geneologybank, newspapers, ancestry.com etc sources
I'm so tired of profiles being full of sources that can't be viewed unless you have a subscription. If one of these sources is added, the least one could do is include a screenshot.
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Unfortunately a screenshot would likely be against copyright. However, a transcription of the record likely would not be - so if you at least include a transcript in Source Notes - that would be a work-around. Since one never knows when access to records might be removed - it would be great to include this transcript of all Sources.
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Ancestry offers the "share" option, creating a URL that anyone can view, with or without a subscription. When I add a source from Ancestry, I try to always include the share URL. The World War II draft registration here is an example. https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/G4XZ-TLP
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We really are spoiled these days. I picked a random book of my shelf and there are dozens sources listed in the bibliography. To check any one of them would take trips to multiple libraries, potentially with the need for interlibrary loans or distant travel.
If screen shots violate copyright and terms of use and transcriptions are not the source and often can't be trusted, then we just have to accept the fact that sometimes evaluating a source is potentially costly or difficult. That does not mean that the source should not be included.
What I do find intriguing is when people post a source from Ancestry and when checking the source find that Ancestry's citation states the record came from FamilySearch.
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Facts cannot be copyrighted, so there is absolutely no reason a person adding an Ancestry record as a source can't include what the source actually says and life facts it's intended to support. A screenshot of a document outside of copyright (including, in the US at least, basically everything before 1900), is not a copyright violation, but may be against Ancestry's terms of services, but given how widely some of those are licensed and distributed, they might have a tough time proving it was taken specifically from them.
I got an Ancestry account because I saw all those sources and thought I was missing out on something important. What I found there was a marginally better search engine, a lot of completely unreliable databases being presented as "sources", and a system designed to facilitate the spread of misinformation. Most people there are far more interested in the quantity of their tree over the quality of it. People are so adverse to unknown information that one person's speculation becomes anointed as absolute truth in a matter of months.
Databases like the "Family Data Collection" and the "U.S. and International Marriage Records" are compilations from unnamed or obscured sources which cannot be relied upon alone. They also have indexes to Genealogie.nl and Geneanet.net that are atrocious -- just the worst collections of commonly-repeated errors, presented as legitimate sources. They're as bad as the trash on Geni and MyHeritage, and worse than even Find a Grave. Any link to a personal tree or pedigree on Geni or MyHeritage, (or especially a link from MyHeritage to Wikitree) should be deleted from sources immediately. There's no reason to help that garbage fester here.
Something else I found from a lot of those linked Ancestry sources, especially when they were obviously copied over from somebody's tree using an application, is that a huge chunk of them didn't belong to the person they were attached to. They were added based solely on names. There's records from England for US families, records for people who lived in different locations and centuries apart, records that give such minimal information that the record itself is basically useless (e.g. a John married a Mary in London sometime, solid info.)
I think what's equally awful is the number of catalogs and databases that the LDS doesn't make available online (and I'm not particularly interested in the excuses for that). If you're sincerely interested in truth and accuracy, you make everything you can publicly available.
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