profile managers cooperative of my efforts.

The biggest problem I've found is with accounts which I believe are legends and others believe are true.  I've approached this by treating the legend itself as history, which it is -- when did it first appear, when did it get embellished, etc.  That makes it easier to convince others that certain things they thought were facts in their profiles are actually part of the legend.

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Dear Jack

I definitely also think we agree on a lot in our work. I enjoy also those little differences between all of us editors who make the effort on this type of profile. Thanks for your comments and efforts on this and other occasions.

However, given my history of working with other wikis, for me the question about the value of profile managers is unavoidably "in what way are they better than watchlists?"

...And in my opinion, your answer does not really show any advantages over a watchlist. A watchlist system does everything you mention?

The special wikitree profile manager system does more than that. It means people can own profiles, and block editing. And when a profile has 1 million descendants and 15 profile managers... we have a complete and utter failure. We have "crap". Some of the examples are so bad Jack. 

Let us not get numb to how bloody awful that some of the most important genealogical lynchpin articles are. They are totally unacceptable. They are an embarrassment. 

Good genealogists still keep away from here in droves. It is a very small number of us who will show whether this can work or not. It can fail. It is even likely. This is the internet. Things turn around very quickly. Wikitree has lots of quirks also concerning things like copyright.

I am contending that the things the profile management system does are bad for good genealogy, always, but especially once we go back a few generations. In recent generations I think they are a compromise with good genealogy in the name of "cousin bait", and getting people in to wikitree to work on the starting point of their family tree.

I am not opposed to compromise, but when we compromise we should be conscious we are making a compromise. I can see the value of getting people in, and feeling close to their recent ancestors. I can not see the value of letting a commune of gatekeepers own a person who lived in 1200, 1500 or even 1700.

...and in the end, just in terms of what is possible, the number of good editors available are never going to make that work, unless it can evolve away from the problems it has now.

I am saying pre 1200 is a scandal, and as some have mentioned, probably not so many profiles. 

Make it a test case?

Regards

Andrew

 

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On an open profile -- any profile more than 200 years old -- how can a profile manage block editing?

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Jack, just by not allowing it. Good people are doing this, but not actively. The system creates this problem.

Many basic types of edit require active permission from a manager or a project - merges, LNAB changes, parent changes, etc. It does not matter how well sourced and uncontroversial the needed changes are. Often the owners of the various people in one family are not even the same.

I am surprised by your question though, and wondering how you have avoided this experience! :)

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For me, merges, which I don't consider a basic form of edit, but rather an advanced form because merges cannot be undone, are the last step in a revision process, and LNAB changes are a form of merge, mechanically.  I increasingly ask to be on the trusted list when I'm working on a group of files, and then when I'm finally ready to do a merge, I'm able to do it myself.

I'm working on some profiles now where there are 4 profiles I'm pretty sure are the same person, but I'm getting the other facts as straight as possible first.  There are some differences in parent, differences in dates, etc.  All of these are easier to resolve first.  And the more documentation i'm able to add, the less controversial they might be.

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Jack, OK so you are I think not unaware of what I am describing just unusually accepting of it. Or perhaps you stick to areas where there are fewer profile managers etc.

But you have to admit Wikitree is not exactly an attractive editing environment for good genealogists who are keeping away or giving up. Note that some of the profiles with the most managers and other blocks are exactly the ones which are most important because they link many lines.

My point is that to fix up families given the current constraints on editing it can take months or years, or in some cases it just seems to be impossible.

I would also disagree about simply needing to get one's sourcing in order. As our recent Musgrave discussion showed, the bigger problem is getting others to read and absorb and accept that information and then get enthusiastic enough about it to actually do actions to ALLOW things to happen. And even then because that process is so difficult, it often simply goes wrong, with the wrong changes being made.

So as mentioned by me above, there are profiles I can explain exactly what needs to be done, and have been doing so for years. It is not a problem of complicated debates and sourcing and lack of people who understand it. It is a case, like I keep saying, of a system which actually blocks improvements from being practical. It is much easier to give up and go look for another venue.

Right now is wikitree's moment. But if it does not fix this problem I think better genealogists can not vouch for Wikitree.

Answer 8

I've voiced some of these concerns numerous times. Then there's this problem: I continually find profiles for people for whom GOOD sources are easily available via FamilySearch (parish records etc.). But the people running these profiles either won't or can't read/locate them, so they post cheap links to Wikipedia or some other internet tree sites for sources....that is, when they bother to post sources at all. I would imagine that the problem is compounded for medieval person profiles. Show me a medieval person profile that has linked primary sources, done by someone who can actually read/interpret Middle English etc., and I'd be shocked.

Answer 9

Maybe one shift in approach would be to employ the term "Profile Manager" for the profiles which have various restricted levels of privacy, and "Profile Monitor" for all profiles which have an open privacy level, thus including all profiles more than 200 years old.  

For open profiles we expect a greater degree of participation by a greater number of people, and we have little -- or even no -- expectations of what profile managers will do.  I've worked on profiles that have had no input from the profile manager since the profile was created in 2011.  Such a person is not even monitoring, but they certainly aren't managing.  

 And I'm guilty.  There are profiles I "manage" that I haven't given attention to in over two years.  The DB Errors project is useful here, because IT knows that I am listed as a profile's manager, and so that profile is on my list of profiles to fix.  

 

Comments

Such small things can help, but for pre 1200, I think we need a greater feeling of urgency.

Answer 10

Andrew, I appreciate you bringing up this subject.

The time frame includes verified ancestry up to William the Conqueror (1066) and his wife, and from him, up to Charlemagne (d. 814).

My caveat is that I would hate to lose the work that has been done on those profiles, documented in Royal Ancestry by Douglas Richardson.

There is more, which I will save until I've had time to read all the other responses.

I agree we need a detailed policy for the pre-1200 profiles.

Comments

Better than deleting would be making it possible to improve articles.

Answer 11

I'm not underestimating the hard work of the participants in the Magna Carta project, but part of the success, was that it had a particular focus, a date they were aiming to get most of the work finished by, and one main source.

At the moment, with EuroAristo even limiting to just looking at profiles from 700-1200 still makes an incredibly broad and varied number of profiles of which many are either unsourced, in other ways unfinished, or have no basis what so ever.

Perhaps to be more successful the EuroAristo project needs to be more like the Magna Carta project and limit the focus for a set period of time.  Identify some key profiles or sets of profiles that need work and make a short, sharp attack on those.  For instance for 1-2 months just focus on Charlemagne, his spouses and children.  Next move on to the first four Dukes of Normandy and immediate families.  Move on again to the Saxon Holy Roman Emperors etc.  There could be a list and people could add to of what to work on next.

I know we have tried this before and it hasn't always been successful, so perhaps other people have ideas of ways to tackle this very large problem that will make a difference to the current quality of Wikitree profiles from this period.

Comments

John, agreeing on Magna Carta Ancestry, as the primary source for the project, enabled the Magna Carta Project to quickly resolve conflicts. It provided a framework, and dedicated, hard-working volunteers did the rest.

Richardson followed MCA with Royal Ancestry, which documents in five thick volumes, (correction): NOT ONLY the descendants of William the Conqueror, (correction): BUT ALSO the descendants of his sister Alice of Normandy, Countess of Aumale and his half-brother, Robert, count of Mortain.

I think Pre-1200 needs to be sorted into workable chunks, with an easy choice for one of them being 'Descendants of William the Conqueror.

I made an error omission above and have corrected with a strike-through. The five volumes of Royal Ancestry cover the descendants of three people: William the the Conqueror, his sister Alice of Normandy, and his half-brother Robert, Count of Mortain. The title Richardson gave his work, Royal Ancestry, is more accurate than the one I suggested for the project. My apologies for the confusion, which led to a perception it would be only a few dozen profiles. Sorry. It would be many hundreds of profiles.

Profiles in the five volumes from the 1600s to 1200s are mostly done by the Magna Carta project, and would only need the stretch from 1200 to 1066 (approximately) to be documented with Royal Ancestry. The Appendix in Volume IV, correction - Volume V, from page 481 to page 504, details five different lines from Charlemagne to William the Conqueror.

Mr Marlyn Lewis, of Portland, Oregon, uses both MCA and RA to document profiles in his online database "Our Royal, Titled, Noble and Commoner Ancestors & Cousins". It's a useful and convenient reference, and includes the five lines in Richardson's appendix.

I do not know how many here have a copy of Royal Ancestry, please excuse me if I'm repeating what is already known.

The reasons we chose MCA as our primary source would apply also to Royal Ancestry. It was recent, reliable, very thoroughly sourced, and Richardson updates his work continuously with errata and new discoveries. Although the cost as a set was daunting to me, the cost per volume is very reasonable for such large books.

 

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April, I use http://our-royal-titled-noble-and-commoner-ancestors.com/p141.htm#i4240 often. It is saved on some profiles I manage and is saved in my google favorites 22nd of 285th. I replaced my last computer less than a year ago lol

Shucks I keep it close to Kitty's Library and Jillaine's Dream Source help Page. JPV IV

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I think the Descendants of William the Conqueror is a good idea.  It's five generations from him to King John, so having a project that works on a five generation descent from William gives a project some concrete boundaries.

Using Richardson as a main source also seems valuable, though Marlyn Lewis does use some other sources as well, and as a consequence has some glaring mistakes and omits some people.  However I am sure some other resources could be recommended if people don't have access to the Richardson books.

However even at 5 generations it could end up being a big project (given Henry I's 20 or so children) but probably not insurmountable.

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Any such project would have an impact on a few dozen profiles at most? So it would be good, but not really addressing the bigger problem very far.

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By the way a similar idea which would overlap is to have a reconciliation project that uses the Henry II website. Maybe a simple table would already help people make a difference in that case.

But still, the families I tend to work on in the 12th century include the Hastings, Le Strange and de Lancaster families. And such medium level Barons are in general very interesting to me, and will not come out. If strong pre-1200 projects come into existence I will want to work on those also. Marshall, Sackville, Fitz Alan etc.

John Schmeeckle mentions the idea of tracing backwards with the Magna Carta barons and that interests me. Sources include Keats-Rohan, Sanders, Round, etc. These contain a lot of errors, but we also have the FMG Domesday corrections pages, and Keats-Rohan did a Sanders correction article.

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For a problem as large as the Pre-1200 profiles, we will probably have to tackle them one chunk at a time. I think that there needs to be a plan, but a project based on Royal Ancestry could be done simultaneously with creating a plan.

I need to correct the concept of Royal Ancestry as 'The Descendants of William the Conqueror'. It is much more than that, and Richardson designed it as 257 Colonials with "royal ancestry" going up to William the Conqueror, and his sister Alice of Normandy and his half-brother Robert, count of Mortain.

If such a project comes to pass, the better name would be what Richardson gave it: Royal Ancestry.

I'm explaining this because my mistake led to the idea that it would only cover "a few dozen profiles". Actually it would cover more than the many hundreds of profiles included in the Magna Carta Project. Not all of those are completed, but the majority are done but only up to King John. John Atkinson perceived the scope clearly as the 'the five generations between King John and William the Conqueror" but it is also the five generations between King John and Alice of Normandy and the five generations between King John and Robert Count of Mortain.

Sorry for the confusion.

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Yes but I think therefore John's approach is sound: first pick a chunk to work on: 5 generations from William.

Some of us have in recent months been doing this for Edward III. (For Lionel of Antwerp, his son I have then also tried going to 10, but it will be some time.) But of course for Edward 5-10 generations brings us to modern times. The first 5 generations after William are tough ones.

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John, I corrected my response from last night. Royal Ancestry by Douglas Richardson covers the descendants of William the Conqueror, his sister Alice of Normandy, Countess of Aumale, and his half-brother Robert, Count of Mortain. That is why it is 25% larger than his previous work, Magna Carta Ancestry. Sorry for the confusion.

I do think it would be a very good sub-project of EuroAristo, and would build directly on the work done (and ongoing) by the Magna Carta Project.

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Yes but I think therefore John's approach is sound: first pick a chunk to work on: 5 generations from William.

I agree totally Andrew.

I will enter a separate reply with the scope of the five volumes next.

thank you!

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Purpose and Scope of Royal Ancestry (five volumes, 2013) by Douglas Richardson.

"Documents lines of descent for approximately 250+ seventeenth-century North American colonists from William the conqueror, the first Norman King of England, who ruled from 1066 until his death in 1087."

• ...no medieval king more famous
• ...the single most radical change in European history between the Fall of Rome and the 20th Century
• ...profound changes in church, aristocracy,culture and language
• ...millions of descendants
• ...every English monarch since William is a descendant including the current one

"Numerous other families are included in this book, chief among them are those of the Conqueror's sister, Alice, Countess of Aumale, and his half-brother, Robert, Count of Mortain. Lengthy accounts of the medieval Kings of France and Scotland are included here as well as many other notable families, including all seventeen Magna Carta Barons of 1215 who left descendants and two companions of the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings, namely Robert de Beaumont, Count of Meulan, and Eustace II, Count of Boulogne. The appendix in Volume V sets forth descents for both King William the Conqueror and his wife, Maud of Flanders, from the Emperor Charlemagne (died 814).

ORGANIZATION:

The England account is placed first in the book. It commences with King William the Conqueror (died 1087), who is Generation 1.  All successive generations of his descendants are counted starting from William, his children being Generation 2, grandchildren Generation 3, and so forth.  The family accounts which follow the England account are arranged in alphabetical order.  Family accounts commence with a skeletal summary of previous generations;  each successive generation is then discussed in turn, followed by citations.  When both spouses have traceable ancestry in this book the lines are cross-referenced. The accounts of the other notable families included in this book follow the same format.  The earliest progenitor of each of these families is considered Generation 1, children are Generation 2, and so forth. When the descents of the other notable families match up with a descendant of King William the conqueror, cross references are provided." from Royal Ancestry, Volume I, page xi. (italics mine).

This summary is provided for any who may not have Royal Ancestry and are interested in the scope and organization. It was difficult for me to imagine the amount of research and individuals covered in Magna Carta Ancestry until I examined the books. Seeing the sources for each profile - sometimes running to more than a page in small print - is what inspired me to purchase Royal Ancestry the next year. I think that the scope and contents of Royal Ancestry would be a good foundation for what would be a rather large project.

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Thanks April, for the information about the Royal Ancestry books.  I do still think that limiting a project to something like '5 generations of descendants of William the Conqueror' is a good idea.  After that you could work on something like the Ancestry of William and Matilda back to Charlemagne, or one of the other suggestions on this G2G discussion.

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I agree John, and want it understood that the way Royal Ancestry is formatted, it would be very easy to use it to do exactly what you said. It would be possible if, with that effort concluding successfully, to then begin with the descendants of  the Conqueror's sister, Alice, Countess of Aumale for the next phase, after that William's half brother Robert, etc.

It would not have to be done all at once because the way the book presents the information is by each descent separately.

Whatever choices are made for the next group effort on profiles Pre-1200, WikiTree is going to continue to get better and better. I see that as inevitable because it has been the clear path of growth since I joined in 2013, and there is no reason to think that would change.

(Andrew I do still agree with you that something must be done about the large pool of Pre-1200 profiles that are unsourced and/or a product of confusion.)

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John, other blocks of work include

Tracing back the Ahnentafel Henry II (handy because there is a good source for it, relevant because he is King John's father and King John is on Magna Carta).

Tracing forward from King John who is of course a Magna Carta signatory. This would complement the Edward III work done recently but is not strictly relevant to pre 1200.

Answer 12

After reading all the comments, it seems to me that the issues are:

• The need to identify and remove (and/or hide to be done later) pre-1200 profiles which cannot be sourced, or where the sources diverge so much they don't make sense. Can this be done with some kind of computer sorting, manually seems overwhelming. What would the programmed parameters be?
• Working out guidelines for the Pre-1200 profiles to be more accessible to designated, specialized work groups, while also removing PMs who are not Pre-1500 certified. I like the suggestions by Raf Ceustermans.  Should a Pre-1200 certificate be added?
• What other large sources can be used? Several mentioned in this thread are:  Genealogics, Domesday Book, Calendar Patent Roll, Fine Rolls, Cawley's Medieval Lands, and Royal Ancestry. Would a thorough assessment of the sources available help to define the possible working group/s?
• Should the working groups be assumed to be the members of the EuroAristo sub-projects? I like Helmut Jungschaffer's suggestions. It seems logical that members of the EuroAristo sub-projects would be the most familiar and successful at creating a list of priorities for Continental Europe, and also the most interested, being self-selected.
• Is there a way we can encourage and recruit experts in the esoteric documents of Pre-1200? What changes can we make to get those who have been mentioned as watching our efforts to become players instead of the audience?

WikiTree is a big tent. There is room for newbies and beginners all the way through professional and certified genealogists. The time frame is also vast, from modern to the Dark Ages and beyond. Surely we can create protocols for dates that require specialized knowledge that will encourage those who possess that knowledge. It is easy to see that they would put a high value on assurance that their work would not be open to arbitrary changes.

 

 

 

Comments

April, I think it can be simplified down to just your second bullet point.

It is interesting how the first thing everyone is reading is that I propose deleting all those profiles whereas I keep saying that this nuclear option should not be necessary if we just allow more free flowing editing by the qualified editors.

It is not that sources do not exist for example, even though there is no obvious equivalent to Richardson and CP in this era.

Concerning MEDLANDS I will make the remark I always make: it is not appropriate to use it as a reference source in the way some Wikitree pages and templates tell people to. It is a constantly evolving project which seeks to build up ideas afresh. Therefore it is not stable, and it is often behind secondary sources (because it supposedly avoids them). But it is sometimes useful, and again, lack of sourcing is not the problem. The problem is that it is impossible to get edits finished within a practical and reasonable timeframe.

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When Andrew says "edit" he includes "merging", which I see as quite a different beast.  But as long as we understand what we're discussing that simply becomes a matter of semantics.  

Currently I believe Leaders are entrusted with the IT capability of enacting a merge without being a profile manager or on a trusted list -- the assumption is that if one is a Leader, one is trusted.

If one is thinking of a pre-1200 badge which is different from the pre-1500 badge, would not one of the key characteristics, be, as I think Andrew would like, to include unlimited merge capability in the new badge?  Someone with a mere pre-1500 badge could still do all the things they would want.  The bar to obtain a pre-1200 merge-badge would need to be quite high.  I'm confident Andrew would pass, but I'd want the number who receive it to be highly selective!  I"m not sure I personally would want it, for me it would feel like keeping a loaded weapon in the house!

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Yes Jack of course editing includes merging, and also LNAB changes.

I can not really understand the concern you have about them. On other wikis, including genealogy wikis like WeRelate, merges and name changes are very easy to make and I do not see this causing any special problems compared to Wikitree.

As mentioned Wikitree has a problem, but seems to have a big problem admitting it. I see no sign of Wikitree being better because of these special distinctions about these types of edits. They are also not more dramatic or irreversible than other edits. Remember this is just code on a computer somewhere.

Merges and name changes can cause a mess if done wrongly, but not being able to do them causes the same problems, so this is not a valid reason to distinguish them?

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Well, Andrew, one of the beauties of life is that you do not need to understand my concern -- only that it is there.  And it is there as part of WikiTree's design, otherwise it would be as easy to merge as it is to change the date in a data field.

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Jack if you think about it, yes, if you want to have a discussion with people about something you work on together with them, they do need to understand you :)

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Jack, as far as I am aware, Leaders don't have any special merging powers (not that anyone has told me anyway).  Leaders can "Adopt Open profiles that are duplicates of PPPs or should be project-protected" and that can sometimes expedite merges, if for instance the profile has an inactive profile manager.

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OK, so as a Leader, you can adopt any Open profile -- which should be any profile with a birth year before 1817.  So if you decide two profiles should be merged, you can adopt both of them without the profile manger's assent, and you can then merge them.  (And then unadopt them if you chose).  So that gives you merge ability with a couple of extra steps, but if you're impatient, you could do it in a couple of minutes.

You'll see I created another G2G question posed to leaders on this topic. Your thoughts would be most helpful there.

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I think instead of a time restricted level of authority ("pre-1200 badge") it would make more sense to have an area specific focus. I am much more comfortable with the countries formerly covered by the Holy Roman Empire, for instance, than Scandinavia or the British Isles. Again, maybe the subprojects could become active in this respect.

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Someone proposed projects getting block powers overriding profile managers for certain areas/periods etc. It might help, but remember that we already have projects and they do not seem to work this way at the moment.

Answer 13

I work a lot on pre-1500 profiles for several other genealogical organizations with a specific area of interest.  These are a few observations:

1.  WikiTree Style Guides will not work for most of these profiles.  It takes me literally multiple touches to get one profile into the system and make it anything that approaches acceptable for accuracy and the style guide limits which don't fit a world were accuracy was never cared about.  You are lucky if birth dates are within a year of the actual event.  Most are baptismal records from circulating priests who visited that hamlet or town once every year or if you are really lucky more than once a year.

2. Literacy was virtually non existent.  The same document often has the same name spelled differently.  This is how in France the name Faisthauer became Feisthauer and then Festor....  sigh...  Or the name Stenger dit Peron became a new surname of Peron.  Yes, no such idea as a last name at birth... they changed sometimes from time of birth until it was actually written down...   Children in the same family can have different surnames which in our world are more constant.

3.  Men often took wive's names if it came with property like a farm.  See this often in what we call today Germany.

4.  Forget countries, rulers owned lands that were scattered all over Europe and sometimes leased them to other rulers.  It is enough to drive a sane person crazy when trying to name a location.   http://www.emersonkent.com/map_archive/central_europe_1477.htm

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/map.cfm?map_id=3752

5.  Sources are often written documents done years later.  Some are from songs or stories that have come down and changed through the centuries.  But do not say they are wrong, it would be like saying any of the major Religious Books are wrong.   Wars have literally been fought over less.

6.  Languages...  I keep a database of all the ways a name might be written... for example John (Hans, Jean, Johan, Johannes, Giovanni) because the same person may have the name spelled differently in different years., places,.. or different documents but it is that same person.  My glass maker ancestors often traveled throughout Europe (countries did not matter really back then for crafts people) making things like stain glass windows for churches.  Then making table goblets for counts or kings.  The same glass maker may be in Italy in the winter, France in the spring, Germany in the fall...  (of course those are modern country names that did not exist back then)  but there were holdings owned by people like the Hapsburg, or other rulers all over Europe.  Glass was carried on Templar ships and traded all over.  Some of the crown gems in Europe are really glass. http://eragem.com/news/a-history-of-st-edwards-crown/

This is not a time period of those who like order and neatness.  It is chaos at best.  And even the experts do not always agree.  So I document both sides and why I have listed what I am listing.  

I think any profile from 1800 or before should be open.  It would solve a lot of problems.  If you have a valid project like Nobles, Magna Carta, Presidents, and want protected profiles then the process should be used and a team should exist as a PM.  All requests should be answered within a week.  With a team the odds of everyone being sick or out is small.  

I also think if you are smart you will copy these kinds of profiles so if something happens you can fix it.  I have masters outside of WikiTree that I work from.

Comments

All profiles 200 or more years old -- birth before 1817 -- must be open.  If they're not, it's an error that needs to be fixed.

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Laura, thank you for the information on your glass-making ancestors. It was new to me and I find it fascinating to imagine what they must have been like: multi-lingual, master craftsmen, meeting with and/or working for the most powerful rulers and nobility across Europe. What amazing experiences they would have. How I wish they might have kept diaries!

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April I am going to send you something to your private email.  I have seen Dehlinger among glassmaker documents.

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Jack we find profiles that are older than 200 years that are locked for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes it is because they came in on a gedcom and the data did not import to the WikiTree Date Fields but is buried in a note at the bottom and sometimes there are weird characters surrounding it like USD569Pk12Nov1648rl347    (I made that example up but have seen things like this working the 901 errors).  I think this means there is a date that belongs somewhere of 12 Nov 1648.  So it is at least searchable.  I do not do the searching because the 901s are all locked profiles and I can't fix it so I flag it for the staff.  Often a PM can have hundreds if not over 1000 profiles in the 901s.   I just cleared over 400 errors that were false from one with over 1300 listed when I started working on it.  It is for the most part a highly frustrating error to work on.  You have to be willing to understand that you can only do so much and then it is up to the staff to either decide to open the profile or delete it because we contact the PM and after 30 days with no response I forward them to the staff for further action.

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So many different types of reasons exist on wikitree, to make edits (and merges!) difficult. How does it help in the periods where certification is needed? No one has answered that question. Striking.

Answer 14

Before the pre-1500 deep freeze took over WikiTree and damaged it more than I could ever hope to say, I was already profile manager of some of the profiles in question. I did what I could in the short time I had, and will contribute more, but it is going to take me a good while to get completely over the big upset that unnecessary deep freeze created. If the community removes me as manager of the profiles I adopted, in good faith, I won't interfere of course, but I'm not removing myself.

Comments

Being an inactive profile manager is interfering by definition I'm afraid. I understand it is not intentional, but that is the practical effect, because that is the nett effect of the mixture of system we now have in this period.

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If a merge or similar change to any profile is requested of me as profile manager, I have and always will act promptly. Even though I'm not pre-1500 approved, and maybe never will be, I can still approve merges, right? I'll gladly cooperate, in this and other ways, with the more experienced members of the community such as yourself.

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But with all due respect what does that add to the process?

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I can see where a descendant might want to be the PM on a profile that is pre-1500 and not have the pre-1500 badge.  That does not make the PM an obstruction.  Only a non response from a PM is an obstruction or a privacy setting for whatever reason on these pre-1500 profiles are obstructions.  (I don't mean the control that limits working on them to pre-1500 certified WikiTreers).

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A PM can be an obstruction without intending it.

The problems is simple: difficulty correcting mistakes, even obvious ones like an extra wife for Henry VIII.

Or should we say that Wikitree is so perfect that basic ridiculous mistakes like that being impossible to fix should not concern us?

Answer 15

Removing all managers, thereby (effectively permanently) further restricting the majority of the community from contributing, will only make WikiTree a far more restrictive, and much less popular, community than it has already become. Instead of removing every one of the managers, it should be possible to have the managers of each profile vote for one, or maybe two, of their number to stay on as actual manager(s) and then restrict all major edits to the approval of the manager(s).

Comments

You deserve the compliment. :)

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Martyn: What gives one or two managers a closer connection to the profile of somebody living in 1200? That's roughly 27 generations if we take an average of 30 years, and 134,217,728 descendants if we give everybody just 2 surviving and procreating children.

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I don't think anyone can honestly claim a closer connection. In selecting a manager out of a group of managers, demonstrated ability should win over claims.

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Projects with blocks of profiles could still do the same job though? (It is one of the ideas put forward.)

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It would work. Less personal, but it would work.

I do think you, as a very qualified pre-1500 member, should be able do all kinds of edits on all profiles with or without managers and without having to get permission first from anyone.

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Among various smaller solutions which could make a difference is the idea of giving stronger permissions to more people based on various criteria.

Such things certainly could help.

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I have profiles that are pre-1500 where I am the PM and I do have the pre-1500 badge.  I feel a close connection with my deceased grandparents and an equally close with my 14x great grandparents.   I know more about some of my more ancient ancestors than I do about some of the more recent ones.  Emotions are real even though they are not often logical.  The problem is when we get a PM who is not open to opposing points of view and when working in pre-1500 you rarely find all of the experts agreeing on anything.  I list both sides in my profiles when I know of any opposing viewpoints.  My 8x great grandfather wrote a work that is quoted from in many books even today.  He wrote it in the 1700s.  It was published after his death by his granddaughter's husband.  Then republished in modern times in association with a village 250 year celebration by one of my cousins another direct ancestor of the author.  There have been a few challenges to some of his original thinking but the records are not clear one way or the other because names were not constant from document to document, because there were often  3 or 4 people with the same name living in the same town during the same time period and all were related (grandmother, daughter, cousins / or uncle and cousins sharing same names).  I have even seen two cousins with the same name born on the same day in the same town.  Yes that leads to genealogical confusion ever after...   So it is very important that both sides of any viewpoint be listed with its supporting documentation.

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Laura, but in practice, here on wikitree, what benefits do profile managers bring in terms of quality editing?

Currently, let's be clear, people do not get their power over profiles by proving that they are more emotionally connected, just like they do not get their powers by proving they are good editors. They get it by being first to jump in, which is many cases is just an accident of history.

The problem is that once something is done on Wikitree (or imported), edits to reverse mistakes, are harder to get done than the original edits, which might not even have been important to the original editor (who often was someone not even on Wikitree). 

So Wikitree keeps ratcheting quality downwards because (in conflict with the normal Wiki style) "second edits" are deliberately harder to make than "first edits".

I think we just need to say how we fix this. No point musing too much about who has more emotions.

Please everyone, let us not be so lost in this system that we become numb to how stupid our project looks by not being able to even get Henry VIII's wives right, after so much time.

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Andrew, don't get me wrong.  I am a proponent of opening any profile that is 175 years old or older.  Exceptions would be projects that have a team of PMs meaning more than one person to watch over the bona fide project.  

I merely am stating a fact, that sometimes the problem is a PM has emotional ties to what is in the profile.  That is good in some ways but a true genealogical scholar would make sure to include both sides of disagreement based on differing sources.   I do that routinely if I know of another viewpoint.   

When dealing with data before 1500 there are often competing viewpoints among experts so that is the norm rather than the exception.  Mainly because sources are so scarce and often written from a biased viewpoint.  The scribe must make the ruler look good no matter what...

I agree, I have never seen a serious assertion that Henry had 7 instead of 6 wives.  I have seen hoaxes and conjecture like these:  http://www.historyextra.com/news/henry-viii-%E2%80%9Chad-seventh-wife%E2%80%9D-claims-historian  or this http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2956818/King-Henry-VIII-seventh-wife-decided-feisty-couldn-t-bothered-six-marriages-failed-new-book-claims.html    

Have you filled out an unresponsive PM form?   I know forms seem so silly in this day and age but it is the process on WikiTree.  The staff should take to heart that bad genealogy of a notable historical figure does WikiTree no good.  It casts a pall on the entire validity of a site like this.  There should be some group who is responsible for dealing with accuracy disputes which is far different than just allowing a war between posters with opposing viewpoints.  That is why I am a proponent of a team of certified source and historical time period experts being in charge of projects like this.  

Editing is changing something in a field.   Merging is not editing it is a different process but it does create an edit to the data.  Unattaching a person is also not an edit but it also creates an edit to the data as it stood.  It is kind of like all dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs...

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I think this logic is backwards.

1. Wikitree is currently the most busy genealogy wiki, and we do not have enough people to work with this over-difficult system already where editing is so difficult after the initial edits. These "just contact more people" ideas that always interject on G2G do not work for that reason.

2. It is not a matter of bad editors literally wanting to make bad edits stay. It is a system where people actively must line up like the stars do once in a century, and bless an edit. The problem is not the gate keepers personally, but the whole system of so many gatekeepers. It inevitably means editing is biased against.

3. This silly word game about merging is only something a couple of people can even follow. Of course merges are edits. Otherwise, please just replace "editing" with "merging and editing" in all these discussions and the problem is still the same problem and the extra words achieved nothing. But it is irrelevant. The edits needed are not only merges.

Answer 16

However it is accomplished, uncooperative or inactive profile managers do need to be removed. I do see the need for that. People who are too busy to respond promptly, within a day or two (and hopefully sooner), probably shouldn't be managers.

Comments

Is there any clear way to judge profile managers and grade them objectively?

If there is not, then shouldn't we at least have it clear in our minds about why we want profile managers?

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Do you always think from a negative perspective ?

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Sure. What use is planning based on what can go right, and trusting in luck? You make useful plans based on looking at what can go wrong.

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So you admit that you planed to come to wikitree and 

" Fix it"

Well it was not broken in the first place.

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/358392/how-to-correct-errors-on-pre-1500-profiles 

I might deserve being Red flagged, but IMHO you need a Yellow Card !

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No sir. YOU make useful plans based on looking at what can go wrong.

Wikitree may have it's problems, but you aint gona fix it by removing profiles. You probably never even read my posted links within this Q

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Yes I admit I try to improve things which go wrong, and not improve things which do not need improvement.

One thing no one seems to disagree with completely except you is that pre-1200 profiles are in need of improvement and not showing the same types of trend to improve that other parts of Wikitree do. They are shockingly bad, but also not getting better.

Answer 17

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/358392/how-to-correct-errors-on-pre-1500-profiles 

 

Comments

A method which does not work. Keep in mind that concerning this subject we do not have to guess what might go wrong. We have years of evidence about what keeps going wrong.

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That's just one persons opinion.

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You are only in two WT Projects ?  European Aristocrats Project | Australian Convicts and First Settlers Project.

Then you haven't a clue.

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For a Community Star and Super Star you sound like a troll?

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“Nobody knows who I am or what I do. Not even I.

Don Juan Matus
” 
― Carlos Castaneda, Journey to ixtlan

No Sir, I'm-a New-York-Texan and you and I are quite probably related :-)

Answer 18

What about starting a project for these profiles?

Comments

Hi Leigh. Indeed I think one of the ideas is that one or more projects can help play a role, but the questions keep arising of what powers they can be granted and how they will avoid clashing with the similar powers of the many profile managers on pre-1200 profiles.

The Euro aristo project already exists for example, but being in that does not really help me at all to get edits done?

I recently started an Edward III descendants "project" which a lot of people seem to like, which also had a clean up mission, but in a later period. But in reality that project gives no powers, and is just a name. It gives us a name to point to, but that type of project would not help the pre 1200 level of problems?

Answer 19

Just wanted to say that although I am away from my computer and Genealogy files for a month or more, that I am reading Andrew's threads closely.

Andrew is bluntly correct about the enormous migraine that will occur for well intended pre-1200 contributors. I have been working an area where I cant claim any specific ancestor, but my gut tells me that it isnt impossible that i have some tiny remnant from somebody that I became educated about. There is fun in learning.

Final comment is that Managers are non contributors, right now, and i learned the hard way,  my post of 2 months ago calling for input on Dunbar-27 is tyoical, and that is just a single profile experiment. Failing grade. Although I still have respect and admire them, just speaking of real world data

I dont have recommendation yet but will read the suggetions.

Comments

The aim of a wiki is "anyone can edit". Real people like you and me have weak and strong points so a good system lets us help each other. We should not see this as bring about different levels of genealogist who need power over each other (that is the problem we keep sliding towards though). This is about ways of working.

I have heard the idea that a small bunch of really good genealogists could make something better than the medieval part of wikitree or any other wiki, and if that ever gets tried seriously we'll see. I will not be unhappy about that if it works. But it has not happened, and maybe because that model has its own problems.

On the other hand it has to be said that further back we go, 1700, 1500, 1200, the less that the very specific wikitree style seems to work.

But the wikitree profile manager system is clearly a conscious decision to try something that is NOT normal in wikis, and not really in line with the wiki philosophy. I would call it an experiment.

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Andrew's put it in understandable terms

It is about ways of working together.

There must be a way to run some sort of pilot effort, in a defined time and space.

British Isles, Western Europe, 1200 plus or minus 150 years is fine with me, but I realize this is only a trial balloon top of my head thought. Basically we do need to experiment and the current profile manager concept, both in early centuries and overall, is really a big liability/challenge, for those who wish to help the whole community with an improved tree. There are a bunch of other headaches, this is just one of the foundation pieces of paradigm, that kills the forward progress.

Answer 20

A few answers have raised the idea that certain pre-1200 profiles should be deleted.

For right or wrong, reading the Deletion FAQ (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Deletion_FAQ) this proposal goes against this fundamental policy. As such, it seems a bit of a non-starter (unless I've misunderstood the policy).

If we aren't going to delete profiles, anohter option is to include adding the warning tags at the top - a bit like the wikipedia tags you get at pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imaginary_Invalid.

Would this help address the reputational issues that people have raised?

Comments

Well if it is impossible to consider then we need another solution.

On the other hand the wikitree concept of making it difficult to reverse things is against the basic way wikis normally work, because it makes it easy to do a first edit but hard to fix later.

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Looking at it in some more depth, I'm actually wrong here. Per https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Developing_New_Rules:

"Any member of the community can propose a new style rule, a clarification, or a change to a policy or procedure."

It's more than once proposed and discussed by the user community on G2G, the final decision on whether or not to implement will be up to the WikiTree managers.

So, do you think the policy should be changed to say, for instance, that unsourced pre-1500 profiles are deleted?

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I vote NO on on your deletion hypothetical, haven't seen Pro Con or scope of impact

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I do not say there should be deletions?