Improved Reporting for Unknowns in the England Project

Profile manager: Steven Whitfield [send private message]

Unknowns reports are run each week from Wikitree+ for England and each county. The current format of the report doesn't help our members to find profiles that match their levels of confidence and competence.

For a few weeks, I have been talking to Fran and Roy to see how we can improve the tools for working on Unknowns. Fran has indicated that it would be great to break down profiles

• by time period,
• whether profiles are orphaned or with a profile manager
• open v private

Roy has confirmed that these elements are all relatively straightforward to build into a table.

We also discussed having some sort of 'flag' to indicate profiles for which no LNAB has been found despite being well-researched . Some Unknowns are probably unsolvable using current records and it can be frustrating opening them for a second or third time when they should probably be left (for a while at least before another attempt is made to research them.)

It would be possible to categorise these profiles as eg 'Unknown EP reviewed' which would mean something like this profile has been researched by a badged member of the EP project to try to identify the last name at birth. We couldn't find it. By all means have a look at it but you might be better looking at one of the many others that are unflagged. They would then show in a separate line of the report.

The new categorisation report announced today would be available to the Unknowns Team Leader, enabling her to monitor who was placing profiles in this category; and to reassure herself that the profiles were being thoroughly researched and completed with appropriate research notes

To you an idea of what a proposed county report would look like, there is a mocked-up Lancashire report below. Like the county tables, the Unknowns table for each county would appear on a single FSP with a summary England Report at the top. Roy has done most of the groundwork for creating this report and could deliver something for testing in mid-June. There is an Unknowns challenge currently scheduled for July which would be a great time to launch the new report.

In the live table, the numbers would link to Wikitree+ reports to the relevant profiles.