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

LegacyUser

m said: I have a separate rating system for sources, which I will introduce as a separate thread because this thread is about a different rating system for sources.

LegacyUser

m said: 43 separate notes that have to be clicked on that no one will read is "a dense page with a millions things on them." I think everyone is violently against 43 separate notes that have to be clicked on. But what is the solution?

LegacyUser

m said: Thanks for reading this thread, Joe.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said:

I think everyone is violently against 43 separate notes that have to be clicked on

Sorry, but I am VIOLENTLY AGAINST taking all notes and mashing them together into a single, non-cohesive, monolithic block of text, ESPECIALLY when it gets in the way of working with the collection of normal vitals and their conclusions/values.

With having separate notes with titles to show categorically what each one is about makes it FAR easier to find the ones that are relevant to what you are seeking.

43 separate notes that have to be clicked on that no one will read is "a dense page with a millions things on them."

So how would a conglomeration of those same 43 texts all locked together in a single humongous page NOT be "a dense page with a millions things on it?"

Having all of the note type information as in the FS example (i.e., the 43 distinct notes) will always be a problem REGARDLESS of where you put them. But each having its own title that is searchable is still far better than having to deal with the monolith. This is especially true if Notes could be tagged to just the conclusions they are relevant to. Removing the ability to "divide and conquer" large blocks of data would be a very distinct step backwards.

Regarding the question of third party tool supporting warnings and other notifications, the API (application programmer interface) that third party tools use is intended for getting information into and out of FS. Warnings and notifications generated from analysis of the database information tends to be proprietary to the tool performing the analysis.

Furthermore, a single shared tree has notification needs that are far more extensive than in most third party tools where everyone has their own private tree that others cannot modify. There's no need for notifications for things other people are doing there. The warnings being discussed here are really only needful because the tree is shared by everyone.

I could be wrong (it wouldn't be the first time), but I suspect that such notifications would not normally be passed across the API.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: "43 separate notes that have to be clicked on"
I would totally agree that one single block of text contaning 43 quasi-separate notes is equally, if not more, unlikely to be read.

I would suggest that there needs to be the possibility of categorising all those notes (probably implying a manual process) and tagging them to one or more specific events / facts - either vital or other. They would then be accessible from the relevant event / whatever - for instance, if one had 4 notes about his birth, those 4 notes - or perhaps the first line / title / whatever - would be visible from the birth event. That way, the amount of unformatted text visible at one time is reduced and is concentrated on a specific topic.

There is an implied design feature there - the Collaboration tab would have a filter (set by the user) on to say "Either show me all notes on this collaboration tab or only show me those that have not yet been tagged to a specific event / whatever on this profile."

Thjis tagging would need to be done manually but the "only show untagged" option provides you with a means to get there.

The 43 notes need to be categorised and grouped and reduced in visual impact. I believe that tagging and optionally filtering out the tagged ones would allow this.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Remember that not all notes or sources are going to be tagged. Currently a source that only relates to a person's residence at a given time CANNOT be tagged to that residence event, but it does still apply to the person. It is possible to have notes of this nature as well. But if you are using the note to describe derivation logic for a vital's conclusion it will typically be tagged to that vital (although at present even that is not possible)

The 43 notes issue is a mess just because it has never been consolidated. They just need to be cleaned up and documented better. That will, of course, require someone to go through the "43 separate notes that have to be clicked on that no one will read"

LegacyUser

m said: "Taking all notes and mashing them together into a single, non-cohesive, monolithic block of text" --- is someone advocating for that?

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: m,

Please forgive me if I have been misunderstanding something here, but it really sounded to me as though that was exactly what you have been suggesting. I kinda got this impression from the following areas of discussion here:

- Using the 43 notes example in FS, you were suggesting that maybe the separate and multiple Notes capability of FS be removed. This was mentioned more than once.

- Using the werelate and wiki tree examples, you appeared to be suggesting that a single "write-anything" text block up front and center on the persons page would be a better way to do it. That kind of block of text would be non-cohesive because it contains many non-related items (e.g., vital derivation logic, biographical tidbits, Research texts, and Discussion type texts, etc.). It would be monolithic in nature because everything is locked together in one single chunk. You wouldn't have as much ease in referenceing individual pieces of it, or to even attach relevant sections of it to other conclusions in the system (let alone trying to track the change history on it and who made the changes). And if you were to import all 43 of those notes in your FS example to werelate or wiki tree, it is unlikely that they would come together in any categorical order. Hence my reference to mashing them together. Their order likely would be random from import.

So again, if the perceptions that I got of you advocating these things from earlier discussions were incorrect, I do apologize.

However, I do still believe that taking those 43 notes in that FS profile and moving them all into a single text file on the main details page (such as the Life Sketch field) in order to eliminate the use of Notes in the FSFT, would definitely be a step backwards.

LegacyUser

ATP said: Jeff,

I read this discussion on 43 notes example as you do! I'm certainly not going through a mishmash of extensive notes to ferret out the ones that might be useful, unless that person happens to be the brick wall in my direct line that is important to confirming my ancestor's' more present descent. I'm much too busy merging and adding sources to my ancestors and kindred dead that somehow got lost along the way to try at least in my ancestral lines to keep the duplication of family ordinances at bay.

In my experiences, users rarely seem to bother to read the page let alone the references in Sources, so, why would they even bother to check NOTES no matter where they exist. We have evolved into a rhetorical culture where generally people are satisfied with what passes as an overview, rather than having to get down to the hard gritty manual labor of actually doing the research and analyzing the results to find and ratify identity and relationship.

FSFT needs to get back to its roots - no pun intended - with a design that, in my opinion, does not conflate the biological bloodline (genes or Genealogy, if you will) with Family History.

Before FSFT existed, all that was needed to perform ordinances and seal families together was a submitted Family Group Sheet verifying and confirming identification of a family by a record(s) of civil law, or/and canon law, and/or by someone with personal knowledge, usually a very close relative, who lived within the timeframe of the vital event taking place which may have been in an interview, or Bible records, a journal, a diary, or some other format. That is all that is still needed to performs sealings and ordinances for our kindred dead!

Everything else, in my estimation, is Family History. All the various stories with mixes of truth and facts and the myths and wishful thinking, all the memories, the pictures, and any other thing you might wish to present as part of your family to preserve your family's culture belongs in NOTES or some equivalent name.

I'm sure that someone else might well have expressed my thoughts better on this topic, however, at the moment....

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Yes, I understand why the "Family History" aspect is important. But because the genealogical side of the site needs to be precise in identifying who's-who I would like to see the biographical, life Sketch, and all other such SUMMARIES removed to a different place. The whole idea of the genealogical side of things is to provide the evidence and logic for the assigned values to various vitals that together UNIQUELY identify a person that lived here. That is so that ordinances for a real person don't get duplicated or smudged up in a PID that is really 2 or more different people. That requires solid evidence and analysis logic for each conclusion about that person.

LegacyUser

ATP said: Sorry, Jeff, after the first sentence, I should have gone to Reply to This Topic, instead of continuing in the section under your name.. But, while I can do research, I am still after a year trying to figure out where to respond in whatsoever way I may on FSFT! : )

You said, "... I would like to see the biographical, life Sketch, and all other such SUMMARIES removed to a different place." I feel sure you have some idea of how that idea would visually appear. Is there a way, sometime, if you have a mind to, you could sketch out, perhaps like a doodle, a design and post it as to how you think it should look, to say, a first time user? Anyhow, thanks for all your comments. They are especially useful, I find.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Well, first of all, the "Life Sketch" is not a really a common term (just try finding it in a dictionary). It is more commonly called a biographical sketch, biosketch, or just bio. It is NOT a Biography (although Biographies can sometimes start out as biographical sketchs).

A biographical sketch is a SKETCH. That is why the word "sketch" is in the name :-) Anyway, the biographical sketch (sometimes referred to as a "Life Sketch") will contain as part of it, either in point form or narrative, a list of all the known vitals on the person. I.e., it summarizes all of those for presentation purposes. So typically a "Time-Line" (or the information in it) is always a subpart of a Bio. On the FS site, one way you could approach this would be as follows:



This puts the Details tab up front where it belongs as well as the actual details on the page starting at the top of the page. Immediately next to the Details tab is a tab for all the evidence supporting the details (i.e., the Sources) and then the tab for all the descriptions of how sources are interpreted to obtain the details (i.e., the Notes). Then comes the Family History related tabs (i.e., Memories, Life Sketch, Timeline, etc.)

There are other programs out there that already can automatically generate a Bio based on the time line and additional text that is entered. It seems logical then that these might be co-located. Leaving the timeline in its own tab could be useful though as some people use it when doing family research to see where things were happening. If this was done, the tab would properly belong just before the memories tab

Note I just threw this together to show the concept. Exact naming could be refined.

LegacyUser

ATP said: Thanks for throwing that together! On the surface, this rough "sketch" works for me! : )

LegacyUser

m said: What do people see when they visit FS through their home genealogy programs? through Ancestry? etc. The "refuted parents" or whatever warning would have to be seen by those people.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: They don't really "visit" the FS site through their home genealogy programs in the way you might visit the FS site through a browser type program. They can "Access" databases on the site through various features that those programs have. E.g., Ancestral Quest has a feature for comparing what you have in your AQ database with what is currently in FSFT. This is done by the feature doing a "retrieve" of data from the FSFT via the API. Since the structure of data in the AQ database is similar to that in the FSFT, that allows for the compatibility of comparisons. However, if the FSFT has proprietary data in it that other programs don't use (e.g., Discussions) it may be that the third party program cannot handle the data.

Since warning messages are typically a function of the system that is generating them, if a 3rd party program does not create those same warnings, then you are likely out of luck since you typically cannot retrieve them from the other system vi the API.

LegacyUser

m said: So let's say someone is accessing FS from outside the FS website. They put wrong parents. Or they merge with a different person. Where can you put a "refuted parents" warning?

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Not quite sure. If the developers of all those other tools have not already put in such a warning, they would all have to add the code to do that in their tools.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: My gut feeling is that such an obligation (to show those messages) would be way outside the terms of the agreement to use the FS Application Program Interface. But that's only an initial reaction.

I guess that the issue would be twofold - does the API include a space for transfer of those warnings? I have never understood the actual relationship between GEDCOM-X, the API and the "data model" of FS Family Tree - the actual relationship, not the hoped for relationship.... The second part of the issue would be - does the agreement to use the API or license a partner, cover functional aspects as well as data formats?

I suspect that the answers may be complex, and as Jeff indicates, stuff in FSFT outside the normal paradigm of genealogical data (what he terms as proprietary) is less likely to be able to be processed by partner software. Clearly I don't know the answers - other than knowing that there are bits in GEDCOM-X that aren't in FSFT - I am simply saying this to indicate that the answers may be complex.

LegacyUser

m said: Why can't the warning exist on FS website?/Why does the warning have to be produced by some party other than FS website?

Also, what is RFN? Lots of notes just say RFN and a number.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: My understanding is that the user of a 3rd party product that syncs *might* not see anything of the FS website, so anything happening there is irrelevant.

RFN? No idea - a pretty useless note to anyone like ourselves!

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I can only speak for Ancestral Quest which I use. Here is a screen shot, showing the main screen for an individual profile -- this one needs work in a number of areas. Like a FSFT profile, there are sections that can be displayed with the various buttons at the bottom of the screen. I don't have time at the present to provide you with each screen, but this particular program is very effective in presenting a lot of the information available in FSFT.

LegacyUser

m said: I saw RFN on several people. Mystery!

We really need Joe to answer the question about what they see, don't we?

LegacyUser

joe martel said: What's a PID that has RFN? Look at the context, the place and date of the Person.

LegacyUser

joe martel said: If that's a Note it could be a number of things. If this came from another genealogy program the Gedcom RFN field is the unique record id number of that person in that program, similar to the PID in FSFT. It comes across in Gedcom to allow for the target database to refer to the source database's record, similar to RIN.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: In other words, if it is in a note, it is pretty well useless to everyone in the world except the one person that copied in the note from their own personal tree.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: True. I do tend to remove redundant Notes. But whenever I've seen similar hieroglyphics, I leave those Notes well alone in case they refer to stuff in (say) LDS-only files.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: That may be, but when people choose to insert their own terse and custom encrypted notes that others cannot understand, that is fine for their own "private tree" (wherever that is), but it is less than useless in a shared collaborative tree since it only creates confusion.

My own take on this is that these types of notes show up when people are performing bulk transfers from their own "private tree" into the FSFT. It just gets included with the batch and if it contains information that only they would understand, they may not be too concerned about it.

LegacyUser

joe martel said: Love to see some PIDs with this. Without that context we can only guess what happened and if its useful.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: m's Jacob Cooke L524-HGY example has a few examples (although they are not nearly as bad as some I've seen).



I've never seen the term "-1666+". I assume it means "around 1666". Most of these appear to be separate citations although the organization and some abbreviations aren't obvious (although I've never gone through Torrey's "New England Marriages Prior to 1700").



I believe that the "!" marks at the beginning of texts was how notes in the early PAF programs were separated for searching and sorting capabilities, But what is BIR-DEA and FGR? BIR-DEA is likely a custom search key that someone originally set up for finding specific types of notes in PAF that they wanted to summarize. Is FGR a Family Group Record for Dale Washington? If so where can others find it?



Although this note is marked BIRTH, it is actually a collection of notes, again likely dumped from a single PAF file record. There are BIRTH, MARRIAGE, SEALED TO SPOUSE, DEATH, BAPTISM, ENDOWMENT, SEAL SPOUSE, D. Gates & Allied Fam, AF says born Panfield, Eng, Other dates for endowments (although this is titled, it has no content), and RELATIONSHIP notes all crammed together. They don't even have line breaks between them. they were all just dumped into FS without any adaptation. If a person wants to know what sources are related to a person, they cannot do it by just looking at the source list for that person, they now have to rummage around through all these notes to see what is missing from the source list.



Although it is titled as a BIOGRAPHY, it is NOT a biography. In fact is not even a biographical (life) sketch! It is a single event (immigration) in a person's life. What's worse, there is no evidence of where that information even came from. Why was the event not recorded using the "other information -- immigration" item in FS? Probably because it was originally just dumped into the FS database. Granted, it may have occurred prior to the change over from nFS, but still if you are going to document an even in a note, at least lable it appropriately and and provide some justification for it's content.

LegacyUser

m said: Alas, I can't give person pages because yesterday I merged what 30 or 40 people?

GEDCOM uploads. So I can't remember names after that.

I am violently against GEDCOM uploads.