> As for picking a family and trying to improve the wikitree account, what > possible incentive would there be to do so? I care too much about my > research to make it a part of what I consider to be a lost cause. I'm > not against joining a group project in principle, but any such project > would have to have realistic goals and have a quality-control procedure > that I trusted. > > Stewart Baldwin Dear Stewart I suppose it partly depends on whether you see genealogy as a public or a private good. The incentive is that by contributing what you know you are improving what is out there. Given that your research is still yours and will still live on your own hard drive, there is no risk of that being tainted, but by sharing that information, posting your evidence and so on you are both improving the information in the public domain and modelling good genealogical practice for the benefit of those less skilled / experienced than you. The extent to which you are committing yourself to ongoing engagement is up to you, given the state of many of the big sites it would seem perfectly reasonable to adopt a "fire and forget" policy now, with a view to coming back in a few years to see what has happened... N.B. There's also the question of what will happen to your knowledge and work once you cease to be able to add to it. It would seem like an incredible waste if it were, so to speak, to die with you. On four specific points: 1. Familysearch doesn't have profile managers so I don't know how they work, but intuitively I'd've thought that the answer would be to put yourself forward as one such and if there are "rivals" convince them by your arguments... 2. on the use of personal knowledge as a justification, I think it depends on what it is and who's claiming it. I feel quite proprietorial about my family back to the middle of the 19th century and have various documents that aren't published (and probably won't be) plus all the anecdotal knowledge that goes with that (although I confess that the location of Cromwell's guns used for the siege of Pontefract castle that my Mother pointed out to me forty years ago, which her aunt showed her because her grandfather showed her based on his grandfather having seen them has unfortunately now been lost!) and so for me to say something like "family knowledge" seems reasonable. To try to claim the same about something medieval would be ridiculous! 3. Novices' ability to recognise good from bad. I think you are being unfairly hard on most novices here - the difference between well-supported and hypothetical is normally obvious, if only from the volume of supporting text. However, I do agree that the current inflexibility of the merge option on Familysearch does make it too easy to lose detail at present. 4. Tidying up a big mess - unfortunately, the reality is that there is a lot of wiki-info being uploaded which initially overwhelms the ability of good wiki genealogists to process it. However, I would argue that this is a function of where we are in the development of on-line genealogy. In ten years' time I would expect the 19th century UK censuses to be almost completely linked in on the big sites, their software to be better at dealing with uncertainty and the genealogists better at supporting their arguments. Whether I'm right or not, or rather how fast this happens will be influenced significantly by the attitudes (i.e. willingness to get involved / share knowledge) of the best genealogists around. Which brings me back full circle...! Regards James

On 6/19/2016 8:30 AM, WJH via wrote: > N.B. There's also the question of what will happen to your knowledge > and work once you cease to be able to add to it. It would seem like an > incredible waste if it were, so to speak, to die with you. I'm not talking about keeping my finished research to myself. By "finished research" I mean not including various notes which may be easily misinterpreted. I sometimes make experimental trees from undocumented data I find just to see how well it holds up, and if the information seems plausible I will use it as a finding aid, but allowing such notes to become public will cause more problems than they solve. Many of the problems present on the Internet are caused by people copying such scratch paper. I have already shared the finished pages of the Henry Project, and other research of mine has been published. I will continue to publish my research or make it available on the Internet. I just don't want to become involved in something like wikitree where my research would be too easily mangled. > 1. Familysearch doesn't have profile managers so I don't know how they work, but intuitively I'd've thought that the answer would be to put yourself forward as one such and if there are "rivals" convince them by your arguments... To many projects, too little time ... > 2. on the use of personal knowledge as a justification, I think it depends on what it is and who's claiming it. I agree that the use of personal knowledge is appropriate in cases where the information is close to the time of the writer. However, the bare citation "personal knowledge" should only be used when the writer has that knowledge from their own personal experience. If, for example, your grandmother tells you the name of her grandmother, then using that as a source is fine, but it should not be cited simply as "personal knowledge" but something like "My grandmother told me ..." (making sure that the antecedent of "my" is clear). Documents in the writer's possession should ideally either be scanned or transcribed word-for-word, along with any known information about the identity of the writer. > 3. Novices' ability to recognise good from bad. I think you are being unfairly hard on most novices here - the difference between well-supported and hypothetical is normally obvious, if only from the volume of supporting text. However, I do agree that the current inflexibility of the merge option on Familysearch does make it too easy to lose detail at present. I agree that many novices quickly advance to the stage where they can recognize the difference between good and dreadful sources, but I have also encountered too many who still can't tell the difference after years of "experience." Also, there are too many bad genealogists who are pretty good at putting enough "window dressing" on their work to make it look better documented than it is. Many novices have difficulty distinguishing such work from good research. > 4. Tidying up a big mess - unfortunately, the reality is that there is a lot of wiki-info being uploaded which initially overwhelms the ability of good wiki genealogists to process it. However, I would argue that this is a function of where we are in the development of on-line genealogy. In ten years' time I would expect the 19th century UK censuses to be almost completely linked in on the big sites, their software to be better at dealing with uncertainty and the genealogists better at supporting their arguments. Whether I'm right or not, or rather how fast this happens will be influenced significantly by the attitudes (i.e. willingness to get involved / share knowledge) of the best genealogists around. Linking to the original source is fine if the source is actually relevant. On Ancestry.com, for example, it is quite frequent for people to link to sources mentioning different people with the same name, or to link to sources which clearly do not prove the information to which they are linked. Such "documentation" is then often copied automatically by others. Stewart Baldwin