Introducing the Geni Consistency Checker

Susanne Floyd
As I said, it does not happen all the time, but still quite often recently. With names it has happened during the last couple of weeks and now also with dates.
I think during my mentioning it earlier Job Waterreus confirmed, he had detected it as well.

Susanne, in these merges, there will remain no conflicts, as geni automatically chooses the info from one profile. and removes data from other profile. So, at the time of dropping one profile box onto another, when merging, everything will be completed. When refreshing one of the previous profiles, you do not get that comparison sheet anymore, just the notice on top 'that all the conflicts have been settled' (or something similar, don't remember the exact text by heart).
I know, in theory, most of the times it is possible to make both profiles look exactly similar and thereafter complete the merge. However, this is OK for users who merge 5-10 profiles. For more active users, who merge hundreds and thousands profiles, it would make everything basically twice as long, because you would have to correct 2 profiles, instead of just 1.
And all of them, which I have seen, have been average profiles, no master profiles whatsoever.

With dates, it's even worse. Quite often the profiles you merge, have slightly different birth years. Because you haven't found the birth record yet and other information is generally more indirect. In these circumstances, the old system was much better, the profile had inconsistency: 2 different birth years. Now geni removes one alternative birth date and leaves just one, which might be not correct.

And I repeat my message to the Geni team: You do not add or remove information just by guessing. Normal way is to do the research. And this is something the machines don't do.

You still get data conflicts some of the time, that makes it extra difficult.
If you are lucky you may be able to find both values for a field that did not raise a data conflict in the logging for the profile. So after a merge you now always have to check the log.

If anyone has a good example that happened in the last 2 days or so and had no profile updates after the merge, please sent me a private message and I will try to get Geni to investigate.

Randel Vuks, I guess I didn't understand the problem. I haven't seen what you noted, but I don't do a ton of merges. I am trying to tie on more now, but sometimes the names will be just different enough to be the same and not show in a search. Oh well, I get your point. There needs to be a way to ensure the correct data is there.

Luckily for me, I think perhaps some 25% of merges are with the profiles I manage myself. Because you take a branch and move along it further into the past, until you reach to some familiar profiles.
And now at least I know, that the data can get lost when merging, However, this just me (and a few others) knowing it, won't help much the rest of geni users and this (information getting lost) is a threat to the big tree.
Actually the problem is lack of communication. If for 10 years you always had to choose the correct set of information yourself, meaning most of the people are used to it; then now, when occasionally the system makes that choosing decision itself and removes the information from other profile, people just can't see, that some of the information got lost. Because no-one has informed them, that changes have have been made to the merging process.

Last week I found a profile where the father had a child when he was 11 years old, this Geni Consistency Checker did not flag it as an error, but in real life, for the human race, a male age 11 can not become a father, it's biologically impossible, (well, some extreme rare cases might be found in Guinness book of records but it is still not a good standard to use one case in billion).

At the other hand, it flags as an error, (read as something might be wrong) if a man older than +66 got a child at this age, this make me think that the checker is not fully gender separeted, as it more or less treats men and woman almost as one and the same, and/or, that the system is not well rooted in the human biology.

I don't ask your programmer to hire a doctor, but at least, do some basic research before entering the limiting parameters for such errors.

I can add another point, not biological. No idea about other regions, but when there was Russian Empire, then the military service lasted 25 years. And although some soldiers married during the time of their service (or sometimes first marriage was before the service), then as I have noticed a lot of such people created family only after the service, when they were already in their 50s. So, they were having children when they were 50, 60, 70 years old.

Another thing in the past was that as the majority of people were peasants, living in the countryside, it was a must to have a woman in your farm. So, the person was 60, 70, 80 years old, but he had to have a wife, to take care of the household and children. It was the question of survival. I would say, on average, when previous wife died, the next marriage usually took place within a few months or at least within a year. When you had small children or baby with your previous wife, you just had to marry again, to keep your children alive. That's the reason behind big age difference between spouses.

The inconsistency checker does take time to check profiles, so it could be a certain inconsistency is not flagged yet, because the profile is still in the queue for that inconsistency check.

The inconsistency checker will also flag profiles that COULD have a problem.
An inconsistency does not mean the profile has to be in error. That is why you can flag the profile to be correct.

Job Waterreus
No, the current system of consistency checker is such, that it works in normal manner only with possible problems with dates and age differences, where it asks you to go to that profile and check it.
However, with names it suggests to add some additional name with 'one click fix' and this is exactly how the majority of users react, they just add suggested name. I see it now almost every day.
If there is intention to keep the consistency checker for names, it should have similar principle: suggesting to go to the profile and check it.
The problem is that most of the suggestions are wrong. OK, maybe 1 is correct out of hundred or a few hundreds.
How can adding a mother's maiden name to a profile fix it (which is the suggestion half of the times)?

Randel Vuks,

Yes I share your objections to the non date checks.

@ Robert Lucious Ritter Under my profile its shows several inconsistency of profile that someone else manages . I am related to them but I don't manage them I made some corrections. On the ones I Manage..

Robert Lucious Ritter, You can choose the group for which the inconsistencies are shown (upper right on the screen, default is your relations), you can choose managed by me there, to see only inconsistencies of the profiles you manage.

All these 5000+ ladies:
https://www.geni.com/search?search_advanced=open&search_extende...=

Have Inconsistency that their one first name "Regina" shall be moved to the suffix field. - Please stop this one (forever please).

Please add solution to edit "Date Taken" of pictures uploaded to Geni:

Lennart Jõõts was tagged in a photo with a date prior to his birth date.
Tip: Click the photo below of Lennart Jõõts (born 02. märts 2007) and review the date or untag him.

Why I shall untag person if Camera's Date was set up incorrectly?!
Solution shall be - to correct date of the photo.

This is again one False Positive:
Astra Mattisen (Haamer) has a child with a different last name.
Tip: Go to the following profile to verify and update the last name.
Eveli Stahelstrauch

If you look these profiles:
Eveli Stachelstrauch
Private
then you see that Eveli is daughter of Astra and his partner -
Endel Stachelstrauch
so Eveli has father's surname AND SUCH INCONSISTENCY SHALL NEVER APPEAR!

Lauri Kreen, it is because Eveli and her father have different spelling - he has a “c” and she doesn’t.

Re "Please add solution to edit "Date Taken" of pictures uploaded to Geni:

I read "review the date" as review the date of the photo which is the same as "correct date of the photo" isn't it?

Thank you - Private User I see it now. But then Inconsistency Checker shall report it: Father and Daughter have different surnames. Currently user will compare Mother and Daughter only.

Photos. First solution shall be Correct the Date.
Review can mean different things and I expect that many users (who even don't know that family group members can edit such dates and other photo fields) will untag photos as first solution.

Re Name checking
From memory the name checking checks to see if the child shares a surname with either the mother or with the father and only reports it as an inconsistency if they don't have the same name as either of them. Job Waterreus, can probably confirm that. Again from memory it is because in some cultures a child can have their mothers name or their fathers name or some combination of both. To me, the error message is correct as there is a spelling error in either the fathers name or in the childs name.

Re Photo
To me the error message already tells them to review the date and personally I don't think that it is feasible to add the the functionality instructions (ie the how to do it) into the inconsistency messages.

Yes, it raises the inconsistency when the child has a name that is other than the name of the father and mother. It takes into account the also known as, but I'm not sure if it checks it on all three profiles (child, father and mother)

It seems it does not check the also known as for the father (see https://www.geni.com/inconsistencies/for_profile/6000000007862113864)

I can confirm that Inconsistency ignore function "Mark this correct for all users" is not working. I (as curator) marked 3 inconsistencies to be correct / ignored but profile manager confirms that all 3 are still displayed in red for him.

Also this one Generates lots of false positives:
"Too old parent"
Peep Hunt had 1 child between the ages of 64 and 69 years old.
Tip: Correct the birth date of Peep Hunt (born 29. märts 1940) or the following child: Heli Hunt

Nearly in each Estonian tree are some males who had their last child when they were 64-66 years old.
But there is no choice to confirm that both dates (birth of father and birth of child) are correct.
This famous writer and translator got his son (famous politic now) when he was 67: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain_Kaalep (son is like father's copy - no any doubt).

What I shall report to users asking help in this case? To make one birth year false up to 5 years?

Is somebody from Geni reading this tread at all?

If "the function "Mark this correct for all users" is not working" , as Lauri reports then I wasted many hours of my time. And undoubtedly so did many others.

Plus any encouragement it is giving people to falsify information is very bad.
And I am pretty sure we are not even told when people are untagged from a Timeline event. This is majorly not good for many of us.

Private User
I have only one confirmation. I marked 3 inconsistencies to be ignored in one tree and asked manager are the red ones gone now. He was even logging off and on again but for him as for manager nothing was ignored.

I found one problem more - about unknown titles, suffixes etc.
Users just deleting them (worst case) or moving them to Other names / About me (bad case) to get rid of inconsistencies.

The same is for Too Old or Too Young cases.
Users are moving dates away (to About me) to solve inconsistencies (until somebody re-adds them).

Like other features it would be good if there was some better documentation.
The language depended ones (like title and suffix) do not work well as long as the default tab cannot be set to another language.

I use the "Mark this correct for all users" pretty often for a variety of reasons such as "too young to bear children or inconsistent for some titles or suffixes" so this news is disconcerting. I don't see it, but that is foul if others still do.

I got a notice about an unknown suffix: SJ
Can it be added to the list please? It is language-independent and indicates that the person is (or was) a member of the (Catholic) Jesuit order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Jesus

This is most probably the wrong place to post this. My question is regarding the "how am I related" - which normally shows 1 the blood relationship and 2 the closest non-blood. So... I recently (in the last 6 months) discovered I am not my father's daughter. Make that bio daughter. He will always be my dad. I added my bio father, and since I did not want to remove my dad I had to select that he was my "adoptive" dad. close enough. So now when I go to see how i relate to people, the blood relationship is sometimes messed up. I would have expected it might confuse the shortest in-law relationship but it didn't. I wanted to report this since any path through an adopted parent is not a blood path.

for an example - Marsha Louise Wood
And if there is a better/more appropriate place to report this sort of thing, please direct me!