Can we improve the style of Robert Goodale’s profile [closed]

Question

Robert Goodale (PGM ancestor of many people) has a very detailed profile that hasn’t been updated in awhile. There are very long quotations from genealogy texts and the sources are cited in a confusing inconstant way. Can PGM and the profile managers get together and work on this one?

Comments

I'm going in

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I got a start, but ran out of time; perhaps someone else can take it to the next level.

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Thanks for starting. I will try some too, focusing on combining the info about one element, his death, in one place may help me.

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I cleaned up the copy/paste estate section.

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I fixed his first wife's last name to "Unknown" to match sources and added Perley's History of Salem as an additional source.

I also added a temporary comment near the bottom of the profile where there appears to be a lot of quotes from Anderson that are already used in the text above it. Should this be removed?

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Jillaine, I removed the parents (again).  Can we PP this profile please.

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Now ppp'ed

Answer 1

Cleaned and reorganized.  Disconnecting parents which had been previously rejected.  Project protection will be added.

Comments

Profile looks much better now! Thanks to everyone.

Answer 2

One of the problems with this profile, and with others on WikiTree, is the duplicated data. Why is is necessary to list the children in the Biography section when those same children are shown in the data section?

Away back in the last millenium when I was learning database design theory, one of the bedrock principles I was taught is that you do not duplicate data - each fact is recorded once, and once only, along with appropriate links to place it in context. There are several reasons for this, but the most important is keeping changes in synch. If data appears more than one place and a change needs to be made, then it needs to be updated everywhere it occurs; otherwise, you have a mess.

I get that in the case of WikiTree, sometimes it's convenient to list the children in the biography rather than create profiles for each one, and then at some point in the future to create the children's profiles. But once those profiles are created, shouldn't the list in the biography be eliminated as no-longer-necessary data?

I also can see that a list can make a biography more readable because the dates that children were born can add important detail to a person's life, and you really can't see that from this list shown in the data section. So perhaps this is a valid reason to depart from the commonly accepted database design principles and include a list of the children with their birth dates and birthplaces.

But I do not see the reason for including the detail of the children's lives in the biography, as was done in the Robert Goodale profile. Those children have detailed profiles, and it seems to me a better way to handle it would be to include links to those profiles in the list on Robert's profile and delete the detail on his page.

Comments

I agree, but the major duplication and confusion has been addressed. There are sections for the major sources and the profile is much better now.

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I agree, Stu. Also think it would really help to get those children's profiles created early on, presuming they are listed because they are sourced, and the extra spouses (spice?). edited to add "I didn't look at the profile, it's a general observation".

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Stu, I agree; however, there is a however. As I build my Wikitree of my family one-by-one, I list the parents, grandparents, etc. first. I list the other children under biography with hopes that, in future, I can go back and add them along with sources. Just doing direct ancestors is a challenge and time-consuming. I list other offspring in the Biography so that if cousins come along, they can see that, yes, they are related (and hopefully join wikitree and add their own ancestry--although at this point it has been wishful thinking on my part). I do not want to use gedcom because I find that there is way to much cleanup on aisle one with these. I've found way too many profiles that were started, say in 2011, using gedcom and faithful wikitreers are spending time cleaning these up and taking them over (or they become orphans). I remove names from Biographies once the children are added, but there are times I forget to do this. There are other times when names are left until 'evidence' (sources) can be found for them. I do research and we are ALWAYS instructed to make sure to backup, backup, back... (in this case sources and family members). Thanks! Carol (Baldwin-3428)

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Listing, or naming children in a biography is also done to give "body" to the profile.  Some readers will totally skip the data fields, because they don't want dry facts and figures.  They want the "meat" of the story, if there's a story, even if all that is is saying Joe married Helen on this date in this place and they had eleven children whose names were.. .. .. ..

Other readers won't ever GET to the biography, because they WANT those dry facts and figures.

This kind of "duplication" doesn't hurt anyone .. and it may just draw in some of those elusive relatives.  I was offering my knowledge to a PM before I signed up to WT because of the bio text, not because of the data fields.  I have been contacted by more than one person because of the listing of the children in the biography, not because of the data above it.

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I doesn't hurt anything until someone changes something in the profile of the child and not in the biography of the parent, or vice-versa, and then you have inconsistent and conflicting information in your database.

Listing the children in the biography with links to their profiles would accomplish the objective of alerting people who don't understand the data fields to the fact that there are children and give them an easy way to access the details of those children's lives. And I said in my original answer, adding a birth date and birthplace isn't too egregious a violation of sound database design principle, at least IMO.

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As you might imagine, I completely disagree with this.  In fact, I would say the children’s section is the most important on the profile, and should be a requirement on every wikitree profile.

The biography is our opportunity to provide sources – what do we know and how do we know it.  In the hobby and science of genealogy there can be no more important detail than proving that one generation is the child of the previous generation.  The children’s section allows you to source the children.  It allows you to explain why these children are correct and others are not.  It allows you to see a single family group on one page and expose obvious errors.  It allows you to understand a family group from the standpoint of when and where they were having children.  There are many thousands of errors on wikitree of children being attached to incorrect parents.  Relying on the data section for a listing of children lets all the internet garbage remain.

For example, before this profile I was working on the profile of Laurence Tyler.  The data section had 10 children which can be found on numerous pages on the internet.  The data section was wrong.  Laurence Tyler had 5 children proven by his will and baptism records, a sixth is almost certainly a child based on baptism records, and the last 4 were internet fantasy.  All this needs to be shown and explained on Laurence Tyler’s profile, so people understand why they were detached, hopefully prevent them from coming back, and if they are ever reattached they can be quickly removed without redoing the research.

I might agree that there is too much unnecessary detail of the children on this profile (I didn’t write it).  But I would rather have that than thinking the listing of children in data section is adequate.

We have a standard of Genealogical Proof.  The biography is where we show and source that proof.  Proving and sourcing the children should be on every profile.

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"There are many thousands of errors on wikitree of children being attached to incorrect parents.  Relying on the data section for a listing of children lets all the internet garbage remain."

The duplication of information in multiple places is a prime contributor to that garbage, for the reason I have stated: it enables the information to get out of synch when it gets changed one place and not another. Let's say a user discovers that a child is linked to an incorrect parent and changes that link – but doesn't think to also delete the child from the original parent's profile. And yes, that will happen. Now you have the same child with two sets of parents. or a spouse gets added or deleted on a child's profile, but not in the listing of the children in the parent's profile. Now you have presumably correct information in one place, but incorrect information in another.

If those scenarios don''t bother you, okay, but they bother me.

(It would also seem to me that to be consistent, if you're going to list the children on one parent's profile that you should copy that information to the other parent's. They're equally the children of both parents, right?)

Look at any reputable family history or how it's done in the major genealogical journals. The author lists the children with the parent, usually with a birth date and birthplace, but then puts the detail in a child's writeup, often many pages later. And they don't even have the advantage of hyperlinks to link the parent to the child.

Listing of the children with the birth dates and places does add some value, perhaps justifying the problems it will surely create. But the level of detail on the Robert Goodale profile invites problems down the road, and is totally unnecessary - in my opinion.