I'm going to respond to other people's comments, and I welcome further discussion.
First of all, regarding the suggestion that Free Space pages be used instead of scroll boxes, I have two reservations about that. Sometimes it can work well, but sometimes the content of the scroll box isn’t enough to warrant creating a separate page. And furthermore, I think that Free Space pages will eventually be eliminated, so I’m inclined to avoid going there..
Here is an example of a profile where I inserted a scroll box at the end, with the will of Thomas Tobey-9 at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Tobey-9. I think this will is notable because of the detailed instructions with which Thomas divided his land AND his house AND his barn between his two youngest sons, who had married their step-sisters. (I’m descended from one of these two youngest sons, and my fellow leader emeritus Jillaine Smith is descended from the other one.) In my opinion, including the entire will as a block of text at the bottom of the profile is unbalanced, because the rest of the profile isn’t that long. My solution: a scroll box for the will. Others are welcome to share their thoughts on aesthetically pleasing alternatives for this profile.
A similar example is the profile of William Joseph Coons-329. On this profile I could have used a scroll box for the military record of his company in General Sherman’s Army during the Civil War. This block of text, just a list of marches and engagements, doesn’t blend in well with the rest of the profile, and many people will want to skip it over, although some descendants will be interested in coming back with an atlas and tracing the route that he traveled on his grand tour of the South with rifle in hand. In my opinion, a scroll box would reduce the visible size of this block of text, making the profile look neater and “tucking away” significant information that won’t be important to many people.
Moving on to another point: somebody mentioned that there are solutions for long profiles without scroll boxes, as long as they are properly structured. I agree, and I think a good example is my profile of John Carpenter-4118 at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Carpenter-4118. This man’s life was repeatedly touched by history, and his profile deserves more than a simple, boring bare-bones recitation of documented vital statistics. I didn't use scroll boxes, but I did use a LOT of embedded links to help interested readers read further, as I tried to avoid cluttering up the profile with too much information. Hopefully I achieved a reasonable balance.
Moving on to a different point, there were a couple of comments about “keeping it simple.” Perhaps people could share examples of well-done profiles discussing genealogical headaches with snippets of circumstantial evidence that support a likely but unproven conclusion. In my opinion, this is where scroll boxes are ideal. Perhaps others could suggest alternatives to the way I have arranged the following profiles.
First of all is Samuel Durham-206 at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Durham-206
I began the profile with discussion of his uncertain parentage. This gets a bit complicated, and I presented six interrelated points leading to the supposition that Samuel was a son of Thomas Durham by an unknown first wife. The problem is, all of this evidence at the beginning of the profile is going to make the causal surfer’s eyes glaze over, so I put it in a scroll box so people could just skip it over if they wanted. For a situation like this, I don’t like a Free Space page, because the discussion of his likely father should be front-and-center in the profile. And once again, I think those Free Space pages are going to disappear…
Another example is John Colclough-52 at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Colclough-52
I actually used three scroll boxes on this profile. I’m pretty sure I came up with an original discussion of the only plausible parentage for him, disproving (or so I imagine) the other contenders. And then I had to show the likelihood that two John Colcloughs in different counties were one and the same person. It’s easy to get the gist: here is his likely father, and it is likely that there was just one man in two separate counties, not two men. But the snippets of evidence supporting these suppositions can get overwhelming, and the casual reader loses sight of the forest for the trees. My solution to keep the profile neat: scroll boxes that internet surfers can easily skip over; but they’re available with the relevant information for those careful genealogists who want to mull over all the evidence without clicking back and forth to a Free Space page.
A final example is William Davis-19677 of Pittsylvania County, Virginia (d. 1791) at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Davis-19677
I’m proud of the research I did on this ancestor, and it seems to me that there’s simply no way to “keep it simple.” This William Davis has been confused with three different William Davises from three different Virginia counties. Furthermore, there were at least SEVEN DIFFERENT William Davises living in Pittsylvania County during the time he was there. I had to sort them out by tracking down every Davis record I could find in Pittsy in the 18th century and organizing all the results. (I created a Free Space page as a dumping ground for some of this overflow of information.) Furthermore, a different William Davis (who moved to Kentucky) was falsely attached to this William Davis’s father by a respected genealogist. So I have to show the disproof of that one, too. The result has been an ever-expanding, half-baked monster profile that has been cooling on the back burner. So far I haven’t used any scroll boxes for that profile. Is there a good way to organize all the relevant information without them?
