The Last of the Mohicans

Curators and PROs cannot affect private profiles as you know. If they appear to be "fake" or "claimed historical profiles" they can be reported by any user under the Actions Menu (upper right hand of a profile). It goes to Customer Care for their action.

N.B. The public tree can certainly be worked with and frankly that's where I'd focus my efforts. :)

Erica Howton
It's my understanding that by tagging the six profiles here the managers of profiles will all receive notifications that they are involved with a discussion.
I can't be bothered sending a PM to every manager so this seemed like a bit of a short cut, if nothing eventuates c'est la vie. It all came from Ken's mention of the Last of the Mohicans in another discussion.

Perhaps i'll write an email to DDL's agent and invite him to join Geni to sort the mess out himself! :)

Yes I followed the train of thought. It will be interesting to see if tagging works.

Well you would know better than I how active the managers are, some may have notifications disabled, some may have Geni tagged as Spam in their inbox, others may no longer check that particular email.
Statistically speaking one is probably dead by now :(
Ties back in nicely to the abandoned profiles theme!

If you want to draw a manager's attention through tagging, it's best to tag the manager, not the profile they manage.

If the manager isn't visible for you due to a profile being private, you can get the manager's name by clicking on the PM link, after which you can search for them. That assumes you're willing to put in the extra effort and that their name isn't something generic. You can also find manager names to tag by looking at the tree matches: http://www.geni.com/search/matches/6000000009352302187

Anyway: I made one of the profiles public and did some merging to turn Daniel Day-Lewis into the MP. The remaining profiles -- the ones seen on the tree matches link above -- are managed by close relatives and should therefore be left alone out of respect for the family's privacy.

Is it possible for a MP to be private?

Nope.

I suspected not.
The family could still connect to the MP and set all surrounding profiles to private.
Just a hypothetical question, i'm not suggesting they have to.

And why would tagging the manager work better than tagging the profile? Different notification levels?

We have MP's surrounded by private profiles, even user profiles, already.
Having a "famous" relative does not necessary mean that we should show the complete family.

Notifications depends: I have disabled email notifications from discussions, meaning that if a profile I am the manager of get tagged in a discussion the only thing that happens is that I automatically follow the discussion and it get listed as an unread subject in the followed discussions list.

If someone tag me personally in a discussion I get an email about it.

Okay, so tagging the manager would likely be more effective as it triggers an email as opposed to just a Geni based notification. Simple.

Alex, something you'll see periodically is a note on an MP saying that it's a "parallel public tree" (or something similar to that). That generally means that the family is not interested in merging into the MP, so we've intentionally duplicated a few profiles to build around it.

I did that with one of the Olympics Profiles of the Day, for example, because we wanted to feature the athlete but her family wanted to retain their privacy and not merge. So I created a small number of duplicates and then put a "please don't submit merge requests" note on the profiles. It worked out perfectly for everyone, and a few duplicates were worth it to meet the needs of both the family, who didn't want to merge in, and the wider userbase, who wanted to find a connection to a famous Olympian. We have a few curators who object to this practice because they don't want any duplicates made for any reason, but I think the majority are fine with the practice I described, and I know that I'm far from the only one doing it, though I do try to do it only rarely.

In my experience, I don't need to contact family members directly (and I probably wouldn't do that anyway). They usually notice when a parallel tree/profile is being built because they get tree match notifications, and then they send a message either to say "great, keep up the good work" (as happened with the Olympian) or "okay, but please keep some profiles private." My experience has been that family members are generally enthusiastic, as long as you're respectful and not too stalker-ish. :)

Another thing: Sometimes when I'm working on profiles of notable people, I'll find that they themselves have claimed profiles. In those cases, I keep it to myself and also remove the tree match to help them keep their privacy. I think there was someone at some point who was keeping a list of famous claimed profiles he'd found on Geni, but I'm pretty uncomfortable with that.

I have a famous great-grandfather but have deliberately not built his tree on Geni because I value my privacy (and his) in that regard. I try to keep that in mind when working -- am I doing something to someone else's family that would make me uncomfortable if someone did it to mine? We have other curators with famous immediate family members who have different approaches -- some do parallel public vs. private trees, and some put everything out there publicly. Again, everyone's different. But I usually err on the side of caution when working on Geni.

Ashley,
I'd like to ask a question regarding this duplication of Famous people's profiles.
What i don't understand is that by setting up these special circumstances for famous people there is an implication that the privacy settings of Geni are not sufficient to protect the families of Famous people. This then calls into question the amount of privacy that Normal people have.
For example whilst i myself am not by any stretch of the imagination famous i might be considered infamous (at least on this forum :)
My mother (who is no longer with us) has an MP profile, my father (who was still here last time i checked) has a private profile. My paternal grandparents (both deceased) are public profiles but not MPs.
With all that in mind, how are my father's private details (nothing more than name, dob and current location) jepordised by my mother being a MP?
If the answer is that they are not (surely that is the answer!) then how would the privacy of the family of a Famous person be jepordised by that Famous person being a MP? All that has to be done is making all the profiles surround the famous person private.
Specifically in regard to DDL the public profile that i listed for him was quite well presented and had a huge chunk of his wikipedia page reproduced in the About Me.
Googling my name or looking for me in wikipedia will not bring up any information on me or my family so surely the issue is actually reversed in that Geni should be more concerned with protecting the privacy of everyday users rather than people who's personal details are readily available in dozens of places?
I've looked now at the MP and notice that DDL has two 1/2 brothers and that his wife also has step siblings, which isn't something that showed up in wikipedia. All these profiles are public so i'm not sure how the immediate family's privacy is "protected".

PS: I've change DDLs sister's display name to include her middle name as that's the name she publishes under.

Alex, I can hear what you're saying. I think that the issue when it comes to famous people is really one of respect more than any actual security issues. If the /family/ feels -- even perhaps incorrectly -- that their privacy is being invaded, especially for living relatives, then making a small, separate line just a kind thing to do, in my view. Does that make sense?

The view of Geni is that everyone is entitled to having a private tree. If a family does not want to merge into the Big Tree, but we want to feature a famous member of that family, this is basically the only option. So it's not an ideal situation, but it works.

Also, what's public in records and what's public on Wikipedia often differs. So that's another thing we have to balance -- and many Geni users believe that if you exist in a public record somewhere (which we all do), then you're fair game for inclusion on Geni. (Definitely not saying I'm in that bunch.) So here, a user probably found records -- admittedly, none cited -- for people that Daniel Day-Lewis doesn't discuss much. But they're not claimed profiles, and the family attached to the other profiles in that area hasn't made any private profiles for those people, so I'm inclined to leave them as is. Obviously, the family isn't looking to protect their privacy much, even if they aren't actively publicizing those relatives.

For me, I often come back to: We can only do so much. You're right -- the way the system is set up, the names of living but private profiles are still going to be visible on the MP. But it's not something I can spend a lot of energy on worrying about. I leave it to others with more time and interest. :)

It's been a very long day and my brain's not all together, so I'm not sure if I'm fully answering your question (or even making sense), but I hope I'm on the right track?

LOL, Thanks for the reply Ashley, i have no idea how relavent it is to my question, in fact i forgot what my question was 1/2 way thru typing my own text. Too many balls in the air today!