Make it clearer that people shouldn't change names and vital info on established pages

RTorchia

I've been running into a lot of situations where, if an editor thinks a spouse is incorrect, they just change the name and vital info on that profile, even though that profile has sources, memories, relationships, etc. that are correct for that person. In other words, they take a profile that is mostly* correct and making it mostly wrong.

(* usually completely correct -- it's almost always the editor mistaking the spouse for a completely different person with the same name)

This causes a huge snowball effect, because other editors often don't notice that this happened. Instead, working in good faith, they start to "fix" the old profile to match the name, or worse, merge it into a "duplicate profile with the new name.

I'm not sure how to prevent this, but something that would help would be to add a line in the "Before you start" section of the How do I change vital information in Family Tree? article saying not to do this, along with any kind of tutorial where it would be appropraite.

Gordon Collett

That's strange that you are seeing this a lot. Can you get any idea of why people are doing this? Is it just one person who has confused your family with his? Have you contacted any of the people making changes to ask them why they did?

One of the great features of Family Tree, of course, is that we can finally fix errors that have been entrenched in family trees for decades. But we should only be fixing errors, not creating them.

Do you have an example of one of these situations? Examining one might allow other people here to give suggestions on how to prevent this.

RTorchia

I honestly don't think there's a way to prevent it outright, but it'd be useful to have that instruction on a How-To page to point to so that the same editors don't keep making the same mistakes, and I so don't have to type out a new message every time. Plus, who knows, maybe some new editors will actually see it before they do any damage.

I'll have to find an example. The last one I ran across was a month or two ago, and I don't remember what it was. But the steps are almost always like I described initially, and are almost always with pre-19th century profiles:

1. An editor thinks a profile, for example say "John Smith", is their ancestor based on name and dates. They're usually wrong -- it's a profile for a different person than they're thinking of, just with the same name and a couple superficial similarities.
2. They go, "hey, John Smith didn't marry this Mary Osborne person, he married Jane Davis!" So, in spite of the fact that Mary's parents are attached, that there's a few sources for her, etc., they change the name and birth and death info to match their personal tree. If we're lucky, they get bored and go away after that. If not, they start hacking off the relationships that don't match. If we're really unlucky they start changing the information on those profiles as well.
3. Since the person they change it to almost always already has their own page, somebody else comes along and sees the Duplicate Profile message and not noticing the sources or edit history, goes ahead and merges since there's no glaring conflicts. After that, people might continue "cleaning up" the page without realizing the children and siblings were all correct and based on sources that are probably still attached.

The longer it's been and the more merges and relationship edits have happened, the harder it is to undo.

The one example I do remember was here (and also affected her spouse, and several generations earlier), but that was an exceptional case where an editor just kept on maliciously editing these profiles, in spite of being banned (three times now, I believe), contacted repeatedly, pointed to the profiles that already existed for the people he was renaming these to. But like I said, that's not the typical case I've run across.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I haven't actually encountered this, but I think most of the time, it's caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of the single-tree concept. On an individual-trees site, if you copy someone's work and discover an error, you fix it by changing the names and dates. If someone approaches the tree on FamilySearch believing that it works the same way, he can wreak years of havoc before someone gets through to him about his wrong assumption (if anyone ever does).

Part of the problem is that FamilySearch persists in using badly-misleading wording, such as "your tree", in what little introductory material it presents. The other part of the problem, of course, is that people don't read, people don't read, and people don't read -- and even if they do, they see what they expect to see, skipping right over anything that contradicts their preconceptions. I don't know how to fix that.

Dennis J Yancey

from the perspective of the person who is actually doing this (changing data into a new person) - its probably not "strange" at all

they just see something wrong - and they want to fix it - and they see an edit button - so thats what they use

we of us who are use to working with database and records and see things from that perspective shudder with horror over this scenario above

but for a person who has no concept of databases and interlnked records etc. - it may seem perfectly logical for them to fix a person by editing their values.

Its all in perspective - and for people who never grew up with computers and databases and the sort - may have a totally different perspective and concept of things.

PERSPECTIVE is everything

RTorchia

@Dennis J Yancey True, I'm really just lamenting that we can't do more to get people to make those edits the expected way. Once they try to add a new profile, there's a decent chance FS will point them to the profile that already exists. I don't know how to do it, but I wish there was a way to make new editors understand that there are a lot of people with similar names, dates and locations. A lot. Like way more than they're expecting.

Dennis J Yancey

I totally agree with you . . .

RTorchia

Just because I keep forgetting, here are some cases like this I ran into today: GH67-QN1, LCBW-731, probably a few others in this mess. Not that interesting, but the same kind of thing I run across more often than anybody should.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Both of those profiles were hijacked this past April by the same user, with the same (nonsensical) reason given of "edit error". In other words, this user believes that FamilySearch is exactly like Ancestry, except that someone has imported or copied a whole bunch of data into "her" tree. I presume you've tried sending her a message about her fundamental error?

RTorchia

I did, a few days ago. Haven't heard back. It wouldn't be the first time I met somebody who didn't understand that it's a public tree.

dontiknowyou

I have seen this sort of newbie contributor behavior, in many parts of the tree. I think they have very little idea how to do anything here.

Usually I don't bother messaging the contributor, I simply repair the damage. If I can figure out what part of the tree they were trying to build, I do enough of that to stop any hints from leading them back into "my" part of the tree.

The person causing problems for @RTorchia apparently has been trying to work on a Lavina Serilda Shoemaker but hasn't yet found the profile: LH3J-C3M