Gedcom Challenge: Show Us The Data

LegacyUser

rotkapchen said: ATP: Pass along the word wherever you can. Most people are oblivious to the severity of this issue. As fast as people load duplicates into the system others are picking them up or worse, releasing them for others to waste their time doing.

Never leave home without your own printed ordinances.

LegacyUser

rotkapchen said: You'd think 10 months of detailed data would be enough to illustrate this MASSIVE problem related to THOUSANDS of hours being wasted in the temple. But then again, they're not the ones doing the duplicate work.

Nor apparently are they interested in keeping people from releasing duplicate records to the temple for others to waste their time with. As fast as I can find duplicate records people are releasing them for others to do and several are outrightly indignant when I point out what they are doing and refuse to audit their own list of reserved records to check for duplicates.

No one really cares about studying the data. No one really 'gets' the significance of all the data behind the scenes. Not even represented by this effort are all the many PIDS I've spent the entire day with today from one person who randomly changed the names and the dates on 10s of records. Who knows how many of their records I didn't find. Once the names were changed then another ner-doer merged them into the changed name records. That took me forever to figure out, other than following the trail of the ner-doer (who is regularly responsible for all sorts of errors I find -- we're not talking simple data -- we're talking entirely different people data).

No good deed goes unpunished...

5/12/2020
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by LindaCruttenden, wrong name on record
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by LindaCruttenden, released to temple for work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by LindaCruttenden
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... dup by TerryMcElroy, printed for temple work, aligned to wrong parents
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... dup by PeterSchuelke1, reserved for temple work
GEDCOM dup by Cajunbaby225

5/13/2020
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by Wilfred G. LeBlanc, reserved for temple work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... dup by bchalk, released to temple for work B/C/I completed
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... dup by bchalk, released to temple for work

5/18/2020
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... dup by debsalley1, reserved for temple workhttps://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... dup by debsalley1
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... dup by debsalley1
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... old duplicate, printed for work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by Wilfred G. LeBlanc, printed for work, B/C/I completed

LegacyUser

Ryan Torchia said: After five years of editing here, I finally got a six-month membership at Ancestry with a DNA test. Now I understand where so much bad information comes from and how it gets propagated.

Ancestry's design flat-out encourages false information to spread. For example, my relative Thomas Mullinix (L1HB-17G), who had only one known child, has been confused with a different Thomas Mullinix (L7JQ-HXY), who had 11 children.

The "source" Ancestry pushes hardest is other user-generated family trees. Ancestry relies on those to determine who a person "really is". So for my example, even with Thomas's profile completely filled out -- his parents, spouse and child -- because so many people have copied the bad info from tree to tree, Ancestry always and only pushes hints and records relating to the other person.

Plus their other main sources are similarly unreliable "Family Histories", "International Marriage Records", and Find-A-Grave. It's actually kind of hard to find solid primary info, unlike here. Ancestry at best is sandbox, and it's baffling to me that Family Search freely allows automated GEDCOM import from Ancestry, or any site without a shared tree with peer review.

I have two suggestions:
1. FS should block GEDCOM or 3rd party app profile creation for people born before 1800 (at least for the US). These are the ancestors with the most frequently-repeated false information floating around, bad dates, fathers and sons with the same name confused for each other, etc.. These ancestors have hundreds or thousands of descendants -- chances are very, very low that they're not already here.

2. FS should not allow any kind of GEDCOM or app editing until a new editor has passed some kind of learning threshold, like, say, 500 edits. This would help prevent the drive-by GEDCOM dumps by people who get excited by genealogy for a week, then disappear.

Anyway, sorry to vent here, but if you close the other thread and don't solve the problem, what do you expect?

LegacyUser

rotkapchen said: Ryan: Thanks for weighing in and thanks for some new ideas and perspectives.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Ryan, by "other thread" I assume that you are referring to the
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

Over 400 replies to that original thread were lost when two separate but similar topics were merged a ways back. Furthermore, in several years now, there has been no real response to these questions.

GEDCOM dumps by people who get excited by genealogy for a week, then disappear

Unfortunately, it goes much further than just that. Many people are using the GEDCOM capability to intentionally bypass the appropriate collaborative limitations of the FS Familytree that they don't like.

These people INTENTIONALLY create their own personal tree records in FS by creating all duplicates from their GEDCOM files regardless of whether or not those are duplicates (which in most cases they are). These are "throw-away" trees that they only enter into the system in order to get the temple work resolved. If any of their ancestors are already reserved in the system, they just reserve all of the duplicates that they've created and immediately have the work done. They then just leave the mess that's left for someone else to clean up. After all, they are only concerned about maintaining their OWN tree which is in some other location outside of FS.

The only reason that they are putting their GEDCOM data into the FSFT is so that they can quickly bypass the normal reservation mechanisms and get the temple work for THEIR records done in spite of any other work that has been done for those ancestors. Going to the efforts to find duplicates and merge their GEDCOM records into the tree is completely in opposition to the real reasons that they are dumping their duplicates into the tree. Why would they want to collaborate with others when they have already accomplished all that they wanted to do?

A lot of this is not being done out of ignorance anymore. It is an exploitable loophole that allows them to accomplish their own private purposes. And as you can see from both of these topics, FS refuses to fix the problem, even though a fix could be very simple, easy, and FAST to implement and would eliminate massive amounts of rework required in the FSFT. The reasons for this continue to perplex me.

So unfortunately, by very sad experience over the past couple of years, I can pretty well GUARANTEE that your suggestions will be completely ignored

LegacyUser

rotkapchen said: And then there's support who recently suggested that I use this forum for an issue I was asking them to resolve to which I pointed out both of these discussions and said this forum is effectively useless and welcomed any other meaningful recommendations they might have.

LegacyUser

m said: Ryan, what you said (the following point) deserves a thread in itself:

"After five years of editing here, I finally got a six-month membership at Ancestry with a DNA test. Now I understand where so much bad information comes from and how it gets propagated.

Ancestry's design flat-out encourages false information to spread. For example, my relative Thomas Mullinix (L1HB-17G), who had only one known child, has been confused with a different Thomas Mullinix (L7JQ-HXY), who had 11 children.

The "source" Ancestry pushes hardest is other user-generated family trees. Ancestry relies on those to determine who a person "really is". So for my example, even with Thomas's profile completely filled out -- his parents, spouse and child -- because so many people have copied the bad info from tree to tree, Ancestry always and only pushes hints and records relating to the other person. "

LegacyUser

rotkapchen said: 6/23/2020
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by Louise A. Martin, reserved for temple work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by Louise A. Martin, reserved for temple work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by Louise A. Martin, reserved for temple work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by Louise A. Martin, printed for temple work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... new duplicate by Desblanc

6/29/2020
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by Louise A. Martin, printed for temple work
new GEDCOM load May 28, 2020 by RogerVitello
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... new GEDCOM dup by RogerVitello, printed for temple work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... new GEDCOM dup by RogerVitello, printed for temple work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... new GEDCOM dup by RogerVitello, printed for temple work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... new GEDCOM dup by RogerVitello, printed for temple work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... duplicate by PeterSchuelke1, released to temple for work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... duplicate by PeterSchuelke1, released to temple for work
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by Louise A. Martin, released for temple work, B/C duplicated
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/mer... GEDCOM dup by Louise A. Martin, released for temple work, B/C duplicated

Brett .

@Andrew VK

FYI

Or ...

Better still ...

I really wish 'FamilySearch' would ...

Just STOP allowing the "Upload" of GEDCOM Files into "Family Tree" of 'FamilySearch' altogether ...

There is just NO need to "Upload" of GEDCOM File into "Family Tree" of 'FamilySearch' ...

Under ANY circumstance ... even if one's "Ancestral" Lines are NOT already in "Family Tree" of 'FamilySearch'.

Just my thoughts.

Brett

Paula Thornton

For the record, since we are at the mercy of the constantly changing protocols and practices of FamilySearch, in the early days we could not use our own names -- we signed up with monikers. All references to Rotkapchen, belong to me.

I have noticed that the hundreds of duplicates that I used to have to merge do not seem to be happening as often, but there also seems to be a lot more people managing merges.

Here's my take on 'to GEDCOM' or 'not to GEDCOM'. While generally I would suggest that it be limited to administrative exception, this platform is not managed in ANY way the way a typical massive database would be administered with administrative oversight. Indeed, it is for lack of administrative oversight that we have nowhere to go to plead our case in this matter. Therefore, by means of logic, the only remaining option is to remove GEDCOM loads altogether.