Certification, Participation, Locking, and Accuracy
Comments
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I heartily endorse this certification idea, or some variant on this theme that can be used to at least encourage more careful and justified edits. I view with dismay an absolute tsunami of changes made to one particular person in the family tree. A dozen changes a day, at least 20 different "contributors" all intermingled and (sometimes) undoing or redoing the changes made by another user just days or hours before. Sheer lunacy. Assuming that FS can and does detect and maintain such stats, I could envision a two-pronged data-driven approach ... sort of an analytical "chill pill" that could be dispensed on a family tree person "NOTE: This person has experienced over N unsourced edits within the last D days, and further edits to them are disabled until <certain things happen>." ... OR ... "NOTE: We have noticed you have had over N edits of yours reversed by others (or that you have reversed the edits of others) within the last D days, and recommend/require that you review the following Genealogy 101 FAQ articles before you may continue making edits."
Something, anyway, that could at least encourage more collaborative, careful participation. The data quality in some cases just seems to take a back seat to having the last laugh, as it were, and it brings down the integrity of all of FS as a result.
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Whilst I agree with the sentiment of 'restricting open-edit access' - I disagree with the indicated method - throttling Edits to limit the amount per day (or timeframe) - though I do find the idea of a 'chill pill' for overly active PIDs somewhat appealing. My preferred method (which I think upon and attempt to advocate - restrict edits based on near relation/group agreement - especially for the most recent 3-5 generations of ones own family).
Chill pill thoughts: I would agree with throttling specific PIDs - if two or more users are flip-flopping data (i'm right attach this and unattach this) - perhaps go ahead and lock it to prevent edits from those 'battling' profiles and give them the 'message' (play nice and collaborate ...). The relevant counter-argument people in Community bring up - who moderates/curates both sides to come to successful collaborative agreement? Obviously it should be record/evidence driven - but I feel especially for the recent 3-5 generations this should be something reasonable people could come to agreement on?
Why my continued focus on the most recent 3-5 generations? Well if those generations can be 'established' correctly - as a baseline for public open-edit of further back generations - I would feel more comfortable that at least those initial generations are pointing the researcher in a more accurate direction. If open-edit cannot efficiently deal with the most recent 3-5 generations - what makes it a better collaborative platform for those further back generations - where open-edit collaboration should be more useful?
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Mod Note: I split this from the original post so that it could be voted on. The other post was too old to accept votes.
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@genthusiast Thanks so much for your review and thoughts. Just to put an example face on this, the particular person I happened across who's been edited a gazillion times recently ... is King James (Stewart) IV of Scotland 1473-1513. His person ID is L1HN-PRR. If you have a moment, inspect his changes with "Show All" ... and be prepared to scroll down ... a lot ... and observe the many "<blah> deleted" and then "<blah> added" gyrations. Presumably, James IV has a pretty darn stable, documented life story by now. And yet, his poor tired old bones are attracting this kind of editing frenzy in 2022. I've looked at English and other European royalty a fair amount lately, and see parents born decades after their children, multiple spouses with clearly similar names with just variant spellings ... all sorts of silliness. So, this is the kind of activity that fuels my own suggestion for certification, or other similar things.
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I have seen what you refer to many times which is why I pretty well ignore anything in Family Tree prior to 1500. For some reason on these old historical figures, far too many people have their own pet theories as to the "proper" way to do things, have their own favorite books to base their work on, and have a lot of trouble compromising with other people on how to present information. There are well know people that far back in history that have had their names changes dozen of times in one day. King James isn't too bad, his name has only been edited 70 time in the past year. That's only once every five days. But I still think the system should be left the way it is. If people are wasting their time on King James, they are not causing problems elsewhere in Family Tree.
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