Return of GEDCOM Import

looks like Morgan Olivia Freisthler used the gedcom upload and has a few thousand duplicates...

Nicholas James Vetrovec I sent you a private message.

I notice that after several distressing incidents (I was involved with one of them), duplicated GEDCOM trees are now being tagged as "Duplicate" (which they should be) instead of "Fictional" (which most of the time they aren't).

My suspicion is that a lot of them sneaked by due to variations in naming, often unjustified ("middle names" that shouldn't exist, etc.). I don't know what can be done to prevent or limit this.

Private User - for a Gedcom import, according to what I have read, Geni doesn't do the first check for duplicates until after 5 generations have been imported - so possibly no need for them to have "sneaked by" -- plus, folks can choose to go ahead and import more, even if Geni does flag duplicates

More like 10 or 15 generations, Lois. I'm battling an extensive Bent(h)all GEDCOM that should NEVER have gotten past the 18th century.

On fictional and duplicate. This option is added recently so some trees are still marked as fictional and should be marked as duplicated. If something (trees or profiles) needs to marked duplicated please send a Curator a message.

It is the Curators that flag the duplicates. And Geni will do the rest.

Mary Elizabeth Skelton

She has added duplicates that have not been merged and she has added grandchildren (different generation) as children. Help please?

Goes with the above profile/gedcom upload

Hiram Robert Skelton, Jr.

John L. Holt, Jr

:'(

TONE Monsen
used a large gedcom file of almost 10,000 people. She didn't think about, how Geni works.

Tone and I have spent many hours for cleaning up after her...

My wish is that, it is not allowed to use gedcom anymore......

"I have translated with Google transate"

Gedcom was really helpful in putting al my data and profiles (about 40.000) on Geni. The problem is, for a gedcom-upload, you need to have a certain experience with Geni, or someone willing to help you along the way. But the people using the Gedcom-uploader are mostly new to the website.

I wish the Gedcom-uploader will remain. But I do think that a disclaimer, a mandatory guide or something, should be added. That an user who uses the Gedcom-uploader knows his/her responsibility and knows he/she has to do some clean-up work (merges etc.)

Mike Stangel -- another suggestion -- when folks click on GEDCOM in Research, in the write-up there, also provide them with information on SmartCopy and a suggestion of when it might be a better choice.

Good suggestion Lois.

Maarten, I like your idea too but I think the reinstatement of Gedcom Imports is a commercial decision to attract new users, so limiting it in anyway is likely to detract from that goal. Disclaimers simply don't work and there is a growing recognition in industry that people don't actually read the fine print.

Well Mike also stated users should only use GEDCOM imports for an initial import (when they do not have any profiles yet on Geni) and should not use it to update the tree. So telling them of an alternative can do no harm. May be there could be a link to https://www.geni.com/projects/Connecting-to-the-Big-Tree/17983.

Sarah Barbee
cross posting...

I saw this over in the Discussion on the Consistency Checker, from Job Waterreus - https://www.geni.com/discussions/203863?msg=1353604 - and it has information about GEDCOM imports that I do not believe I had seen before -- I thought Geni imported 5 generations, then looked to see if duplicates, but according to the comment, it looks before then and gives a choice to abort - do not know if that is new, or if I had it wrong, but am glad to see that --
plus some valuable Suggestions and Warnings for interacting with a Gedcom upload of someone else's:

"A GEDCOM import will import 5 generations max on first import and it will halt the import on any branch where duplicates are found and offer the user to abort the import on that branch.
BUT if someone does a merge the import will continue.

So it best to give the user some time to decide before doing any merges.
For a new user solving conflicts is not easy so they may need weeks or months to do it.

So it may be wise to contact the user and ask if duplicates should be merged, before doing any. That way a user can look at that branch and decide, before others do the merge that may not be wanted."

Private User,

I did some experimenting in August and found some problems. Mike did fix some of them and I did some testing of those changes, but did not do a full test, so what I've written above is based on the August testing. But as far as I know this is still a correct description on how it functions now.

Wishing a Happy New Year 2020 to all, I want to remind that there is practically NOT ANY Curator or Geni user in Finland, who would recommend GEDCOM. On the contrary, all Curators & users strongly critisize and advice against it.
I see only problems, which seem to remain to be solved by others than the importers themselves. Sometimes the conflicts can be unsolvable due to lack of source information,

Use of GEDCOM should be strongly restricted, or stopped totally.

I will support this: Use of GEDCOM should be strongly restricted, or stopped totally.

Import makes a lot of unnessesary works because many who are using Gedcom does not merge dublicates or fix dataconflicts. Many just leave everything when the imports are finished.
Today I have worked with three big imports with many wrong names and informations . All this takes time. The Family threes are mess-up.
The worst are americans with "strong" ("private") settings so it is impossible to merge or fix dataconflict.

This is something that Geni does not want to do (as I understand it).
I hope to convince them to add some more information on the GEDCOM page so that users understand what they have to do and know how to do it before starting any import.

Please keep in mind that the users who do an import are new to Geni and may import so many profiles that it can take them months to solve conflicts if they know how to fix them. So it may be better to point them to some helpful documentation and/or explain to them how to fix the problems they created.

A lot of users just start merging, but merging will allow the importer to continue importing on that branch even if the user who did the import does not want to import the whole branch. This means more conflicts to solve and more complains.

Please do not start merging without asking that user!

"A lot of users just start merging, but merging will allow the importer to continue importing on that branch even if the user who did the import does not want to import the whole branch. This means more conflicts to solve and more complains."

How many ordinary Geni users know this ? I did´t know and it seems that others doesn´t know. Users merges dublicats and fix data conflicts in their list of Collections.
It is not enough to add information about this on the Gedcom pages but also in "Introducing to Geni" and other places.
(New) users should not be alowed to do import before they know what they are doing.

Maybe Geni have got some new users because of Gedcom, but it seems that the activity among old users are reduced. They are tired of all new changes with import of Gedcom, Consistency Checker and the last change with contries names
Why not use the sources to fix filters to take away all incomprehensible suggestions about matching Norwegitians profils with Danish... The change historic does´t work... It is wery difficult to search for names/persons.
Fix old problems before making new.

Mike Stangel --- re: ""A GEDCOM import will import 5 generations max on first import and it will halt the import on any branch where duplicates are found and offer the user to abort the import on that branch.
BUT if someone does a merge the import will continue."
and the follow-up
"A lot of users just start merging, but merging will allow the importer to continue importing on that branch even if the user who did the import does not want to import the whole branch."
-- that seems the wrong way around --

if a merge is made, it seems to me that should trigger the system to STOP the importing on that branch, or, if it already had halted it because duplicates were found on that branch, to keep it stopped - either full stop, or if not that, then at least until and unless the importer, having been properly informed, requests the importing to continue.

Huge mess. 30 children.
Does anyone here WORK on these or is this NOT the place to put them?
John Matthew Peatross, Jr.

Cynthia Curtis, A183502, US7875087 there is no one "working" on the mess so there is no "correct" place to put them.
Importing, tidying and merging is the responsibility of the user doing it not anyone else. Sadly in some cases the amount of mess being created outweighs the ability or interest of the user doing the import, but it is not anyone else's responsibility to clean up after them.

I had a look at the link you posted, 21 children with one woman still seems extreme but not so hard to believe as 30. What I would do is look for primary evidence of each child in turn to prove or disprove that the belong to these parents. Document the evidence on each of the children's profiles and also have a running discussion from the father's profile summarising your findings. You'll either end up with 21 well documented profiles or a list of children that need to be disconnected.

Thank you Alex Moes. I check back here and look at the progress of the ones I have out here and for one, I went back and worked on them, another I saw someone actually sorted them all and MP'd a profile. I do like having a place to put things...you know, so that it is not just complaining or just leaving things in such a state...
Thank you for the suggestions.

Your welcome, I suppose I should clarify that last sentence for anyone following along or reading later; it should have read "... that can be disconnected due to a lack of evidence."

Another thing to be careful of with a couple birthing children over a 40 year time frame is that people maybe confusing different generations, given his name is John Jr and he himself has a son (at the moment) named John that means there is possibly 3 Johns in a row in the same geographical area having children. It may be very difficult to determine which children belong to which John, especially if records don't also name the mother.

17792 profils importet and still importing by new user from 29.2.19 .....

It this realy the meaning with Gedcom ??

Hmmmm.... My import of about 40.000 profiles was done in about 6 to 8 weeks. Did he really start with the import at that date?
If the started at a later date, then I don't see any problem, as long as he is giving his import aftercare (merges, data conflicts etc). After all, we all want the world tree to grow and have more data.

Sorry. I see now that it became wrong month. Should be 29. dec. (29.12) 2019. And the import is still in progress. Now there are over 22000 imported profils with a hug numbers of dublicates, three conflicts and dataconficts .