Please clarify "Profile Created / Review Below"

Question

I have been adding quite a few profiles recently because I am using GEDCOMpare to bring in information from my original family tree.

My plan was to bring in most of the profiles I've been recently improving and updating, then I was going to go back and 'clean them up', add more/better sources, conform them to WikiTree style conventions, etc.

But I received this message that made me wonder if my plan isn't recommended or acceptable:

 "Profile Created / Review Below"ed / Review Below

It is very important to review and edit a WikiTree profile after creating it. Our GEDCOM data import process is imperfect. It never produces the kind of thoughtfully-written biographies we would like for our ancestors. 

Please make sure Pardon's profile does not need improvements before adding more profiles to our shared tree. Thank you!

Answer 1

I did exactly what you did.  I don't remember getting that message.  Here is my thinking after experimenting with different methods and working on wiki:

Before I imported my Gedcom, I verified my Ancestry tree against Family Tree, and made sure to find all the sources I could.  I ignored all the City Directories, Yearbook, and other sources like that unless they had unique information.    I also imported my tree to My Heritage, and used the My Heritage Consistency checker to fix up my Ancestry Tree.

After doing that importing from Ancestry is the best path.  Ancestry imports will fill in bare bones stuff and pull record sources.  The sources are not in the format wiki likes, but in the case of people born after 1800 there are usually plenty of them, census data, Social Security data, birth and death certs, find a grave information, all can be seen and found from other sources with the information from Ancestry.   It makes it easier to go back and clean up, and you can then pull the same sources from Family Tree that have the image links wiki likes.

But...when you get to people who do NOT have a lot of sources, or have problems, then you should flag them somehow, I actually made a list on paper, and go back and clean those up first.   And the farther back you go in time, the worse Ancestry sourcing gets, and the less likely that anyone else will be able to duplicate those sources.   Other people's trees are not a source.

So I stopped importing about 5 or 6 generations back.   I keep my Gedcom active by adding someone from it every three months, usually a sibling of a grandparent, and when I do have sources or have found a positive merge, I go back and bring in the older generations one at a time and fix them as I import them.

Comments

Thanks Wendy!!  Your answer shows you understood exactly what I was asking and you gave me just what I needed to know how to proceed.

In the meantime, I came across the recommendations for when to contact a profile manager before editing, so I will do that, since I'm adding quite alot of profiles to the Angell branch in particular.

Answer 2

I think a bigger reason than number of sources, etc. is that far too many people never, ever go back and clean them up and let other people do it. While time consuming, doing the cleanup when you create the profile will make for a better WT in the long run.

Comments

Thanks for that input.  I hear you and I don't want to let that happen.  I think it will be helpful to others as well as myself if I make a note on the profiles, as I've seen elsewhere, saying something like "This profile was auto-generated by a GEDCOM import. It's a rough draft and will be edited by Profile Manager."

Answer 3

I also create most of my profiles using GEDCOMpare. At first I used to just do a small amount of tidying to each new profile before moving on to the next one, on the assumption that the automated process probably created something acceptable. However from looking at other profiles I soon discovered that the note "It never produces the kind of thoughtfully-written biographies we would like for our ancestors" is actually a considerable understatement and each generated profile needs quite a lot of work to make it look even reasonably nice. I have therefore now switched to making each profile look reasonable as I create it.

I think as a bare minimum you should make sure that the profiles do not create work for other people on the site. This means making sure they have at least one source, so they don't make work for the people who search out sources for unsourced profiles (the sourcerers). They should also not contain anything that triggers an error report, so they don't make work for the people who fix errors (the data doctors). To check for errors, go to My WikiTree at the top of the page and click on Suggestions - this will show you anything that is flagged as a potential error on the profiles you manage.

Comments

Thanks for that info specifically about what others may have to do if I don't take care to produce thoughtful profiles.

Answer 4

Tricky one.  What should people do if they have 20,000 people in their tree on a paysite and they want to close their account?

Comments

Ancestry never deletes your tree, even if you quit paying.   And you can upload to My Heritage or one of the other sites for free.  You could put your 20,000 people any number of places : )

And you can't import a gedcom that big here in one go anyway ; )

---

I was only thinking, WikiTree wants people to come here, and they'll want to bring their stuff with them.