How do you edit information on family trees?

LegacyUser

Bonnie Jean Bowles said: How do you edit information on various people? I see no edit button.

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: That function has not been added yet. Family Tree is "read only" at this point. It is using the nFS data base.

LegacyUser

Adam Christian Fugal said: Would it be possible to have arbitrators like those for indexing trained and authorized to make changes? There are literally thousands of relationship jumbles that I don't think Salt Lake can do all the repairs on. On the other hand, I wouldn't want everybody and their dog to be able to delete my stuff.

Perhaps there are some fixes that should only be done by Salt Lake but problems like somebody being their own son or having a child or spouse 200 years older than themselves, or a sub-record containing multiple sets of parents should, of which there are tons could be dealt with on a grass-roots level.

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: I think we just have to wait and see what is released. My understanding is that it will be open (anyone can change) but if you change you have to justify the reason for the change. My thought is that it will be something like the summary screen where anyone can select information. I don't think there has been an excessive amount of conflict there so I believe there is hope for the open tree.

LegacyUser

Adam Christian Fugal said: You have a good point. The difference is when you select the "correct" name all the other names are still there. If you make a change the original information is presumably gone. This is OK in a numerous cases where the original information was obviously completely wrong but you would need a neutral party to verify it is obvious, right?

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: No the plan is to keep a history of what changes are made so they can be rolled back if a mistake is made. It is my understanding that collaboration and use of sources to document (verify) information will be the deciding authority and it is anticipated that users will come to reasonable agreements. The department does not have the manpower to be the "judge" of right and wrong. However, if someone is intentionally messing thing up then their access to the system would be removed.

LegacyUser

Adam Christian Fugal said: I think the roll-back option would help out in some cases like an undo button but the problem with an undo button is if you make a change, another change then undo once then make another change the first change is gone. Same problem with Word, excel or any other commercial product. It's not feasible to keep a clear record of every change, undo and redo on every record and every combination of records. Either you allow information to be "lost" or you store every bit of information that was ever added. The first risks deleting important information the second is a quagmire like what we've got.

I can't say ward membership clerks always get information right but they do a good enough job to keep good track of 99.99% of everyone who wants to be kept track of. This would be a bigger job because there are 10 million members and 500,000,000 records in nFS but I don't see any way around it.