Please help protect well sourced important and early profiles. Why not appoint moderators for early
LegacyUser
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robert king said: Hi. firstly, I think Family Search is a fantastic collaborative resource so many thanks to those who set it up/run it/volunteer. However, when dealing with entries for persons of historical interest and further back in time (e.g. C17th or earlier) there are obviously many descendants who want to make connections. Unfortunately, sometimes hours of work and inputting of information can be wrecked by those who either don't know what they are doing or don't read the existing sources before merging/deleting/adding impossible alleged issue etc., even when they are already well sourced. It can be quite dispiriting to see hours of painstaking research disappear and it can feel like some sort of battle trying to defend the integrity of a profile. Please consider introducing some sort of monitor system for early and important persons -possibly persons with a 'Moderator' status. It needs to be made more difficult to just post rubbish and wreck the hard work of others. Even a simple, clear, message or warning such as 'Please read attached sources before merging this profile' might help slow the damage. Thanks again for all the brilliant bits. Bob.
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Alan E. Brown said: Thanks for taking the time to submit this suggestion.
Family Tree already has a mechanism for doing what you suggest; it is called "read-only records for persons in Family Tree" and is further described in this Help Center article:
https://www.familysearch.org/help/sal...
One example would be the record for President George Washington: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/per...
The difficulty is that different people have different opinions on who should be marked as read only. As that Help Center article notes, "When we mark records as "read only," it prevents collaboration. Consequently, we do not accept patron requests to mark a record as read only."
Much of the frustration you describe applies to any person in the Family Tree that multiple users edit. This has been an ongoing discussion, and will certainly always be an issue in a single collaborative tree that is open for edits from anyone. All we can do is provide good sources and reason statements for the conclusions we draw, and communicate kindly with those contributors who make changes we disagree with.0 -
Cousin David said: I am grateful to the recent increased efforts by FSFT Staff to reply to suggestions and ideas made. In the case noted above, I concur with the suggestion, for all of the reasons made and many more.0
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David Newton said: And what does that mechanism bring? Duplicates, more duplicates and even more duplicates created by people frustrated at the system. These are often exactly the same sort of people who would make the bad edits in the first place. Those who have not, cannot or even will not learn how to edit FSFT properly. Sadly true and likely a very hard problem to deal with.
I wonder what the daily count of newly created duplicate Brigham Youngs is? I'll bet it's non-zero most days. Same with Joseph Smith I suspect.
I would not call the current system adequate. Far too many people are read-only and far too few are protected from bad edits. Quite the seeming contradiction. What solves the issue? An intermediate state between read-only and full access. Said intermediate state only editable after passing a test proving you know what you are doing with respect to genealogy and FSFT. Said intermediate state applicable to all 17th and 18th century individuals. Said intermediate state applied to many of the read-only individuals today.
Crucial differences? A defined route to being able to edit these individuals. Stopping many of the drive-by edits perpetrated by the ignorant, the stupid and the vandals of this system. Allowing concentration of support resources on those records which really need full protection.
After implementation this would reduce support's workload running the read only system. It would reduce complaints about drive-by edits. It would mean that where such edits occur they affect fewer people because the individuals concerned would have fewer descendents since they would, by definition, be more recently-deceased profiles.0 -
Paul said: As always, surely this would depend on resources - or FamilySearch managers' definition of priorities. Training /testing seems a good way to at least partly deal with the problem - but who sets the tests, and marks the results, to confirm a user's competency?0
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David Newton said: Automated, multiple choice test, so no human marking involved.
Typical question would be to look at a suggested merge and decide whether it's correct or not. Another typical question would be to look at a suggested source and decide whether it's correct or not. Draw from a pool of such suggestions to reduce the possibility of cheating.
Other subjects to cover basic things like speed of travel in various periods of history (to impress on the test takers the importance of considering geography to FSFT) and the reliability of sources and conflicting sources. In other words to make sure that the test takers have a decent basic knowledge of sourcing and genealogical techniques and are aware of things like geography and general history and how those interact with genealogy.
When you're dealing with 17th and 18th century profiles you have to be much more aware and careful than when dealing with 19th and 20th century profiles. Fewer sources, more people affected by bad changes as more descendants of the person in question. This is the logic behind locked down all the medieval stuff from editing. I'm just extending that to later profiles and providing a path to gain editing rights.0 -
Juli said: WikiTree has something like the suggested system: there's a quiz for editing pre-1700 profiles, an approval process for editing pre-1500 profiles, and profiles can be "project protected", limiting major edits (changing/adding relationships, and merging) to a small group. I see two problems with adapting this system to FamilySearch: the language barrier, and lack of communication tools.
On WikiTree, if you make a typo in a birthdate and trigger the pre-whatever-century block, you can post to the forum and someone will fix it for you, often within a few minutes. FamilySearch has forums, yes, but how many people even know about just one of them? And which forum should you post to if you accidentally triggered a block?
WT is an order of magnitude smaller than FS, and despite attempts at internationalization, it's still very much an English-language site. The pre-1700 quiz is available in English and Dutch, and the private email list for discussing pre-1500 applicants is all in English. I don't know what would happen if someone who spoke only, say, French managed to apply for pre-1500 certification. Change that to, say, Hungarian, and I'm pretty sure the system would break down completely.
Now transfer all that to the much bigger and completely decentralized, disorganized jungle known as FamilySearch: who would be available to evaluate users? How would they communicate? How many languages would you need to translate the quiz into? Would you try to localize your questions/examples, or would everyone need to learn to evaluate U.S. censuses (or whatever)?
Unquestionably, the current FS system of read-only records is inadequate: all it does is generate duplicates that users can mangle to their heart's content. But I'm at a loss for suggesting alternatives.0 -
Robert Wren said: 'Locking' a PID (by users) was discussed in the 2011 White Paper (THE CASE FOR MOVING TO “OUR TREE”): : http://broadcast.lds.org/eLearning/fh...
"New features . . . . Community roles will provide expert community members the tools they need to monitor activity in the tree, resolve issues, and “lock” ancestors when heated issues need a chance to cool before further changes are made."
Not to beat a dead horse, but the concept has been ignored for years since (as have the other goals)
Discussion here: https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...
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As far as the "Read Only" George Washington KNDX-MKG - which doesn't accept changes and apparently doesn't even show up as a DUPLICATE for those attempting to ADD another version.. . . .
A quick search shows several NEW GW additions: ALL ALSO show "0" "POSSIBLE DUPLICATES"
GQMV-PQP GEDCOM data December 28, 2019 (0 Possible Duplicates)
G984-ZGD Person Created March 11, 2019 (0 Possible Duplicates)
G327-BKV Person Created November 19, 2019 (0 Possible Duplicates)
GQS9-2KW Person Created January 2, 2020 (0 Possible Duplicates)
K4VD-TFF GEDCOM data December 14, 2019 (0 Possible Duplicates)
Who knows how many more? Does anyone really care about minimizing duplication (another White Paper goal)?
Allowing users to 'know' fellow watchers, would be a great help in COLLABORATION as a potential solution for minimizing the duplicate problem - as also outlined.
I agree with others that the problem PID's most needing to be "locked and monitored are likely the "persons of historical interest and further back in time (e.g. C17th or earlier)" or "17th and 18th century profiles" or 'first' immigrant ancestors and "famous people." BUT something should be done!0 -
Paul said: "Automated, multiple choice test, so no human marking involved."
Again, no argument in principle, but is FamilySearch even willing to devote resources to implement this? As Juli points out, this would involve versions in different languages, too. Without wishing to get too personal, I had you down as someone far more realistic than idealistic, David! But, who knows, FamilySearch might surprise us all and actually implement your worthy suggestion.
("Gold star" from me, too.)0 -
Tom Huber said: Other discussions have taken place over the years, but to no avail.
The typical response is that FS wants nothing to stop or slow down a person with little or no experience from using the site.
By the way, I am in favor of some level of confidence testing for everyone, but with the limited resources, I have my doubts that will ever happen.0
This discussion has been closed.