Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote: >On Sat, 18 Jun 2011 09:15:09 -0400, Bob LeChevalier <[email protected]> wrote: > >>Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote: >>>You see this list of trees that all have things like "10472 >>>individuals" - so which one is the original and which ones are the copies? >> >>Why would it matter? The data is the same. > >And the errors are the same and the unexplained sources are the same. > >And you need to find the first person who entered the data , rather than those >who just mindlessly copied and pasted it, which they made A sn B the parents >of C, rather than D and E, and what sources they used. In many cases, that first person is long gone. Rootsweb trees have been online since back in the 90s, and seldom is an email address still valid for that long.. Furthermore, most people simply don't keep records of their sources. That may be improving recently, but anyone who relies on tree data is best off assuming sources are unknown unless explicitly mentioned. >>>There is no point in trying to make contact with the "owner" of a tree that is >>>apparently exactly the same as five or six others if they have just copied the >>>whole thing and havent done the research. >> >>The obvious thing to do is to ASK them. The whole point of a >>social-network based genealogy system is to get people communicating, >>not just looking at other people's data and trying to read their mind >>to determine why they entered what they did before copying it. >>Ancestry has been trying to felicitate cooperative genealogy for >>years, not generally with much success. Older trees and those created >>solely by massive GEDCOM uploads (that frequently do not specify >>sources) will tend not to be designed for use by others. > >And that is precidely the thing that Mundia makes so difficult. If it made >that easier, I might take it more serriously. Ancestry usually assumes that the initial contact will be made through their privacy-screened connection service, and the parties can choose to exchange "real" email addresses in their screened exchanges. I don't know if Mundia has changed this paradigm. Rootsweb trees I believe allow connection service contacts, but they also often show the real email in a noisy picture. But again, that has seldom worked for me for any tree more than a year or two old. lojbab --- Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist [email protected] Lojban language www.lojban.org