dupliciate family trees

Hrm,

Some of these are very prominent rabbanim of Chabad Lubavitch. I would presume we would find quite a few profiles of them.. If we can't get everyone to agree on using the English/Latin alphabet, then use display names or nicknames.

I would even request to Geni to allow names to be stored in multiple languages for this exact reason.

Handle this the best way for you to understand. Personally, I prefer that it is followed through in English.
If these people are not blood related to me, I'm not interested. If they are blood related, then I want to know all there is to know about them.

Shalom all,
the "convention" in the shared parts of the historical tree, is to use the NATIVE language of the person. When this is NOT English, then to please use BOTH languages. Here are some examples:
Adam of Eden, Noah .
Maimonides "Rambam", Theodor Herzl, Father of modern political Zionism and Rabbi Aryeh Levin

The whole idea of Geni, is in the end, to have a single combined tree, in which there is only one profile per actual person. So sooner or later, all duplicate copies of historical profiles WILL be merged.

I am a Geni Curator ( http://www.geni.com/discussions/6000000009728208335 ), so, please, if you have any issues with the shared parts of the Jewish Tree, feel free to send me a message, and I'll see what can be done.

I agree with Shmuel. The Tree is international and part of it the Jewish Tree. The reality is that globally (however unfortunate), most Jews do not read Hebrew - and if we use ONLY Hebrew fonts, they would not be able to follow the rabbinical lineage and their history.

The names should therefore be both in Latin and in Hebrew fonts. I would also recommend that the "About Me" section of the prominent Rabbis would not be only in Hebrew, and whenever possible include an English section as well (or at least an appropriate URL). This would be very educational.

I try to go back and add the Hebrew names (in Hebrew fonts) to all Jewish public figures (including Rabbis of my extended family) that I manage.

Yigal and Shmuel,

As a Jew who has quite almost but not entirely forgotten my Hebrew school lessons, I appreciate the dual language approach taken to the Jewish tree.

Geni profiles are helping me learn about the prominent rabbis, and please keep building it out. I have concluded that my own ancestry is from one of their descendants who didn't follow the "family business," and one day, we'll be able to make the connection.

I have had a discussion with Erica about standards, and this discussion extends the need for standards. If Geni committed itself to using a standard like the ones being built by Open Gen or the one I started work on, XGenML, it would be great. Then each person looking a the tree would see it in the language in which he/she feels most comfortable. This problem is great in Jewish genealogy because aside from having the names translated to different languages, we have names used that are acronyms (Rashi, Rambam), names of their works (Chinuch, Orech hashulchan), names having to do with where they lived (the Vilna Gaon, the maggid of Mezrich), nicknames (the Baal Shem Tov), etc. as well as the given name + surname combination.

Then Erica could see it in English and Shmuel or I could see it in Hebrew, and a Japanese reader could read it in Japanese.

I welcome anyone who wishes to join in the work of creating the standard and if anyone (maybe a curator like Shmuel has more influence) can convince Geni to commit to using the standard, that would be great. If many genealogy programs used the standard, information would become easily transferable from program to program. The same is true about getting other organizations such as JewishGen to commit to using the standard once completed.

Gedcom is now being used as a stand-in for a standard, but it does not do most of what a modern XML standard should do.

I have had great grief in my own family tree in this regard in adding information re the family of the Maharal (Rabbi Yehuda Loew of Prague), where so many contributors and managers add the same people doubly and triply and more using different names, and requiring way too much work to fix all the problems.

To see the extent of the problem as it is in Geni, see how many times Rashi is entered and how many daughters he has in Geni.

Disclosure: I work in creating the standard (and have worked on other standards such as XBRL), but have no connection to any genealogical program.

Gedcom 6.0 is XML and Geni had option for that for a while.

When it comes to language depended names it is as far as I understand promised already as part of the further internationalization of Geni.

Hi Bjorn,

Yes, Gedcom 6.0 (i have a copy of the draft standard is XML, but development of that has ceased and we have people associated with the Church of Latter Day Saints who will be working with us in developing the Open Gen standard.

As far as Geni`s promises of internationalization, it seems to me that most of that is still far away, further than the development of a standard. As I see it, use of the standard will make internationalization as well as many other improvements, promised and not yet promised, much easier to fulfil. I admit that I am an evangelist for standards in general and a standard for genealogical information in particular, but I think my commitment is justified.