Famous person
Mary Jo Kopechne was famous due to the way she died. Sadly some members here have posted obviously fake obituaries I can only describe as offensive. I reported some of them and then just gave up because there are thousands of entries with her name. Is there some way for a person with real technology and editing rights to eliminate these entries and prevent such a member from doing this again? I have neither a computer nor editing rights. Thank you.
Answers
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Note that she never married, had no siblings nor children. She was not related to anyone named Kennedy. Robert Kennedy died a year before she did.
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You have highlighted a main weakness in the Family Tree, open-edit model. FamilySearch has only limited resources to monitor the vast amount of profiles added to the tree, so relies largely on the decency of its users when it comes to the addition of offensive details.
Although I would be surprised to hear (officially) how the organisation works to minimise such disrespectful work, hopefully there is a section to which all such reports are directed. However, your example illustrates the enormity of the task. Naturally, famous individuals are always going to be the main target for such treatment, but I suspect there are many others (who have never been in the public eye) who have had nasty comments added to their profiles - due to family / personal feuds, for example.
I suppose banning individuals is difficult, as they could just switch identity, but we can only hope FamilySearch can continue to devote as much time as possible in finding ways to reduce (if never to completely eliminate) such inappropriate activity within its Family Tree.
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@Marie Corwin I made a similar post a couple of days ago. My person of interest is not famous, but there is a hurtful and wrong comment that has been spread from his profile and to trees on other sites. I finally convinced the person who posted it that the situation was not possible, but the comment is still there in the changelog, for anyone to see, and for anyone to restore to the profile. I was hoping to get it removed permanently, but that will likely require my reporting the comment, and a great deal of persistence on my part. I've reported other issues in the past, and it was exhausting to accomplish little.
Sorry not to have a better suggestion/solution to offer.
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@Marie Corwin I'm curious as to what obituaries you are trying to remove? I didn't go through all 18 sources that were attached to her, but some of them (most?) were not actually obituaries but rather newspaper articles related to her death and the inquest and furor over it. So, while she wasn't related to Kennedy, Ted Kennedy's name showed up in nearly every one of those articles because they were together in the car when the accident occurred. The names are extracted from newspaper articles by a computer and computers do not get all the relationships and names correct. If you were to go through the articles and make sure all of the individuals extracted are attached to the appropriate people, it might help to clear up the problem.
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