Hi WikiTreers,
This message is aimed especially at DNA Project members and others with extensive experience with both DNA and WikiTree. I'd also be interested to hear input from members who have recently tried to follow our DNA Confirmation instructions.
I have been working on making the instructions simpler. My recent changes to Help:DNA_Confirmation and related pages are not final and need to be discussed by the community here.
The goal, of course, is to make the instructions easier to follow so that it's easier for members to do confirmation correctly. But I also think we are laying a foundation for future automation. At some point we could replace the need to manually mark relationships as Confirmed with DNA and manually create the source citations to justify them. It could all be done automatically based on information you enter about your matches.
For close cousin matches between WikiTree members I think it could be pretty simple. We already store information about the DNA tests members have taken. We would probably just need the member to select one of their tests and a test from another member, then enter the predicted relationship given to them by the test company or comparison site. If the members' relationship on WikiTree corresponds to the DNA-predicted relationship (and it's third cousins or closer) we could mark the appropriate relationships as DNA-confirmed, right? We could do something similar with yDNA and maybe mtDNA.
It would get more complicated if the match is not on WikiTree and/or we want to allow for triangulation. And I do think we want to allow for both. Otherwise the utility of the new system would be limited. If you can use the system to track all your significant DNA matches, I think more people would. I would.
But before I get too far into this, I want to get feedback on the changes to the DNA Confirmation page. What do you think of it? Any questions or complaints?
There are two things I would rather not rehash here.
First, the use of the word "confirmed." Like any word, its meaning can be debated. Its meaning on WikiTree is explained on the Confirmed with DNA page that's linked from the icon.
Second, whether we should require public verification. In the past, we have considered and sometimes specified that DNA-confirmed conclusions should be verifiable on Y Search, Mitosearch, GEDmatch, etc. But I believe that building our requirements on top of sites like these isn't a solid foundation. We can and will work on building our relationships with other tools to facilitate comparisons (and there has been some recent progress on this) but our policies and tools shouldn't depend entirely on any one of them. Therefore, some sources that justify some DNA-confirmed conclusions will not be publicly verifiable. Educated genealogists will learn to put less stock into DNA sources that can't be verified, like with other sources.
Back to our confirmation instructions. If the DNA Confirmation page is agreeable, do you have thoughts on the Triangulation page? That has not been edited as significantly, but its content was controversial for a while. I don't know where people are at with it these days. (And I need to emphasize, I am not an experienced genetic genealogist. I haven't tried to mark any of my own ancestors as confirmed using triangulation.)
Triangulation is inevitably more complicated than one-to-one comparison, but we need to keep our instructions as simple as possible. What conclusions can users confidently draw from what they're getting from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, etc? If we can boil things down to the barest essentials that we are comfortable with as a community, we can think about automation.
Another tangent: I am still unsure if we might want to store start and stop points for segment matches. This would enable the DNA conclusion to be automated, rather than entered. I think. But maybe we'd just want to depend on the conclusion given to the user by the testing company or third party. It's tempting to do it ourselves, but complicated. (We actually came close to starting to track segments last year, but we pulled back because of the GDPR and the privacy implications. Our hope was to create chromosome maps for ancestors. But we could not make these segment matches public in any way. Maintaining them privately is less beneficial to WikiTree's mission, so I have been inclined to leave it to third parties. But it's still tempting to think about it.)
We should probably consider automating simple one-to-one confirmation first. Then expand on that. I keep getting ahead of myself.
The question for now is whether there is input on the help pages. What are your thoughts?
Thanks!
Onward and upward,
Chris