Why do we have a "Big Tree"? What is the purpose of it?

There is a big difference between viewing the entire tree and editing someone else's profile.
It's OK with me to let the entire community view my tree, but I need protection from editing by everyone, even in the family.
my best example is about naming convention - GENI is not completely multilingual, thus we cannot write the same name if different laguages. If we take Adam and Eve - thats the english spelling. but the Hebrew names are ADAM and Hava / Chava / Khava - no version expresses the right way to say this name in Hebrew. now think of all the girls named Eve...
the same for many other biblical names.
If two or more users have the same gr-gr-grmother named Eve - and they have the need to 'correct her' name each time the other changes it.
I thought of a big tree that contains single-way links to profiles. Every profile can be linked to a node in the tree, but every user can have his own version of the profile. user can merge their profiles, but they don't damage each others work

Erica, I hope that you are making notes of all of these great points.
It is a good think that we are talking about these issues instead of arguing about them. This is far more productive.

Have a good day all. I need to do research off line today...our projects.
So much to do, such little time.

Terri,

I've directed other curator and Noah Tutak attention to the discussion. It's been very useful to me and I love the tone of discourse. Thank you so much for that.

Private

Waxing poetic indeed! Well stated.

Let me see if I can address your points from what I know. I am putting in list / bullet format.

1. Geni believes in providing the most positive use experience

Rick, you nailed it. That is my interpretation of the Geni ideal as well.

Remember that the company was started by an eBay billionaire who had just made a successful independent film (and was frustrated by the limitations of "collaborating" in that media).

Geni is not a traditional genealogy program. We've had different semantic discussions. I see it as a web 2.5 company exploring and pushing the boundaries of "collaborative knowledge building" -- and flexible enough to accommodate a variety of users, who have different goals and come from different backgrounds.

2. Geni needs to decide how it will serve its important stakeholders.

Let's work on that one a little. Who are its most important stakeholders? Just for information purposes, "living / private" profiles are 60% of the database, "deceased / public / historic" profiles are 40%. I do not know the proportion of PRO vs free users.

3. Should Geni allow the Curators to take ownership of the historic profiles by granting them extraordinary rights and permissions thereby excluding others who have also worked hard alongside them to create the Cloud? Should they open the system back up and allow anyone to do anything their heart desires without regard to valid genealogical practice?

Speaking as a geni curator I have no desire nor is it my best interest to lock *anyone* out. I serve the 300 million Americans tracing their American / English / Scots roots, one little person can do this alone? I don't think so!

So I see my curatorial role as having some super user rights to merge duplicates and correct relationships. I use Projects to build the interest groups to enrich and validate data quality. In essence, I work for you, the user. So far we have a great working relationship and frankly I'm obsessed. :)

4. Should Geni allow the non-collaborators to hide in their own worlds and not even see the Cloud unless they are willing to collaborate?

That is one of my thoughts and one of my requests to Geni: just HIDE those other profiles. :)

Did you see the latest Blog entry though?

That might explain to everyone Geni's current approach.

http://blog.geni.com/

Private User

Yes, Geni is moving toward full Wikipedia style "record and revert" functionality. I believe this will be ready for release in a couple of months.

I for one am very interested in seeing document / image storage, search and collection capabilities built out and have some ideas for easy implementation. Hopefully Joe B. started a new thread on that -- will share more there.

Yaacov Glezer

You wrote:

"I thought of a big tree that contains single-way links to profiles. Every profile can be linked to a node in the tree, but every user can have his own version of the profile. user can merge their profiles, but they don't damage each others work ..."

I'm not sure how that's different from having your own tree on your own computer, though.

In terms of language conventions, we have developed some naming conventions for different parts of the tree. The Biblical tree came up with a protocol for using English and Hebrew that doesn't look too bad.

More here:

http://wiki.geni.com/index.php/Naming_Conventions

I appreciate this discussion and the very thoughtful contributions to it. Thanks for starting it, Terri, and thanks to everyone who has contributed so far.

As a curator, I have shared many of your concerns and insights.

One thing I do want to explain, though, is why some profiles are locked by curators. It's not to keep anyone *out*. It's actually to help all of us as we clean up this tree--to keep all those bad merges from being made that merge several people together who aren't the same, and so on.

I know that I have a number of profiles for historical ancestors that I have locked using my privileges as curators. That doesn't mean that I am "taking ownership" of them--in fact, it means that I am trying to serve the interests of all of the descendants and managers of these profiles by trying to respect the proper identity of the ancestor and trying to clean up many wrong relationships and dates. These are usually profiles who have been mismerged repeatedly over the last two years with others whose names are similar. That's why we end up with a profile with six different parents and 14 different spouses.

So someone has to clean that up, and I've found that if I don't lock those down (which requires me to approve any merges into it), then as soon as I spend 6-8 hours getting all the wrong connections untangled, someone tries to be helpful and merges them all back together again!

So please understand that we curators are NOT on a power trip to "take over" profiles by any means--we are volunteers working extremely hard to disentangle the mess that these trees have gotten into from two years of unfettered merging. We (by this I mean all of us mergers, not just curators) have made *tremendous* progress in the last two months since Noah changed the system.

I think it will only get better and better and the Big Tree will get cleaner and cleaner. Please be patient and eventually it will all come around, and we'll find all those loose ends and reattach them. Everything is "Under Construction" right now so there's a lot of debris floating around, but it will get better! Phase I is getting the profiles merged, and Phase II is getting the historical details verified and written up in the master profiles.

Erica Howton
The main ratio I mentioned was to have a big tree but protect hard work from damage by amateurs.
having a tree of node with links will allow having a real connection tree, with personal versioning.
if a user links a profile to the tree - he should get a list of differences between his version and the "first" version in the tree.
if 30 or 300 or 3000 people will say that Jesus was Muslim, still doesn't make it true.
I believe that after merging trees - editing privilage shouldn't be granted automaticaly

Rick, thanks for briinging the topic of Curators into this subject.

Pam, I disagree with your comment about how "curators are NOT on a power trip to "take over" profiles". While you may be right about some Curators that is certainly not the case with all. My tree has been personally targeted by at least two and possibly more curators who have taken management of some of my direct ancestral line. When I expressed concern to Geni and also to one of the Curators concerned I was basicaslly told to go jump. I either accept these powers given to Curators and their subsequent actions, or I leave Geni.

Is that how it should be? Was it made sufficiently clear to me and possibly others that our data is not private but that totally unrelated people can and will access your tree, make changes, merge profiles and act at their own whim without any consultation or permission whatsoever

I find that action to be unacceptable. But there is nothing I can do about it. It's all very sad

Alan,

Do you have a URL of profiles in question? That would help a lot. I think there are curators (and geni itself) who are objective and have no ax to grind.

The default settings are that your tree is private out to your fourth cousin and up to (I think) your third great grandfather. That translates into everyone living is private and only actionable by those within your family group ... entirely outside of curatorial scope.

We are interested in "one accurate shared profile" for **historical** figures, who are the common ancestor of thousands if not millions. (I think someone calculated that 99% of living Europeans / Americans can claim Charlemagne as an ancestor, for instance.)

So I am actually confused about your situation: are you talking about a deceased public profile from the 1700s?

Thanks for the clarification.

Yaacov Glezer

I don't know of any way to do this in the current geni platform. So ... let's work with what we have. :)

Erica. I have changed my privacy settings in the past couple of days. Initially it was the default as I never had any privacy concerns. I never thought for one moment that my tree could be subject to unauthorised access. Sadly I never consideredthat there were entities out there who have been given basically unbridled access to the whole of Geni.

I have no problem with the concept of Curators. What I do have a problem with is how they can and do make changes to a tree without first contacting the existing managers of that tree.

Less than one week ago our tree stood at less than 50,000. Within the space of two days it was integrated into the "big tree" despite my clear indication that I did not wish to go down that track.

For the moment I would rather not list the particular profile(s) here. Our tree is subject to enough unwanted scrutiny as it is. Suffice to say the profile(s) are more recent than the 1700s

OK, I wanted to understand what ancestors you were talking about. I don't think I've merged anyone more recent than 1830 or so and that's in the US, and more than that ... my merges have gone through the usual "request to merge" process. That is, I request a merge of duplicates, and a msg goes out to the manager asking them to approve it. That's the usual communication between collaborators.

A couple more questions if you don't mind. I really do want to understand the case while of course preserving your privacy.

1. It sounds like the profiles in question were the 1800s.

2. Would it be OK to ask what country? For instance, I've only worked in US, Scotland and the United States.

3. Do you collaborate? Are you used to what I'm calling "the usual merge together duplicates" process?

Thanks Alan.

Personally, I like the big tree, but understand when people want their own private tree. I don't think that anyone is on a power trip. You have to understand that when people begin a merge by indicating that two profiles are the same, then it's either correct that the two profiles are the same or it's not. If one of those profiles is in a private tree, it is up to the manager of that profile to agree or not agree. That decision may bring the tree into the big tree, if it wasn't already connected. Starting the merge gives the option to the manager of the second profile.

Curators do not have permissions over private profiles in private trees. However, if a profile in a private tree is made public, that opens the profile up to merges by curators. Not because we want to bring the tree in, but because when the merge is requested, it will automatically be approved because the profile was made public.

Geni has great technology and everyone should be able to use it. We're all trying to clean up and make the big tree better. I encourage the use of Geni even if you want a private tree, because everyone should benefit from the technology. Just remember that to keep the tree private, all the profiles have to be private.

@Pam Wilson,

I will be honest. You lock way too many profiles and you leave them locked for way to long. I do not believe that you are on a power trip but I do believe that you have way too much confidence in your own judgment as it relates to the judgment of your geni colleagues. I believe that if you and the other Curators want our confidence and support you are going to have to make a greater effort to make sure that your actions do not look like a power trip to those of us who are not blessed with your wisdom and power. I am sorry to be so blunt but I must stress that in any situation where one group has the greater power over another group, perception is reality.

Rick

Rick,
let's turn that last comment of yours around.

Some of the central profiles in the historical tree already have more than 500 managers. These managers have between them many thousands more collaborators. EACH of these people, can edit and merge these profiles, as can many of THEIR collaborators.

If there were NO locked profiles, the historical tree would become a tangled mess all over again within a month, with those profiles full of bad data.

Would you prefer THAT?

Even with locked profiles, EVERYBODY can still make suggestions about them, either by starting a discussion or by directly messaging the Curator. Additionally, if you have interest in specific parts of the tree, join a project that deals with it or start your own. Curators, having more than enough work, will most likely be glad to hand off taking care of the relevant profiles.

Between protecting the tree's integrity, AND knowing it's protected finally being able to invest the time to fill out these profiles, both by Curators, Project members and other people of interest, we will have a high-quality tree in no-time.

Personally, I have been working on the Biblical Tree ( http://www.geni.com/projects/Biblical+Tree ) of Geni for almost three years now, long before we had Curators or even Collaborators. I have, myself, merged at least 80 copies of this tree, and many of these profiles have 100+ managers. I can finally lock down parts of this tree, and they will STAY locked for the most part, because there is so many lousy GEDCOMs out there with lousy data.

Before we could protect the tree, we "power-mergers" were constantly chasing our tail, fixing the same damn mistakes over and over and over again.

There is probably a very small number of major profiles where that argument would prevail. I suggest that there is a happy medium between protecting large, difficult profiles and locking and blocking everything in sight. You folks need to put your heads together and come up with a consistent policy that puts limits on the numbers and duration of the locks so that the rest of us can get back to work.

I suggest that before a specific profile is locked it be approved by a small concensus of 3 or 4 members of your group. That will improve greatly the perception on the part of the greater group that it is not one member locking a large number of profiles simply because it is convenient and easy to do so.

There is a great problem where it comes to non-collaborators. There needs to be an information solution as well as a software solution. You need to post on your curator notes a polite request to remind everyone not to stack and merge non-collaborators (NC) I had earlier said that we might hide the cloud from the NCs but, upon further consideration, that is a bad idea. Geni does need to modify the software to prevent repeated merges of NCs into large stacks and to streamline the process of unstacking them from past merges.

My bottom line is that I'm happy to have curators take care of the Mayflower Pilgrim mess. They are cleaning up the scores of incorrect and duplicative profiles and from their discussions I see that they are sourcing their work. If their work somehow damages my own later generations of descendants who are well documented in my family, of course I will be aggravated, but it's less likely they will harm me than some family member or collaborator.

Rick,

Easier solution, already implemented.

Projects.

Profiles become part of Projects and Projects have Project Collaborators to act on those Profiles.

Down the road I see it being the natural "collaboration pool" for common ancestors.

That gives you the "small group" empowered to make changes; by locking down relationships / data, it is not spuriously changed by random incorrect GEDCOM uploads.

Best of all worlds.

I love Projects.

I don't know about anyone else but I don't know how to lock profiles but if I did I would. Not all of them but my immediate family. I don't have any immediate family members who would be interested in participating in Geni so why not lock my personal family info. Make everything I can private. You can only do this up to about 6 ot 7 gen. back . Then Geni forces you to be public anyway and lets face it most of the info can be attained by just going to public records so anyone can get the info anyway. So that far back doesn't matter if other people get into it as long as they don't alter it, I don't care who looks at it. Judy

judith profiles in your family group are locked no one can edit them but you and your family. curators can not even edit them

Rick, if you have concerns or interest in any of the Master Profiles I curate and/or have locked, please send me a PM and let me know what you need. We are still waiting for Geni to provide us some management tools like a merge center for our locked profiles, so until I have a better mechanism for tracking them, there are some that I keep an eye on every couple of days and some I haven't gotten back to in a few weeks.

I have only locked probably less than 5% of the total profiles I curate. As I said, they tend to be the ones that are the most problematic. Even keeping them locked, they need to be cleaned up on a regular basis since mergers like yourself do a great job stacking pending merges of valid duplicates, which I and other curators then approve--but then that leaves all the extra information and all the duplicate wives, parents and children that need to be tended and merged.

while i agree that profiles need to be protected, there are many unnecessary locks that are a pain to work around especially in the busy areas.

I think there's confusion about the word "locked."

1. Private profiles. Can't see anything other than first initial, last name. They belong the living are can be edited by member of a family group. They cannot be viewed or acted on by collaborators or curators.

2. Zombies. Private profiles in the historical tree. This is a result of a bug in the GEDCOM import process where profiles without dates in them defaulted to living, therefore set to private. Cannot be affected by collabs. CAN be "made deceased" by the zombie zapping script curators have. Post requests in the "Zombies please" discussion.

3. Locked by curators. A small number of historic profiles are temporarily locked while the curator attempts to repair the damage of incorrect relationships (see GEDCOM import issues, above). As noted, send the curator a msg if you have a question or a need on those few profiles.

Hope this helps.

Erica, I have a g-g-g-g-grandfather in Scotland who was locked by a cousin who originally put him on the tree. I cannot see anything but "J. Mulholland" with a lock icon and cannot merge him to his other profile which I added to try and force a merge. Any suggestions? My messages have been ignored by this distant. cousin. Mary

i was referring to curator locks not private profiles

Jason and Rick, please be specific about which profiles you think are unnecessarily locked, and provide the URLs, and the curator can address the reasons for locking them.

Private User can you post a link to your g-g-g-g-grandfather's profile.

John Mulholland

Daniel, this is him. I used my husband's account to add it to the tree to try to get it merged with the locked profile. Thanks. Mary

Tim Stamps 10/29/10 said, "My understanding is that "profile stealing" is an anomaly caused by Geni's software, the way it is currently programmed. It is, basically, a computer glitch. As we go about merging profiles, Geni's software sometimes hands over profile management to others who were doing the work of merging. It has the unfortunate effect of creating the appearance that management of the profile has been stolen. Nobody is proactively stealing profiles... it is a bug in the system that transfers profile management to the wrong people.

& So - I ASK: When will this bug be resolved? I SPENT MONTHS TO create MY TREE with 222 names, Photos, etc. BUT when I let my niece to "JOIN" my tree ALL OF MY DATA - ON MY TREE - the one I spent arduous hours creating & UPLOADING PHOTOS - that ONLY I HAD - MY tree diminished to 50 names, with few photos ... while HER TREE - USURPED ALL of MY names & Photos! WHY? Why isn't the "creator" kept separate from "connected trees"? HOW can all MY information be taken by another, who had NOTHING to do with the data??? WHEN will this be FIXED - so each has a "SEPARATE" TREE & the "CREATOR" of a tree KEEPS the data they created?

Tim Continues: "As I have been going about cleaning up the tree when I wind up in areas that need cleanup work, I have seen this occur, where profiles created by someone else were handed over to me, even though I am not a direct relative of the profile. It is unclear how to grant management of these profiles to others, even the rightful 'owners'."

IF the "rightful owners" are not allowed to keep their info seporate from others, than I will disband this site, for those other "FREE" sites that I belong to, and don't let "others" control MY data! This problem is systemic, and can be corrected & should be ... ASAP! before this site looses all credibility.