Suggestion to improve collaboration and document quality of record in Family Tree

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: This suggestion comes from some recent efforts I have been involved with to straighten out and recover some records in Family Tree. The records were pretty much destroyed by over merging/combining and just incorrect linking etc. When I finally got one of the family's “cleaned up”, I began thinking about – How do I keep this family together without someone messing it up again? Many users of Family Tree complain about incorrect merges and other activities that tend to mix records up so they are not a true representation of the relationships and family that really existed. In my case, I had an independent source of information from living descendants who created the information in the late 1800's so I was quite confident of who was in the family and where and when they were born/christened. Obviously that was a great help in making choices of what I wanted keep and what needed to be removed.

Over the years we have had suggestions of allowing users to lock records that they believe are correct. Other strategies have been suggested where there is a user responsible for each family and changes could not be made without agreement of the responsible party. Some have suggested that each user could undergo certification before being allowed to make changes in Family Tree. Others insist that much of the problem is associated with GEDCOM uploads. None of the above strategies has been implemented and the current collaboration tools have in my opinion proved to be quite unsuccessful in promoting the desire result. Most of us just rely on using the Watch List to keep track of a large number of records where we feel we have personal interest. When a change is made to someone in our list we go and verify when we believe it is valid or not, and then take appropriate action. I believe for most users that is about the limit of what is presently done for most records.

I would like to suggest that on the person page an additional link similar to Sources would be added with a title something like “Record Quality”. Similar to Sources it would have a number associated with the link. The number would indicate the number of users who have commented on the quality of the record. By clicking on the link it would open an additional window where all of the comments by other users could be viewed. Each user who commented would have a separate area to add comments on the Quality of the record, issues with the record such as “not sure these parents are correct” etc. The individual comments could be modified only the original submitter ie No one could edit or delete comments by another user but they could update their own as more information/sources are discovered or added to the record. Any comment would have a date attached that would be the most recent edit of that comment. This would provide an indication of how recent the user had reviewed the record.

The benefits of having this type of information available would accomplish several positive collaboration aspects.
1. It would allow all persons who have an interest in the record to clearly document their interest and indicate what concerns or issues that have about the record. This allows other users to see individuals easily with whom they may want to collaborate.
2. It would provide novice users a place to quickly learn what issues other users have with the record before blindly attempting to make changes. It would allow them a way to review and understand how others view specific records and how research can be moved forward.
3. By reviewing all comments, users could quickly understand what others believe about the quality of the record and where others believe additional research efforts needed to be undertaken. This might assist in reducing the amount of time spent on duplicate research.
4. It would provide a location for individuals to enter the status of research and when they return to the record at a future time, they could more easily begin where they had left of.

I do not suggest that this would resolve all issues that occur because of mistakes being made by other users but I think it could be an improvement over what we have today and there is the possibility that it might lead to more collaboration which I believe most experienced users believe is essential if we are going to really get correct records in the system.

I believe as a group we might be able to amplify on my suggestion to arrive at something worth FamilySearch considering. I have only provided a rudimentary thought. Other extensions could actually include some sort of grading system maybe as simple as a 1 to 10 scale and the average of all voting provided.

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Cousin David said: This is becoming a SERIOUS issue. As the FamilySearch FamilyTree program becomes more complex, the objective of :one person, one name, one place" etc. becomes more and more difficult to justify without SOME method to distinguish novices from experienced researchers.

This must be addressed soon.

"FREE" FamilySearch may have to have some level of competence provided in Registration.

Those of us who are Consultants of many years simply cannot have "novices" come it and revamp a tree to their own, often incomplete and inaccurate, thoughts, ideas and information.

Its NOT getting better, bosses. It is turning people away from FamilySearch, free or not.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Interesting thoughts - not quite certain yet how viable they might be but worth considering.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Totally agree about some sort of assessment.

To be picky it's not just about experience, I've seen fantasy genealogies given credence by long-standing patrons of FS. As someone said in another context, "They might have 20y experience but it's the same first year that they've repeated 20 times"

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Paul said: Those who do not agree some action must be taken must either have a very small watch list and/or be working on relatively few branches of the tree.

I strongly agree with Cousin David's comments that the issue is really serious. However, I don't know whether the suggestions put forward by gasmodels wound necessarily achieve a great improvement in the situation. Already we have the Collaboration section and opportunity to add reason statements and sources to back up the identity / history of the IDs we add or are following. However, in spite of my Discussions items and clearly visible reason statements against Vitals, etc., users still go ahead and make merges of individuals with little in common but their names. Even these don't always match and I find my WRIGHTSON relatives have even been merged with individuals named WRIGHT.

For a long time I have highlighted the part the current "Possible Duplicate" algorithm is playing in the problem of incorrect merges. Even after I have "unmerged" two IDs the same suggestion of them being possible duplicates immediately appears on the respective person pages. If I do not refresh the pages and check for this straightaway (marking "not a match") the strong possibility is that another user will repeat the merge that has been undone!

I was very hopeful for the new merging feature being of great use in limiting the number of incorrect merges being made. However, within a week I found a careless user had merged several individuals named Thomas Wrightson (one actually being a Thomas Wright) IDs, even though they clearly showed different birthplaces sitting opposite each other on the first page. When I contacted the user regarding undoing these merges she merely responded, "How would I do that?"

Unfortunately, I feel gasmodels' suggestions will still only be of help to the more responsible and experienced users. So many others seem to be so intent on "helping" the FamilySearch "goal" of having one ID for every individual that a thorough check of persons of some "similar" identity becomes very much a secondary issue for them.

There have been suggestions regarding training, making more records "read-only" and now those in this post of gasmodels, which I am not dismissing and believe are worthy of consideration.

To see how serious the problem really is, I would suggest users greatly expand their watch lists. In the last few months I have doubled the size of mine and can't help thinking about all those errors that would have remained uncorrected had I not been watching these IDs. Even more importantly, how many I am STILL missing. I can't keep a watch on every ID I have worked on, so often think of the potentially wasted hours I have spent adding carefully researched detail that someone has now probably completely undone.

As I have said elsewhere, far worse than there being so many genuinely duplicate IDs on Family Tree is the fact that genuinely separate individuals have disappeared, becoming part of a "composite" ID - having the vitals of multiple persons who just (usually) happen to have the same name and lived at the same period of time (though not necessarily even in the same country).

Whatever the solution, ignoring this serious problem will not make it go away.

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joe martel said: Some good thoughts here, and this has been a concern since the design of FSFT. It was not known how long this open-edit model would live. But it seems way better than the old nFS model which was tipping over, under a fraction of the user and data load we have today. There could be a better model, maybe a tweaked model...

I wonder if the Discussions feature is a good starting point? It seems to have attributes of your suggestion. The problem is it is buried in the UI and users don't see it.

The LifeSketch is another mechanism people use. It's like a pinboard, but that isn't necessarily seen either and is not really it's original intent.

Finally none of the partner products and some FS tools surface the Discussion or LifeSketch so none of those users ever see that info.

There have been previous threads about calculating or voting accuracy of the data. That's tough because algorithms don't know the details of a Person in 1700's in a place with no records, vs one with lots of attached records, which are wrong. Then add in the complication of evaluating relationship quality. Voting just measures niche thinking. And does my vote still count after someone changes some data? ...

Your watch list is your only warning today, but that is dependent on you specifying those people, and really is reactive - bottom of the cliff - after the damage is done. And the changelog is great, but again reactive, requiring us to go clean up the mess.

We want the tree to grow, to include all mankind, and to increase quality. To do that we need new users to provide info that the tree does not have. Plus there's the desire for people to document themselves, to pass that on to future generations. Sometimes those contributions are family folklore, or falsehoods, to make cover the aspects of life we sometimes wish to hide.

I know I'm not providing a solution here, I'm just trying to scope the problem and the goal. So maybe we need to focus on how to make the software more proactive, prevent the damage from occurring, approach?

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Juli said: Perhaps FS needs to look at the other collaborative trees that are out there for solutions or ideas. The two major ones I know of are WikiTree and Geni. I use the former; I've tried the latter, but the constant MyHeritage paywalls and other problems have caused me to mostly give up on it.

WikiTree's basic answer to the whole collaboration-versus-control conundrum is the idea of the Profile Manager. This is often the person who entered the profile in the first place, but it can be anyone interested in that profile. The PM has control over the privacy settings, which in turn control the degree of access that other WT users have. Of course, like any solution, the PM concept introduces a whole new set of problems, necessitating an Unresponsive Manager procedure and other measures. I'm not sure that some of these details would scale up too well to a site the size of FS.

The problem with any sort of "voting" page -- or any extra page requiring user input, really -- is that people would just ignore it. As it is, the Discussions and Notes are generally empty, and even if there's something there, it's ignored wholesale by 99% of users. (I'm kind of leery of using anything on the Collaboration tab myself, because I can never remember which is which in terms of permanence/editability.)

I think one solution that would kill two birds with one stone would be to fix the whole changelog reason versus conclusion logic conflation problem. Instead of the one reason box that's sometimes labeled as one and sometimes as the other, have an optional note field associated with every conclusion ("Reason this information is correct"), and a separate text field associated with every change ("Reason I made this change"). The conclusion-logic box should correlate with the Note field of the GEDCOM standard, i.e. it should be passed to partner sites and apps with that label.

(The conclusion-logic box needs to be strictly optional, because most of the time, simply tagging the conclusion with a source citation serves the same purpose of explaining where the information came from. The note box would be for the cases where it's not that simple.)

It should go without saying that the conclusion-logic text would need to be displayed in the merge process, and ideally would need a specific decision from the user about keep/discard (i.e. there should be no default unless both boxes are blank).

Of course, my idea suffers from the same user buy-in problem as Gasmodel's proposal. People would just ignore it most of the time. On a "contested" profile, there would be motivation to use it, but that status is most often discovered at the bottom of the cliff, as Joe put it.

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m said: I have never had problems with novices---usually I can just point them to the discussions filled with sources.

I have only had problems with a "bad actor."

Someone who has an agenda of intentional destruction of the genealogical record for whatever reason.

FS has nothing in place to help us with the "bad actor."

(We are at the mercy of the "bad actor.")

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Tom Huber said: Yeah, my solution will not work with the bad actor, but it is effective in dealing with everyone else.

I guess we are relatively lucky that there are few bad actors when it comes to the massive tree. Those that do exist tend to be retaliatory in nature, from what I've read in the discussions about these folks. Any claim that is made against them is immediately turned against the person who lodged the initial complaint.

In one instance, I got involved, but only because I determined that the person's profile was also a relative of mine. That's a very rare situation and I think I accomplished what was needed (at least I hope so, if my memory is correct).

Aside from assigning someone in FamilySearch that has the ability to put accounts on hold, I'm not sure anything can be done, short of following the WikiTree methodology that Juli described. As she said, that profile manager position opens up its own can of worms. Given the scope of users I would give it a chance of being a good solution at less than 50 percent. Largely because there are a lot of users who simply do not have the experience needed to deal with conflict issues. The other issue is of course, the absent manager -- who may have died or lost interest in working with the tree.

And, when it comes to this sort of thing, while I like the idea, there are certain profiles that really need more than one person watching it -- Pieter Claesen (Wyckoff) is a good example. And, there are at least two of us who are watching it and taking swift action when it comes to someone entering something that should not have been entered. It didn't help that Gustave Anjou was involved and is largely the source of the problems with his bogus genealogy.

I think that what has to happen is that FamilySearch put into place an easy means to report the "bad actor" that also allows for authoritative FamilySearch communication with those who are determined that their information is correct, despite having no sources. In a way, it should be a little like the position held by the FamilySearch Moderator in this forum. Someone to call for a cooling off-period and, if necessary, the means to lock an account.

There are other possibilities, to be sure, but I'm not sure that any of them are any better (or worse, for that matter) than those that have already been brought up.

Thanks again, to Joe Martel, who has contributed to this discussion.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Oh, and by the way, I think that those who heavily depend upon the watch list would have even bigger problems as profile managers with many profiles they are responsible for. I know, even with as few people that I have currently in the system, I would never have time to do research...

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Jeff Wiseman said: As Joe touched on, the first part of what gasmodels described is very much like the existing Discussions. And we know how effective they have been! Also, I doubt very much that it has anything to do with them being hidden under the Collaboration tab. If they were on the main page, I suspect that they would still not be used much, and when they were, it would not be for collaboration.

I think part of the challenge here, is that any "new feature" that is added will just make things more confusing to a lot of people. One reason that a lot of documentations are not read here is that many people want an easy solution. We've had folks come to the forum and actually admit that they never read any of the notes, discussions, life sketches, sources, or even memories.

Another thing is that all of this requires a lot of communication by computer. A person not only has to read a lot of details (many pertinent ones of which a person might not even know how to find, such as Reason statements stretched across multiple change history log events), they also have to be be fairly quick in TYPING. We have so many members under the age of 18 that work on here and I've watched as they struggle just to type in a reason that they are changing something. It is so painfully slow for them that they want to achieve it with only one to three words.

I know that I sound like a broken record, but things are being made too complicated. There should NOT be sections and tools on the site that only experienced users want to use. It needs to be much simpler so that even the novices must use the same areas that experienced folks do. If you have to document something, there should be a specific place to put it where EVERYONE will look because there is not any other places where it would exist. Why would someone put something in a Note describing why a vital has been given a certain value when a change history reason field that is posted so prominently below each vital (at least, those on the main details page) appears to be the "Correct" way to do that? Not to mention the Discussion "things" that are also being used as Notes...

Things need to work the same across the whole site. We tag sources to vitals such as birth events as evidence for that event. Many times that tag is all that is necessary. But what about relationships? those are vitals too. Why are they handled in a TOTALLY DIFFERENT fashion?

Anyway, that is just a long way of saying that a lot of the proposed solutions here need to be effective with far less experienced, slow at typing, maybe not too interested in deep details, and maybe senile individuals. Our leadership wants all of those types of members on the site as well, so my suspicion is that limiting those folks in access in any way is very unlikely to happen. I suspect that real solutions are ultimately going to come by:

• Simplifying things in the User Interface so that it is more intuitive to folks across the board, and

• Get to a basic structure that doesn't have to have major re-structuring every 3 months. That way training classes can be consistent across the world.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: And by the way. My own personal view is that simplifying the User Interface, adding consistency across the UI, nudging everyone to put everything in the same spot..... None of that is easy. There's the old story about the guy who wrote a long letter and apologized for it, saying that he had not had enough time to make it shorter.

Similarly, a smaller, tighter User Interface is going to require more effort from the techies, not less.

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Jeff Wiseman said: First of all, you'll need to have 2 or 3 engineers that excel in Requirements Structural Analysis in order to identify all the aspects of the problem domain's inherent structure. This can be tough because those skills are difficult to find.

Secondly, those 2 or 3 engineers will need to convince dozens of managers and senior developers that what they have spec'ed is "correct". Usually the evidence of structural coherency is not easily convey'ed to others who are focused on how to implement a solution. Requirements development and system implementation by nature are very different things and require a person's thinking to be tuned in very different ways.

Many places will short cut the requirements phase or put senior developers in charge of it. That results in a lot of experimentation in solutions,

Anyway, so it is more than just the techies putting in more effort :-)

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Adrian Bruce said: "coherency" - that's a word I remember. Can't remember exactly how it worked (and it's not the place to explain here, I suspect) but I remember the word!

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m said: Werelate has everything where you are forced to look at it.
Sources are on each vital. You click on the number of the source and it takes you to the source at the bottom of the page.
Lifesketch section.
Source section.

See example image below.
Link to page: https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:...

LegacyUser

Robert Wren said: Yep, I also remember Jeff throwing in 'Entropy' concerning computer tech. Brought me back to YEARS ago ChemEng classes. (as opposed to "Enthalpy")

LegacyUser

Robert Wren said: Reading this topic brought me this strange Déjà vu feeling.

I also noticed that this month starts my sixth year as a Forum participant. I began with a suggestion from FS Support to post here. " After several emails of inaccuracies and lack of sources for verification and in response to my FH Support emails, it was suggested posting my comments and suggestions here, as "we cannot process your suggestions and need you to do one more thing to get those suggestions to the right people;"

After five years, I'm also experiencing: "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" (The more it changes, the more it stays the same.)

It was in that initial post, that I "met" our 'user advocate' Joe Martel - and truly appreciate his continuing "advocacy" for us, the users. Thank you, Joe.

Ron Tanner also weighed in: "BTW we don't need to be reminded that Family Tree is an open-edit tree - we designed it that way. Thanks."
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

In this topic 'gasmodels' refers to the need for "collaboration" and "quality" - items mentioned in the formative WhitePaper The Case for Moving to "OUR TREE" https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea... (along with reducing duplication, and SOURCES. (It also mention "locking" records)

So, may I suggest we opt for one of the topics suggestions and swap Life Sketch with Collaboration and rename it RESEARCH NOTES, and provide the ability to link the page to multiple members of a family as most research becomes family, rather than individual.

I would further suggest that FamilySearch adopts a clearly defined goal or purpose, which, hopefully would include some reference to QUALITY (aka "Records Worthy of all Acceptation') and prominently display that for all to see - AND work toward that goal (as opposed to quantity - tens of millions of this, and millions of that).

Currently, in addition to the White Paper, I find this other documentation about 'purposes':
https://www.familysearch.org/en/about
https://www.familysearch.org/help/sal...

Then, after declaring the goal of FSTree is QUALITY, not quantity, set into practice items to meet that GOAL - such as education (Promote the FHGuide); requiring SOURCES; reporting MERGE completions. The "My Contributions" tool on the FS app demonstrates the capability FS has to individualize statistics - include merges as an item, suggest an 'appropriate' ratio for persons added vs Sources. (five, ten sources for every addition?) If the app can compute it for an individual, it certainly should be able to compute an average, and use the stats, to promote the desired outcome.

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ATP said: Jeff Wiseman,

What you have described in these last 2 of your comments is, in my opinion, why those who have authority to sign off on any implementation have difficulty in comprehending the "whole" picture as it were, not, as we know, from the lack of desire to produce the easiest and most intuitive system to all the various users, but, for the lack of such engineers as you describe who have ability to easily convey the knowledge necessary on how it should and could be done to those who have probably had little, if any, actual experience in the genealogical and family history research process, either before and after computerized research.

Research means did not change research strategies!

Thanks, again, for your insight and comments!

LegacyUser

m said: 2nd idea that FS " adopts a clearly defined goal or purpose, which, hopefully would include some reference to QUALITY (aka "Records Worthy of all Acceptation') and prominently display that for all to see - AND work toward that goal "

..."Then, after declaring the goal of FSTree is QUALITY, not quantity, set into practice items to meet that GOAL "

(this idea should be its own thread).

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Jeff Wiseman said: By the way, I hope that no engineers were offended by my comments here. But although the difficulties of moving between the requirements world and implementation world may appear very subtle (and even insignificant to some), in fact can be difficult and have great impact. It sort of works along these lines:

If you were to take 5 good Requirements Engineers and have them each analyze a customer’s need for a product and then create an essential (i.e., requirements) model, All of those models would be the same. This is because the problem domain for the customer has only one set of “essential” requirements. They are “essential” because if you remove ANY of them, something that the customer needs will not be met. If you ADD anything to it, that would be something that was not specifically needed. Requirements is the “WHAT” that needs to be provided for the product.

If you were to take 5 good Design Engineers and have them analyze and create an implementation (i.e., design) model, you would come up with 5 differing designs. Engineering design is the process of taking requirements and mapping them into technology. There are many ways to map requirements into technology with many complex trade-offs. These would be the “HOWS” of the way the product would be implemented.

So good Requirement engineers are tuned to identifying the only correct requirements that properly identify the essential needs of the system.

So good design engineers are tuned to developing the best of many possible implementations from a given set of requirements, based on the available technology and resources.

Now if you assign a dyed-in-the-wool Requirements Engineer to perform the Design on a system, they very quickly tend to run into “analysis paralysis”. They are used to identifying a single “correct” structure, but now they have been tasked with putting together one of many ways to implement the requirements—all typically having different tradeoffs. They also are very tuned to keeping “Design Contamination” out of the requirements. And yet, now they are being tasked with actually making design decisions.

If you assign an excellent senior design engineer to write requirements, they run into the reverse problem which can be even more severe. Instead of identifying the unique “Correct” essential structure, they wind up with all kinds of premature design decisions embedded in the requirements. This “Design Contamination” in a requirements set that LIMIT the ability of design engineers downstream to make effect implementation choices.

Many companies do not have distinct requirements/design phases, or if they do, they will use senior design engineers to do the requirements work. This results in design beginning before the problem is completely understood, and so you keep having to back things up to create fixes for things aspects of the problem that weren’t identified up front. This is a common problem in systems engineering.

Ideally the structure of the implementation follows the structure of the requirements. There are many exceptions to this, especially when technology is limited. But if you have a correct essential model, any of a number of “correct” designs can be mapped back to it and tested against it. If the essential model doesn’t exist, there’s no way to evaluate whether the design is appropriate or not.

A lot of my complaints on this forum are from issues where the implementation of a feature has strayed too far from the essential structure of the problem being solved.

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Robert Wren said: Thanks, M: Good point, I'd considered it - but I had already done that (in a discussion with myself: https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...
But I may do it again

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Jeff Wiseman said: Robert,

The number one thing to know about Enthalpy appears to be:

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Adrian Bruce said: Jeff - that's a really good summary of Requirements versus Design Engineering. All bar one year of my IT career was spent modifying existing systems so on that basis my Requirements Analysis was always polluted! And indeed, my company was such that I never really realized the issues that you raise.

In the one year that I worked on a green field project, I guess that I was a Design Engineer in a Requirements role but fortunately my Project Manager was good at keeping my design pollution out of my requirements. Our battles were tongue in cheek because we respected each other's abilities.

One thing that I'd add, though you might not agree, Jeff - FS has a major problem in trying to work out the requirements of genealogists because how does it get agreement over those Requirements? This is NOT the fault of FS.

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Jeff Wiseman said: Regarding "Design Contamination" of requirements--these are nothing more than arbitrary or unjustified "Design Constraints". The idea is that you want a few design constraints in a requirements set as possible to allow the developers as much freedom as possible to come up with the best implementation that they can.

But design constraints are also a necessary part of a requirements specification. Some inexperienced engineers think that there should be NO design constraints at all in the requirements. This is idealistic never true in reality. For example, if you are working on adding to or modifying a legacy system, there are always design choices that must be made as part of the requirements. If a company has been producing small microprocessor control boxes as part of their product line, it may be a requirement that a new software product be housed in one of these boxes because market studies have shown that even though creating a different type of box might make a nicer product, the cost of setting up a manufacturing line for the new box type is totally prohibited. Hence, you have a design constraint that it is required to use the existing boxes and the design engineers are limited to that choice by requirement.

And regarding the "Requirements of Genealogists", this work has been done for so long and using so many different tools that the workflows of research, identification of sources, identification of the derivations of vitals from sources, and the vitals set in general are ALL very well known. An essential model can be produced just from analyzing how things have always been done (i.e., understanding why they were done the way they were). Don't get the "Requirements of genealogist" confused up with the "Implementation (i.e., design) choice preferences of genealogists". There is only one essential model and that should be well understood today. There are many ways to implement or design a system to meet those requirements. What a genealogist WANTS in the implementation of software tool is not so important as that tool meeting all of the essential requirements of the genealogist.

You can see this in the fact that the essential model for this will always include a many to many relationship between all source entities and vital entities. How that is implemented is different depending on who designed and implemented the system as well as the mandates placed upon them by different companies.

For example, Ancestral Quest implements this essential relationship directly between the vitals and their supporting sources. This is implementation structure is very close to the essential model structure. However, because of FS' massive sources database, it would be far too difficult to implement things in that same way. So instead, they have you create a local "pool" of sources on each person record (i.e., a fixed set of vitals), and then associate those sources to the pertinent vitals via the "Tagging" process. It looks totally different from the AQ implementation, but both Designs meet the criteria of the essential model's many to many relationship between all source entities and vital entities.

If a system only allowed an association between the person record and sources without an explicit association to the vitals, then the requirements of the essential model has not been met (basically meaning that any genealogist using the system will not have a basic capability that all Genealogists need). The product would fail a test against it's essential requirements.

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Cousin David said: Well said. There are some “way overboard” theoretical comments on this thread. I’ve been here since before PAF 1.1; not losing any sleep over the multiple programs I use EXCEPT the novices who change before studying.

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ATP said: And, then there are those who assist and teach others how to research family history who appreciate how "way overboard" theoretical comments can be used in adapting that information to better explain and instruct.

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ATP said: m,

Wow! Almost like a old fashioned hard copy family group sheet! That is for those of us who still have those old fashion hard copies of pedigree charts and family group charts in handheld books!

Thanks for the posting this!

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Adrian Bruce said: Although that would probably not fit on one screen, so you'd need to scroll up and down. Still, it's useful to make you think, thanks.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Cousin David,

Not sure if the comment was direct toward me, but yea, I certainly admit that at least I have probably gone "way overboard" on analyses here :-)

However, I do feel that it is important that folks here understand that the comments I've made in this particular topic are not really "theoretical". I have been totally immersed in all of these items for most of my career. I've used all of these principles almost daily. I know that they work and can produce significant improvements for any product development, and especially those containing software.That is one of the reasons I get so passionate about these things.

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Adrian Bruce said: Warning - "philosophical" points follow...

Jeff - while I would wholly agree that there's very much a consensus about the logical requirements for genealogy, I'm less convinced that consensus exists for other aspects. For instance, should there be any requirement to model multi person events (with no duplication)? Not so very long ago, after all, FS was talking about stories, which tend to relate to multiple people. (And we have Memories that perhaps grew out of that)

Then in terms of the analysis of the quality of sources - there's a whole new ball game there in the US amongst those genealogists who go deeper into matters that has barely reached the UK - we don't even agree what "primary" information means...

So yes, there's a bedrock that surely is agreed, but other potential requirements where it's less clear - are they even in scope? - and my huge sympathy for FS over that is - who do they talk to on those topics?

LegacyUser

m said: If you visit the actual page in the above image at https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:... you will see that there is no Notes section on Werelate, nor does the page appear to lack anything. Everything is in a good place. Each vital can have a number or numbers next to it corresponding to source or sources at the bottom and the Lifesketch section can contain whatever text is necessary for that person.