Why are so many persons marked as Read-Only in Family Tree?
I certainly understand that there are good reasons to mark certain persons in Family Tree as read-only because of their prominence. It appears that many prominent leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are in this category, and I don't have a problem with that.
However, in many cases, every child of these prominent people is also marked as read-only. That seems completely unnecessary. It creates all sorts of problems.
Here's an example: George Franklin Richards KWCQ-JVF was an Apostle of the Church, so his record is read-only. Fine. But every one of his children is also marked as read-only. Except for LeGrand Richards KWC7-BLW (who was also an Apostle), these children have no particular prominence that justifies them being marked read-only. This makes any updates to these children very awkward, since it has to go through a specialty team. This also means that no grandchild of George Franklin Richards can have duplicates merged in the normal way.
If FamilySearch would take a more reasonable approach to who gets marked as read-only, the families of these descendants of prominent people would be able to update the profiles of their ancestors. Much simple maintenance for these people goes undone because it's just too hard to make changes. And if fewer people were marked read-only, the limited time of the specialty teams could be focused on the people in the Tree that truly need their attention. That would improve the quality of Family Tree. Can these children have the read-only designation removed?
Answers
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I don't think this matter will ever be clarified, especially as whoever makes such calls (on who gets to be read only) never participates in Community, of course.
I continue to be baffled by the criteria being applied, especially (and I admit I have raised this point before) when the individual below (and you can't get more important than him, I guess) continues to be open-edit. (Take a look at his pedigree chart, too, as well as the Collaborate section.)
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@Paul W Thanks for the reply. I don't see how the example of Jesus Christ is particularly relevant; it's completely understandable that FamilySearch doesn't want to take responsibility for maintaining a sub-tree that has so much legend and tradition connected to a fairly small set of reliably documented facts. I'm much more interested in the well-documented last couple of centuries.
I'm confident that there are some decision makers at FamilySearch who may be observing issues raised in Community without actively participating, and we know for certain that moderators sometimes bring issues to the attention of decision makers. So I hold on to a glimmer of hope that this topic could be seen and considered.
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Obviously you are entitled to your opinion about the relevance of my example and I agree it does not exactly relate to the issue you raise. My reason for providing this was merely to illustrate the apparently arbitrary decision-making criteria for who should be read-only and who open-edit.
My point is - if FamilySearch management has so little worries about users adding what they like to the profile of Jesus Christ, why should any ID on Family Tree be read-only? After all, if there are differences of opinion about the profiles and relationships of Apostles of the Church (or anyone else) any user could provide their comments in the Collaboration sections, just as we find at https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/collaborate/LDLR-236.
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Obviously you are entitled to your opinion about the relevance of my example and I agree it does not exactly relate to the issue you raise. My reason for providing this was merely to illustrate the apparently arbitrary decision-making criteria for who should be read-only and who open-edit.
We're clearly not going to agree on that. I don't think this case illustrates at all any arbitrary decision making, since that sub-tree is a hopeless mess of myth and tradition -- if I were the decision maker, I would absolutely decide not to take over management of that sub-tree. That doesn't mean that I think the decision making is perfect -- the whole point of my post is that I think it's not -- but that example doesn't persuade me in the least.
... if FamilySearch management has so little worries about users adding what they like to the profile of Jesus Christ, why should any ID on Family Tree be read-only? After all, if there are differences of opinion about the profiles and relationships of Apostles of the Church (or anyone else) any user could provide their comments in the Collaboration sections....
Setting aside the example of Jesus Christ, I still see good reasons for a limited set of people in Family Tree being read-only. It's reasonable for the Church to protect the profiles of people that are important. To take an extreme example, if Joseph Smith were open-edit, there would be an endless stream of changes to be corrected, both from people who are opponents of the Church as well as from people who are trying to establish their connection to such a prominent person. The existence of a Collaboration section wouldn't have any significant effect on ensuring that only responsible changes would be made for open-edit persons. And collaboration is not available for read-only persons, so that's no help for people marked as read-only.
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