Dear Stewart >I decided to test this by checking out wikitree on a few of my immigrant ancestors, and saw no evidence of any convergence toward something acceptable. Well, to be scientific you should record a few pages, and come back in a few years? :) Everything you say is true, but nothing you say disagrees with anything I said. Also I never argued that you should feel obliged to work on a big wiki. They will exist and improve glacially. No one is arguing much more than that I hope. The people who do good work on Wikitree will in my opinion help genealogy though in their small way. An interesting question in practice is whether good editors can speed the glaciers up on a family they care about. Will a good editor who takes their time be reverted and unable to make improvements, even slowly? The good news, no miracle, is that the answer seems to be yes. I can point to families I have worked on which have improved and not been reverted. Other families will languish for a long time unfortunately. Any Magna Carta line is likely to be an island of sanity because there is a small core of good editors working on those for example. (If you wanted to play around you could pick a favorite family and try improving that?) The point about sourcing which says that it comes from an editor is ok in my opinion. Basically they've decided to say that you should state that this is the source. It makes it obvious work is needed. They are effectively saying "be honest". Anyway, there is absolutely no comparison in quality to the Henry project. And what's more things like the Henry project will fuel better editing on all bigger websites, and are incredibly valuable. Regards Andrew

On 6/18/2016 3:41 PM, Andrew Lancaster via wrote: > Any Magna Carta line is likely to be an island of sanity because there > is a small core of good editors working on those for example. (If you > wanted to play around you could pick a favorite family and try improving > that?) I have no doubt that these "islands of sanity" exist, but how is the novice who is trying to use the website supposed to know where these are? For the most part, these "islands of sanity" tend to be places where other sources are also going to give correct information. People are most likely to consult sources where they have difficulty finding good information, but it is exactly those places where wikis tend to be at their worst. One point I have been trying to make is that there is a MASSIVE amount of wasted effort here. If some of the profile managers spent more time doing carefully documented research in original records (on a small enough number of individuals that they did a thorough job) and less time making decisions as profile managers about pages involving research that they apparently have never even read, they might even end up creating some additional "islands of sanity" and also learn enough about genealogical research to make more sensible decisions as profile managers later on. 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