Should we remove references to unlisted people in profiles? [closed]

Question

Whilst adding a <references /> tag to an orphaned profile today, I noticed that the husband and son of the person were private, yet the names and wikitree id's were in the biography.

Should they be left in 'plain sight'? Or should they be removed?

Normally, I assume that the PM makes the decision, but this was an orphaned profile.

Interested to hear your thoughts.

Neil

Comments

The husband and son are Private, not Unlisted.

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Yes, good point, you are correct. I had confused the two terms in my initial question. I did mean private people in my question, but somehow ended up putting unlisted.

Answer 1

I see no reason why they should be removed.

At some point in the future someone may come looking for those people and that profile on which their names are mentioned may be the only accessible record for them.

I have already seen one post on G2G in which a person asked about how to get the profile for his recently deceased father out of unlisted status. He was told to contact the wiki  team.

Unlisted profiles are hidden. Names and wiki IDs on biographies may be the only way to find them or to know that they already have a profile.

Otherwise more duplicates will be created and we dont need more duplicates.

Comments

Hi Robynne,

Yes, I agree with you, although as Aaron pointed out, I had accidentally confused unlisted with private people. I am not advocating removing the names, just interested to hear the different view points.

These two profiles (the husband and the son) were private, not unlisted.

I think my original post was questioning if references/links to private people should be removed on biographies - otherwise, why be private about them at all.

If a profile was owned by a PM, then they are accountable, but if the profile is an orphan profile, then who has the accountability? Kay suggested asking the PM who orphaned the profile, as it was not that long ago for the profile in the original post. I suppose that could work in this case, but some PMs who have orphaned many profiles, it could be hard to remember them all.

In conclusion, I have left the references in and won't be removing them.

Answer 2

In this case, you might want to ask the profile manager for those people; he was active as recently as last February