John I "Lackaland" of England (1166-1216)

Bridget - you can set your tree view preferences so that all you see are direct ancestors.

May I take a moment to remind those of you who mention sources, to PLEASE add the sources to profile? Adding sources and documents can prevent incorrect merges. Even a brief statement that "so-and-so was born in place and date" is better than an empty Overview tab. If you have a link or a document, all the better. If you need help adding a link or document, ask!

Fay,
no hijack is correct - without my permission merges was done on my tree.
When asking Geni help I was told that a numer of curators had got permission to do so.

So my only option was to cooperate - which I have done. Lots of merges every day, as many corections of tree as possible. I also try to follow the name standards, when I am the manager or have data conflicts.

But the case is in all these merges that are done, lots of faults are introduced. With the MP not locked it is a difficult task to keep a clean tree.

I do not think that the currators do a bad job but what I say that with the number of people that are working in the tree they have an impossible job unless they start to lock MP:s .

Knut, Sylvia and Bridget, I understand your concerns. However, I hope that you have kept another copy of your own well-researched tree on your personal computer. That is not the purpose of Geni. As a collaborative project, Geni allows you to contribute your trees to the project, and *any* of us (curator or not) who are connected to the "big tree" can be involved in merging all of the various versions of each ancestor into one single master profile. Certainly, I can tell you from experience, that the profiles which are the best researched (that is, which include the research information and sources) and also which contain the most specific details, such as full birth and death dates, full locations, and so on, are the ones that rise to the top and become the preferred information. The vague information gets swallowed up by the most specific and best documented information.

This process was going on long before we had curators, but it became rather chaotic with hundreds of versions of profiles of each person (in some cases) floating around in "Geni space". And so just over two months ago, Geni introduced the curator concept to try to put some order into this chaos. Those of us selected to be curators were given extra tools (powers) to merge and edit so that we could most efficiently put some order on the unruly mess. And so we are all in the middle of that process. While you're cleaning up, it takes time and it happens in phases.

So please be patient with the process. In the end, the best-researched information will prevail, and we will all have a collaboratively-built family tree that is richer and fuller than anything any one of us could have built ourselves. And every one of us, from brand new users to experienced curators, is making that happen.

Thanks for starting this discussion Gene. He's another of my X great grandfathers (19th) supposedly. My great aunt and grandmother found a lot of these connections to British and French royalty as long as a century ago, so I'll be interested in which ones hold up and which do not.

On the subject of “Curators” –
I think that they are a very bad idea, as I have observed that they cannot be relied upon to manage the work correctly.
I have pointed out mistakes but nothing has been done.

Merging
The merging of profiles is being done as it should by checking that all the information contained within one profile is the same as another.
I find that I am being cistantl requested to merge only to find that the other profile has an incorrect merger.

I would like to see a sytem where the profiles we create for our tree remain unchanged until we agree with the change presented. In this way we will retain our trees as we know them and they will only change if we say so.
As to the world tree – geni can copy our information and merg it with others but they should still leave us the opt-out option,

Reg, that's what Geni had. Doesn't work when managers set up a tree and then never log in again. The tree is an absolute mess. Curators (me included) are trying to clean it up.

If you want to rely on a curator to do all the work, that's not going to happen. We just have extra rights to help everyone clean up.

Merging - the other profile has an incorrect manager? I don't understand. How can a manager be incorrect?

I don't see any mistakes that you've pointed out in this project. If you find one and need help with it, let me know and I'll assist.

Knocking curators for the sake of knocking curators doesn't make sense. We're just Geni users like you are. You don't know me, but you think that the fact that I have extra rights is very bad and that I don't help with mistakes. That's a sterotype.

I'm grateful that there are curators. However I do see the downside of curators in that they can approve pending merges without having the responsibility of cleaning up the mess that results. I have found however that the curators are more than happy to jump in and use their expertise in Geni to clean up profiles, to make them master profiles where it makes sense, and to take any and all well-founded requests and suggestions for fixes to the profiles.

Personally, I don't have the time or the expertise to clean up all the messes from the many duplicate profiles, some with incorrect and incomplete information, for my famous ancestors. The further back you go, the more of these there are. I'm very happy to collaborate with the curators.

Hatte, I agree. We would never have been able to untangle the problems without the curators. Mary

I think most of the curators are responsible people - without I doubt I trust most of them - and they seem to be doing a wonderful job - after my one disaster of a colloboator of just one person on my - one line i have great respect for the ones i have choosen to colloborate with and sometimes when i am in doubt I check or ask the two people (one is now a curator) who diligently helped me those 4 months in trying to help clean up my line and back out of the merges per geni reps every blue dot, yellow triangle and these offending greene dots with x's (some result in inter-marriages I have alot of 2'x because my greene county Indiana lines loved to marry into each other - They are spending countless hours backing out of or tryign to fix very bad merges by all Geni users - one bad merge avalanches into many if not corrected immediately - I sympathize with each of these curators - and what they are tyring to do - - at least its alot better than when I entered into this over about year ago - and then immediately got a request to join a family group which turned out to be a night mare - allowing only one person into my tree created enourmous amoutn of bad merges within 1 week which took four months to correct and back out of almost on a 24/7 basis - - I thank the curators for their efforts - - there may be only one I have true doubts about and would not fully trust.

bridget - ' I don't rely on anyone's information but my own." where do you get your information? from Ancestry, from county histories, from published genealogies, from indexes etc. from others who send you data???? It is all someone elses work unless you send and buy every will, birth, death and marriage certificate and yet these documents are other peoles work and information - - Too rely only you information and no one else's is sad thought - - you sure don't get far in genealogy with that opinion

Gene keep up the good work - not reviewed this line as yet - but i am sure you are putting your best foot forward -

Reg, I'm sure all curators are interested in making things right. But there's so much stuff to put right, and so few hours in the day. If you have a specific profile that should be other than what it is, and have the documentation of what it should be, do drop a note (here, in mail to me, or to any other curator), and we'll see what can be done.

(but do remember that we're all volunteers ... I write this from Beijing, 5 hours after coming off a transpacific flight, looking forward to a long week of meetings... instant response is NOT to be expected....)

Harald,
that was my point. You will see 1000+ merges. Few totally right, most correct but with the wrong name stanard, some totally or partly wrong. You will have to go back to the profile 1000+ times.

So in order to utilise the curator time better:
1.Fix the MP so that they are correct (Names,data, parents, spouses, children etc)
2. Lock the MP
3. provide a MP merge, where all the data and connections will be accoring to the MP.
4. Spend the curator time with fixing more MP

Knut,

It depends on what part of the tree you're talking about. In fact some curators operate in exactly that fashion.

In my area, Colonial America, it is not an efficient way to use my time. I have a large volume of users with many new ones joining daily, building their family trees focused on one major milestone: the first immigrant to America. So I have judged it more important that I provide them a "quick reference" in marking the Master Profile than researching utter correctness personally. Let the user do that.

We've provided additional user tools for correcting data in the Project tool.

Knut, please provide links to profiles that trouble you. We have a "need curator assistance" discussion that curators check daily, sometimes multiple curators multiple times a day. Harald has offered carte blanche for you to geni mail him directly. Start a discussion from the profile itself so the profile collaborators see the problem.

Hope this helps.

Dear Knut

I believe that you are exactly right in your interpretation of the present state of affairs for Geni.

It is difficult to make the Master Profile perfect. This problem occurs more frequently when the ancestors lived more than 200 years ago. Records were not always correct and records were often lost to fire, mold, storms or lack of space to store them.

The small errors are always present. Often, the records do not agree on dates and places. Sometimes the children get mixed up simply because there were so many children. Editing such errors is time consuming. It
requires a lot of patience and persistence to make changes.

It is definitely helping to have Master Profiles that are as accurate as humanly possible. I agree that Curators need to focus on the Master Profiles as a way to improve the accuracy of Geni.

Ethel Johanna Myers

With this part of the tree, there are MP's. John I "Lackland", King of England is an MP. But, there are 300 copies of the same person! We just have to keep merging. Once we get it clean, it will be easier to maintain.

We have a project for the Plantagents. Who wants to help clean them up? http://www.geni.com/projects/Plantagenets

Brendan,
my point is that you never will get it clean!
You say that you today have 300 copies.
In Sweden there are estimates that 200-300000 persons are relatives to the Vasa kings. That will make all of them related to John i Plantagenet.
In other parts of Europe you probably have the same. So let' s say there are between 3.000.000 to 10.000.000 persons that are related to him.
Now not all are are part o Geni and some might merge on a lower level - but still there will be contant never ending massive flow of merges into his profile.

So the only way to keep it clean is to lock it!

Six degrees of separation.....

"So the only way to keep it clean is to lock it!"

Ah, but what is *it*? Yes, we can have a profile clean by not doing any more merges. But, if you don't lock the parents, John would have 3,000,000 brothers named John. OK, easy enough. You lock the parents. But, you can't stop there. To have a perfect clean tree, you have to lock every profile in the big tree. OK, so now what? Geni will still have 3,000,000 copies of John, but the big tree will be clean. Geni will be a disaster, but the big tree will be clean. You'd never be able to search for anyone. So, the answer is clear. Don't allow any new profiles. Yea, that would work. But, it goes against all logic and Geni's business plan.

I agree that it's a never ending battle. The Geni engineers have developed some great tools and they haven't stopped. I can see Geni getting to the point that if you try to create a profile for John Plantagent, Geni will realize that it's a duplicate and you will get prompted to merge into the big tree before you end up duplicating 100 profiles and wasting your time.

I haven't really been part of this discussion, but I do want to mention (as a descendant of Lackland) that when you go back this far, pretty much everybody of any European ancestry is a descendant. The distinction come not from the ancestry but from the ability to document it (more or less -- as a Harvard lecturer once said to me, 'Genealogy depends on multiple generations of women not lying to their husbands.'). Perhaps sites like this will make ancestral snobbery obsolete. That would be good.

I haven't really been part of this discussion, but I do want to mention (as a descendant of Lackland) that when you go back this far, pretty much everybody of any European ancestry is a descendant. The distinction come not from the ancestry but from the ability to document it (more or less -- as a Harvard lecturer once said to me, 'Genealogy depends on multiple generations of women not lying to their husbands.'). Perhaps sites like this will make ancestral snobbery obsolete. That would be good.

Knut and Brendan

Maybe the Master Profiles could be duplicated so that one set would be kept in a special tree of Locked Master Profiles that are as accurate as humanly possible.

Thus there would be a protected tree that could not be changed unless some vital new information was found. (Special rules for changing with permission of expert genealogist.)

The second tree would be available for connection as related people add a
person to their tree. The merging problems would still be present, but the
carefully worked out Master Profile would be protected.

Ethel

Knut and Brendan

Maybe the Master Profiles could be duplicated so that one set would be kept in a special tree of Locked Master Profiles that are as accurate as humanly possible.

Thus there would be a protected tree that could not be changed unless some vital new information was found. (Special rules for changing with permission of expert genealogist.)

The second tree would be available for connection as related people add a
person to their tree. The merging problems would still be present, but the
carefully worked out Master Profile would be protected.

Ethel

Knut and Brendan

Maybe the Master Profiles could be duplicated so that one set would be kept in a special tree of Locked Master Profiles that are as accurate as humanly possible.

Thus there would be a protected tree that could not be changed unless some vital new information was found. (Special rules for changing with permission of expert genealogist.)

The second tree would be available for connection as related people add a
person to their tree. The merging problems would still be present, but the
carefully worked out Master Profile would be protected.

Ethel

Knut and Brendan

Maybe the Master Profiles could be duplicated so that one set would be kept in a special tree of Locked Master Profiles that are as accurate as humanly possible.

Thus there would be a protected tree that could not be changed unless some vital new information was found. (Special rules for changing with permission of expert genealogist.)

The second tree would be available for connection as related people add a
person to their tree. The merging problems would still be present, but the
carefully worked out Master Profile would be protected.

Ethel

Knut and Brendan

Maybe the Master Profiles could be duplicated so that one set would be kept in a special tree of Locked Master Profiles that are as accurate as humanly possible.

Thus there would be a protected tree that could not be changed unless some vital new information was found. (Special rules for changing with permission of expert genealogist.)

The second tree would be available for connection as related people add a
person to their tree. The merging problems would still be present, but the
carefully worked out Master Profile would be protected.

Ethel

Ah, there's the problem with duplicates. They replicate!

I was just asked to agree a merge

The lady in question had a profile with three different named fathers but only one mother {strange that} but she did have 8 husbands.

I was all set to reject this merge but saw that he merge had already gone ahead.

Why was I asked to agree to the merge in the first place, when the merge was completed?

I have recently acquired a book “Britain’s Royal Families” which lists the marriages and children of Britain’s kings and Queens, going back to Egbert of Kent. The book lists where they were born and where they were buried.

It also lists John’s 12 illegitimate children and 25 of Henry I.

Reg,
Regarding the merge completed before you could respond --
1. if there were multiple managers on one of the profiles, they all will see it in their merge center.
2. Curators working in a particular area of the tree will complete pending merges as they resolve other issues in that area.

Unfortunately, there is no way to notify you that the merge has been completed.