On Thursday, June 16, 2016 at 9:10:13 AM UTC-7, Andrew Lancaster via wrote: > (With full respect to MEDLANDS, I do think it is wrongly understood by > many people, and used as a fixed point when it is actually a work in > progress. The entire internet is a work in progress, but putting something out there is also 'publishing' it, in this case, publishing it under the auspices of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy, which gives the false impression that some sort of editing or fact-checking is taking place or at least that the material has been formally approved by the Foundation. (Many of the citations to Medieval Lands on Wikipedia used to credit it to FMG alone, not even naming Cawley.) There is nothing on your average page view that gives anyone the impression that it is anything but fully elaborated and confirmed genealogy, rather than some kind of preliminary compilation. It is no wonder many people misunderstand it. taf

On 6/17/2016 10:35 AM, taf via wrote: > On Thursday, June 16, 2016 at 9:10:13 AM UTC-7, Andrew Lancaster via wrote: > >> (With full respect to MEDLANDS, I do think it is wrongly understood by >> many people, and used as a fixed point when it is actually a work in >> progress. > The entire internet is a work in progress, but putting something out there is also 'publishing' it, in this case, publishing it under the auspices of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy, which gives the false impression that some sort of editing or fact-checking is taking place or at least that the material has been formally approved by the Foundation. (Many of the citations to Medieval Lands on Wikipedia used to credit it to FMG alone, not even naming Cawley.) There is nothing on your average page view that gives anyone the impression that it is anything but fully elaborated and confirmed genealogy, rather than some kind of preliminary compilation. It is no wonder many people misunderstand it. In addition, the descriptions of the project appearing on the Medieval Lands site itself (abbreviated "ML" here for convenience) seem to actively encourage this type of misunderstanding. In the following comments, quotes preceded by "MLH:" are from the ML Home page and those indicated by "MLI:" are from the ML Inroduction page. MLH: "The approach is to verify information against primary source material, quoting relevant extracts in the original language." In fact, many of the "quotes" appearing in ML are just snippets of Latin which have been inserted (often ungrammatically) into English sentences in a way which obscures or eliminates their original context, and far too often misinterpreting the original statement. MLH: "This has enabled many traditionally accepted relationships to be challenged." Is this really true? If so, it would be interesting to see examples. In reference to the frequent copy-pastes of material from ML appearing on other sites, MLH states: "Please be aware that such unauthorised copies are not updated and may therefore be factually incomplete or inaccurate." I'm not defending the common unauthorized large scale copy-pasting of material by others into their websites, which is a form of plagiarism used only by rank amateurs (of which the "Henry Project" has also been a target), but wouldn't the "factually incomplete or inaccurate" comment also apply to the source from which the material was copy-pasted? MLI: "In this work, the families of rulers and nobility in more than 180 geographical and political entities in medieval Europe, North Africa and western Asia are being reconstructed from scratch. Outline tables on royal and noble families presented in published secondary works, such as the Europäische Stammtafeln series, have provided the basic informational framework into which data from primary sources has been incorporated." Here, we have two mutually contradictory statements about the methodology. If "outline tables" from secondary sources are being used as a framework, then the families are not being reconstructed from scratch. MLI: "The ultimate objective is to verify and correct all secondary source data against primary source material and supplement it with accurate historical background information. The project is on-going, but the eventual result will be a complete encyclopaedia of accurate and reliable historical information which will benefit all medieval historians, professional and amateur." This statement at least contains a rather weak acknowledgement that the project is not complete, but still attempts to portray it as leading to a "complete encyclopaedia of accurate and reliable historical information" without any acknowledgement that the project has in fact introduced many inaccuracies which were not present before it started. MLI (following a heading entitled "New Approach"): "Medieval Lands represents a new approach to the presentation of royal and noble families, and the historical context in which they lived. Most existing published works in the field have two important drawbacks. Firstly, the information, even if complete, is usually limited to dates and outline relationships. Secondly, information is copied from previously published secondary works without adequate verification against primary sources: connections which started life as speculative have been transformed into apparent certainty and errors perpetuated." These statements are misleading in more ways than one. Of course, there are a lot of sources out there which have the drawbacks mentioned in this quote, but the careful verification of genealogical and historical information against primary sources had been around for a long time before Mr. Cawley started his work, at least among the more qualified genealogists and historians, so the claim that this is a "new approach" is troubling. Is the insinuation that this approach is "new" some sort of claim to be THE authority in the field, or was Mr. Cawley simply unaware of the large amount of high-quality scholarship in the field (admittedly often hard to notice among the mass of lesser material)? Also, ML has exactly the same problems as those which were criticized in the above quote. In addition to outright misinterpretations, there are far too many places where unreliable "primary" sources have been quoted, and the almost complete lack of reference to the scholarly literature is not a virtue. MLI: "Medieval Lands aims to present full background material and arguments to explain the basis for postulating relationships. Where a connection is doubtful, the reasoning is discussed in the context of the available source material. Doubtful connections are shown in square brackets." Yet another misleading statement that encourages misinterpretation. Many doubtful claims are not discussed at all, and discussions that do appear are often insufficient. For a source whose goal is to lead individuals to correct information, conventions such as putting doubtful connections in brackets are insufficient without further discussion of the problem. Those who are not aware of the meaning of material in brackets will often misinterpret the reference, and those that are will assume that the absence of brackets means that the information is correct (and there are far too many errors for this assumption to be correct). MLI: "It must be emphasised that many areas still remain to be checked as the research is still incomplete. When consulting the documents, it should be assumed that any information which does not include references to primary source material falls into this category and should therefore be treated with the appropriate caution. One further point is important to emphasise: what Medieval Lands provides is a record that "source X" says "Y". The project is not necessarily taking the next step of concluding that "Y" is therefore factually correct. Given the nature of the sources with which we are dealing in the medieval period, and the various different purposes for which those sources were compiled, the drawing of such conclusions would not always be appropriate." Finally, toward the end of an Introduction which most users are never going to read in full, a few caveats are given. However, it still invites the user to believe that if a reference to a primary source has been included, then the information is correct. It seems to me that both ML and the wiki procedure fall within a flawed methodology which is used by far too many amateur genealogists. What happens is that what is essentially "scratch paper" containing various tidbits about a family is assembled, gradually becoming a "rough draft" which then evolves into what the author believes to be a "finished product." If the author eventually checks each individual "fact" carefully against good primary sources, then this can turn out OK, as long as the original "scratch paper" outline did not contain errors that are easily overlooked (such as the misidentification of individuals). Virtually all genealogists use "scratch paper" (or a digital equivalent) of some sort, but the most proficient ones know that the best approach in making a "rough draft" is to try to avoid errors in the first place, rather than starting with a rough draft full of errors and then trying to remove them all. Of course, the least competent never bother with any kind of fact-checking or documentation, and copy from each other indiscriminantly. The digital sharing of databases and automatic merges have made this even worse, but this is not all of the problem. A large part of the collective genealogical mess is contributed by very intelligent individuals who would make very good (or even outstanding) genealogists if they just bothered to educate themselves on the basics (or realized that they needed to educate themselves), and limited their research to manageable projects. Many such enthusiasts are unaware of the extent to which much of the available material is in fact "scratch paper" disguised as finished product, and help to perpetuate this material, and many of them who might otherwise contribute something useful fall into the lure of having a "large database" which spreads their talents too thin to provide much of use on the difficult earlier periods. That, in my opinion, is the problem with Medieval Lands and with the wikis I have seen. Stewart Baldwin