Identifying locked profiles

That's helpful feedback, Annelise, thank you.

We have a few "all curator" projects but as with eveything - it's voluntary work.

This is a guide:

http://www.geni.com/projects/Geni-Curator-Projects-Guide/2728

This is the "outside" Wiki listing:

http://wiki.geni.com/index.php/Curators

I show 126 curators.

Annelise,

Again, it's only my personal opinion but I don't believe there are ANY curators who want only closed door communication. It would make no sense. The only reason curators have the few extra powers they have is because Geni believes they will use those powers to help users.

That doesn't mean that every user is going to agree with every decision by a curator, but it does mean that overall if a curator is not responding to user concerns, he or she is not doing the job.

I think you have the right idea. If you don't know why a profile is locked, the best thing to do is contact the curator. If you want a curator to start adding explanations, contact that curator and ask.

I concur with Justin that the Locked Profiles project is a good place to bring these examples up and we should get it out in public. http://www.geni.com/projects/Locked-profiles/109

I can tell you that it's very frustrating to spend a day researching a family, merging and cleaning up and documenting the profiles, getting rid of spurious spouses and children and then have someone come in and change it to match an incorrect tree on the Internet. Or merge two children with the same name or two wives who are cousins with very similar names. Or worse yet, get many generations mixed up because all the men are named "Samuel"! There are good reasons to lock profiles or fields. But I do agree with you that it's reasonable to ask curators to document why they are locked. Sometimes when a curator has a lot of MPs, they do the documentation on the new ones or the ones they touch again, but not retroactively.

If only all curators where familiar enough with our Dutch topografical aspects it would be NO problem is they lock fields that are non-discussable. But unfortunately a lot of them do not know about ALL the little towns and regions of this big, big world. So, please let the fine-tuning be done by geni-users who know where they write about and not by profile-collecting volunteers... Even curators who speak or read Dutch, but are not born of elevated in our country make mistakes in this area! Sometime the managers themselve can corrigate the best way, if only all curatores had the courage to communicate more and better. And if we look at all the work done for the projects about NEW AMSTERDAM that are in damage already by bad merges or managers who insist in given them names and birth/death-places that even not exist in our country, you would hope some day there will be a good DUTCH-label instead of a MP.

Jeannette, my fellow ginger, I don't think we'll ever be able to find any curator who knows the details of every single village of their home country or region. If that became a requirement, we'd have no curators at all. Just the same, we can't know the details of every single family tree we work on, but we do our best with the information that is available. That's all anyone can ever do in genealogy.

If you find an error, please simply report it to the curator in question so that (s)he can fix it. I know you say you want curators to communicate more and better, but the same has to be expected of users as well. Communication works both ways, so please use your own courage -- which I know you have plenty of! :) --- and speak up to curators directly when you find an issue. We don't want to be in a situation where people are posting abstractly on the discussion boards about problems but not communicating the specifics directly to the curators in question. We need everyone's help in keeping things working well.