Reference # on GEDCOM

Question

I looked up this topic because of issues with downloading a gedcom. And found this question: "I downloaded a GEDCOM of one of my ancestors to save me some work on my own personal tree and I've been working through it and cleaning it up. Each person has 2 reference numbers, the #60 as well as their own 7-9 digit number. What are these numbers for? I can't find those numbers on their pages either. An example is Cornerde-1 has the reference number 60 and 8931535. Where can I find the meaning of those numbers?"

The sole answer had to do with "stuff" that shows up in a profile when importing a gedcom, and thus is not relevant. This question has to do exporting a gedcom.

What do these number mean? They are not profile numbers.

Answer 1

60 is the privacy level. 60 is Open privacy.

8931535 is the User ID of the profile.

Comments

Thank you.

I wish I could globally delete these, as they have no value in the software I'm using. However, they get put into a predefined "fact" field, the field cannot be deleted. My only option is to go into each and every person in the file and individually delete it.

There are other issues with exporting gedcom files as well.

---

If you look at the .ged file in a text viewer like notepad, can you identify the INDI line where these values are stored? If so, I can help you remove those.

---

For instance,

0 @I1@ INDI

1 NAME John /Smith/

1 SEX M

1 PVC 60

1 _UID 8931535

1 FAMS @F1@

---

1 REFN 11218702
2 TYPE wikitree.user_id
1 REFN 11905215
2 TYPE wikitree.page_id
1 REFN 35
2 TYPE wikitree.privacy

---

Thank you for the offer, but i’ve started to remove them manually and am about a third of the way through.

My next step is to fix all the citations. The WiikiTree just dumps these into the notes field. These need to be turned into actual citations that my software can work with.

After that, I need to remove all the formatting (html?) codes that mean nothing to my software.

The file I’m working with has only about 300 people, so the task is not impossible.

One thing I’ve learned from this is that I’ll not do it again.

Why am I doing this? If I run an ahnentafel report without any of the notes fields, and without the reference numbers, I get a report of about 25 pages with the name and place index. If I have it print the notes, the report is more than 150 pages, and pretty much unreadable.

---

If I know all the boundaries of what you are wanting to do, I can run it through a script for you. I already created one based on the info Jamie gave, and it takes around 30 seconds to process a file with 500 individuals and will remove all lines associated with the user_id, page_id and privacy.

---

It’s been tedious, but i’ve removed them all.

I also removed the “facts” with no data.

As I go through the file, when the other last name is a compound name, it gets split into two fields. I’ve fixed all these, fortunately there were not many.

The notes and sources are next ...

Answer 2

Maybe I'm missing something but, I don't see how the reference numbers included in the GEDCOM are at all useful.

1 REFN 11218702
2 TYPE wikitree.user_id
1 REFN 11905215
2 TYPE wikitree.page_id
1 REFN 35
2 TYPE wikitree.privacy

Can the user_id and/or page_id be used on WikiTree anymore to find the user or page?

What would be more useful would be to include the WikiTree ID, e.g.:

1 REFN Braunstein-75
2 TYPE wikitree.ID

Comments

Louis? Well, seeing as this looks like your second G2G post, may I offer you a huge welcome! Anyone who's done any serious genetic genealogy in the past several years will know you, even if they don't immediately make the association. I sincerely hope you find time to drop by here from time to time.

And I agree with you. I wrote a script, as Steve evidently did, to strip out those three REFN fields. In all the exported GEDCOMs there is a top-level line under each 0 INDI, i.e.:

1 WWW https://www.WikiTree.com/wiki/Surname-123

Of course, that URL will import in various ways depending upon the application, but I can't see how having a separate REFN field for the WikiTree ID would be a problem.

Just FWIW, another matter eluded my ability to script for it. I did an quick experiment earlier this month and pulled my fairly small pedigree using the "limit for privacy" option. The export was 51,177 lines for 898 total records; 611 individual and 284 families. Running it through a GEDCOM validator threw a whopping 1,368 errors.

I doubt there's any feasible way WikiTree can mitigate that since all text in the biography box on profiles exports as one massive NOTE field. There were scads of non-UTF-8 compliant characters peppered in there, and many of those forced a line break which then also threw a second error because it broke the protocol of all lines under 1 NOTE needing to be prefaced by either 2 CONT or 2 CONC. I'm actually surprised that errors-to-lines ratios like that don't cause apps like FTM and sites like Ancestry to need the Heimlich maneuver when they try to eat the GEDCOMs.

Don't know how it might be accomplished, but stripping out those non-UTF-8 characters would be on my wish list for improvement of WikiTree GEDCOM exports.

---

Edison,

Unfortunately, no, I don't see a

1 WWW https://www.WikiTree.com/wiki/Surname-123 tag

under every INDI.  In the GEDCOM I downloaded, I only see the WWW tag under the INDI for myself, and not anyone else.

To add to that problem, WWW is not a valid GEDCOM tag at level 1 in an INDI record.

A correct and likely better way to add the link would be to include the WikiTree profile page as a source, e.g:

0 @I1@ INDI
1 SOUR @S1@

0 @S1@ SOUR
1 TITL WikiTree Profile Page for Surname-123 (Full name)
1 OBJE
2 FILE https://www.WikiTree.com/wiki/Surname-123

Yes, there are other problems with WikiTree GEDCOM exports, including illegal UTF8 characters as you mention, and lines without level numbers and tags, and non-inclusion of source information. Each program handles GEDCOM differently, and basic name/birth/marriage/death information should transfer well, but for all other information, different programs will import a WikiTree GEDCOM differently.

---

Well, the WWW tag was among the nine added to the 5.5.1 draft of October 1999, but that version wasn't released then and 5.5 stayed the standard for two decades. FamilySearch did finally release 5.5.1, very quietly, as the published standard in November 2019 without revisiting it with a new "draft" notification. Shame they didn't actually look at evaluating a full version update, a la v6.0.

I need to go do test GEDCOM exports again the next week or so. I pulled three early this month--one for my watchlist "privacy limited," and two for my "Family Tree" one each limited for privacy and file size--and all three have that WWW line between the place of death and the "FAM" tags.

I sorely wish we could get true "SOUR" entries, but I do understand the limitations the MediaWiki platform imposed on WT from the beginning. It's a trade-off we've gotten used to. But imagine if there were a true, curated, centralized database of sources and easily-copied citations we could draw from when working on profiles, and then exporting GEDCOMs with extracted source data. Would be cool.