Complaint: Genealogical terrorist
The user (name removed) has deleted countless of correct data from the profile of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Hohenstaufen II (LD7M-NZ3) without any reassons and messing up several profiles consequently, such as Queen Constanza di Sicilia (LY3J-J2L) that is comproved granddaughter of Emperor Frederick, but her parents was simply deleted or were lost with the erasure of content in Emperor's profile.
Frederick certainly had at least 20 children, including the legitimate and illegimate, with numerous women, but mister (name removed) simply deleted both children and wives of Frederick, furthermore, he also deleted the Records and Notes that explicitly mentioned the wives and children that the King had.
With all this exposed, it is certain that the profile is intentionally deleting true information to convey disinformation about Frederick Hohenstaufen, committing a kind of "genealogical terrorism" or "historical terrorism."
The profile has also changed its name, as I said, previously it had the name (name removed), this change of name is sufficient indication that it wants to remain anonymous, further increasing suspicions that this entire attempt at omission is intentional.
Best Answer
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I appreciate all the community's attempts to fix the mistakes made by the "profile vandals."
The contributors of Frederick's profile are already aware of what is happening and are already trying to fix the lost content (even though there is now a debate about whether using Wikipedia as a source is reliable, but at least now the changes are being made based on arguments).
Thank you all.
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Answers
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Couple of questions, firstly have you tried to contact the user for an explanation? and secondly, can you identify a specific example of a deletion they have carried out that explicitly goes against one of the attached sources (or a source that they have detached)?
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Answering the first question: No I didn't contact him directly, actually I wrote a note in Collaborate explaining about this profile that was removing content and that even if there was inaccurate data this would not be a justification for deleting children and wives. I found it strange when literally minutes later this profile deleted my note.
About the second question, yes he did deleted sources about his descendants, like a quote taken from the topic about Frederick on Wikipedia (which in turn uses other sources) about the emperor's genealogy.
One more intriguing thing is that Frederick's own topic on Wikipedia is attached as a source to the emperor's profile on FS and there is the king's explained genealogy. Even if he hadn't removed the notes he would still be going against the attached sources.
I really think Sprinkles is just a troll profile that is just messing around for no reason.
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I am not the OP, but I took a look at the profile, and I agree that there is evidence of gratuitous vandalism. The deletions of all marriages for Frederick II himself are suspicious, but take a look at the change log for GT64-31T:
- Another user had merged profile "Manfred King of Sicily" (GRRP-Z4M) born about 1232 into "Manfred De Siciliy king of Naples And Sicily" (GT64-31T)
- This user Sprinkles87 deleted all facts and relationships on that profile, either with no comment or short comments "Mistress" or "Inaccurate", then changed the name to "Giovanni Giovanni"
- And then merged CT64-31T into L7WV-SZ9, "Giovanni G… nato" (yes, a profile with an ellipsis in the name), born 1893 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania!
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If this is reported to FS as abuse, is it likely to be picked up and the vandal blocked?
These profiles, given that they are (or so I assume) historically significant and therefore will probably have been properly researched by historians outside the FS community, should presumably align with that academic research, so I'd suggest they would ideally be made read-only once they have been corrected/reverted, though I know setting to read-only is an infrequent happening.
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@MandyShaw1 I already tried reporting it as abuse, FamilySearch said it didn't qualify.
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What do you need to do to be blocked, then? This and other sutuations I've read about make it sound like FS bends over backwards to protect potential bad faith users at the expense of the data and of the rest of the community. Why not block them and provide an appeals process, a la Wikipedia?
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Running into a similar situation here: somebody who's had their account banned nine times (and counting), creating a new account a day after the previous one was banned and attacking the same profiles. And every time it's like pulling teeth to get FS to act — they allow the account rampage for a day and a couple of us have to spend a few hours going through and cleaning up the damage.
It's baffling that we can't just say "This person was blocked on this account and now they're back on this account doing the same thing." and have that be enough to act on it. On most sites, creating a new account to evade a block results in a permanent ban, often for the entire source IP address. There's no way we can prevent vandalism, let alone have time to do actual research and improve the site, if creating a new account wipes the slate clean.
My advice is to keep submitted Abuse complaints. Get other people affected to do it too, at different times of day so you get different admins. Always mention the previously blocked account(s) and include a link to some edit history that shows the vandalism.
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Mod note: a post was edited to remove code violations. Please see the Community Code of Conduct for more details.
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Oddly, the Terms of Use specifically say, "You agree to input data accurately to the best of your knowledge", but for whatever reason, breaking this rule isn't considered abuse. (Granted, about 99.9% of users probably violate the terms at least once, if only because the Terms require you to actually read them, but still.)
I guess, perhaps, that it could be easy in some circumstances for the malicious user to paint the people correcting the information as the abusers, which may be why they're so cautious about this.
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There must be objective ways of identifying abusive behaviour patterns at IP address level, surely?
It's a bit like identifying spam, add together the user's questionable behaviours (no reasons given? removal of information with tagged sources? never attaching new sources? ignoring alerts?) and compare against a threshold.
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The problem I can see with banning IPs is that they can't risk banning a FamilySearch Center computer.
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They should be able to identify FSC/affiliate library devices and filter them out, surely?
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What is not considered abuse?
Errors or changes in records are not considered abuse. If you have questions regarding inadvertent or potentially malicious errors in records that you are unable to resolve, please contact FamilySearch Support.
Our core policy is defined in FamilySearch Rights and Use Information, found at the bottom of most pages on FamilySearch.
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I have had a look and the policy appears to make no reference whatever to vandalism (i.e. intentional corruption of the data), only, as I see it, to actions liable to harm other users (which you could well argue vandalism does, in that it reduces the quality of the collaborative data and wastes loads of users' time in remediation). Is this how we are supposed to read it?
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Oddly, the Terms of Use specifically say, "You agree to input data accurately to the best of your knowledge", but for whatever reason, breaking this rule isn't considered abuse.
It's a bit hard to judge another's state of mind. I've run into users who sincerely believe the tree they created supersedes the accuracy of period sources.
On the other hand, I don't understand why "creating a new account to avoid suspension" isn't covered there. That in itself should be the easiest thing to report and enforce,.
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Maybe the policy could be specific about the need for verifiability/sources, and the need to respect others' good faith efforts and accept that they may be right and you/your family may be wrong.
Our family genealogical records, many of them prepared by a 2 greats aunt of mine, among other clear errors identify an early US immigrant wrongly (should be his brother). And there are all sorts of stories about family members doing notable things, almost all of which are provably wrong.
If the user has no independent verification, surely overriding others' careful work indicates a lack of care which should be unacceptable in a collaborative data store.
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You have no control over what people believe about their tree. I know someone who is convinced that they are of the bloodline of the Holy Grail in that they are a direct descendent of Jesus and they have traced their tree back to Adam. I make no comment on this as who am I to judge their research.
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That's up to them, agreed, but surely FS has the right to protect the Tree from someone's 'research' if it is not verifiable and thus liable to subvert others' work?
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