"Kerry Raymond" <kraymond@iprimus.com.au> wrote: >> But, I'd venture to suggest that out of any 100 genealogists at least >> 51% _still_ want a program to record their conclusions so they can >> print it out. This doesn't mean that 49% is insignificant, it just >> means it's the minority. > > I agree with the sentiment. I think your statistics are overly hopeful > though :-) When I look through the GEDs that people sent me, it is > very rare indeed to find any source information (I'd put it at less > than 5%). Obviously almost everyone has boxes and filing cabinets of > letters and certificates and so forth, so they do have source material > but rarely do they enter any of it into their software program of > choice. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. > > Firstly, most people think in terms of "facts" not "evidence and > conclusions and confidence levels" -- that's simply their world view. > So they don't see the importance of sources after the "facts have been > extracted from the sources". They are not professional researchers. > > Second, even if people think it is important to record sources, it can > be mighty tedious to do so, both in terms of the volume of data to be > entered and the fact that a lot of the software out there just doesn't > make it very easy (lots of clicks to get to the right screen, weird > data models, confusing screen layouts etc). So that's another reason > sources don't get added. > > I doubt the people in this newsgroup having this conversation are > representative of the broader genealogy community. A number of people > have mentioned their "day jobs" and it sounds to me like most of us > are university-educated and quite a number of us are IT professionals > and scientists (or at least reasonably well-informed about such > topics). While we clearly have some strong views on how genealogy > should be done and how the genealogy software should be built, we > constitute some tiny proportion of the market for genealogy software. > So if most people just want to record facts and print out trees, the > software will be built to support their "world view" not ours > (sadly!). > > Kerry > > > Amen. I, for one, have decided to only support efforts to clean this mess up by making "doing the right thing" (entering and passing on sources) as easy and as accurately as possible for the largest amount of people. I applaud FTM 2008 and Ancestry.com for doing just that, and am eagerly looking to see how quickly LDS and others follow suit. Praise the computer, and pass the records. :-)

On Sat, 19 Jan 2008 09:38:32 GMT, JD <jd4x4@<del.this>verizon.net> wrote: >I, for one, have decided to only support efforts to clean this mess up by >making "doing the right thing" (entering and passing on sources) as easy >and as accurately as possible for the largest amount of people. > >I applaud FTM 2008 and Ancestry.com for doing just that, and am eagerly >looking to see how quickly LDS and others follow suit. Presumably (hopefully?) FTM encourages users to actually check the Ancestry transcription rather than a click here source noted approach based on what Ancestry shows. I've lost count of how many times the wrong folio and page number is referenced by Ancestry as the source document for their English census transcriptions. -- Robert G. Eldridge Toronto NSW Australia http://www2.hunterlink.net.au/~ddrge/ Now researching ELDRIDGE families world wide 1000's at my Web site * Wanted * Any Eldridge related information