• Problems with sources

    From Jenny M Benson@21:1/5 to All on Mon Aug 17 00:30:48 2020
    On 16/08/2020 14:39, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
    To be fair, Steve wasn't complaining about trees, but a specific
    dataset. I think we all agree, trees are dodgy at best. (It doesn't help
    that the various tree-hosting sites don't AFAIK have any way of
    recording how _reliable_ you consider a "fact" [or its source] to be; I
    don't _think_ the GeDCom standard does, and as that's what most use for uploads, I can't really blame them. [Many home genealogical _softwares_
    _do_ have a "quality" field: for example, the one I use, Brother's
    Keeper, has [for sources rather than facts - a "fact" can have several sources, of differing quality]: 0 ["Unreliable"], 1 ["Questionable"], 2 ["Secondary or fairly reliable"], and 3 ["Primary or very reliable"].
    Others, I'm sure, have similar, but no automatic way of _sharing_ that field.)

    But surely your rating in your quality field is only of meaning to you.
    I don't care how reliable or otherwise you think your data ia, if I
    choose to "take" it from you I will make my own judgement about it. I
    very rarely accept information from other people's trees without
    checking Sources myself. If others aren't so bothered ... well, I was
    going to say "who cares?" but I suppose most of us DO care about the
    amount of bogus information which is put about.

    --
    Jenny M Benson
    Wrexham, UK

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  • From J. P. Gilliver (John)@21:1/5 to All on Mon Aug 17 02:47:39 2020
    On Mon, 17 Aug 2020 at 00:30:48, Jenny M Benson <NemoNews@hotmail.co.uk>
    wrote:
    On 16/08/2020 14:39, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
    To be fair, Steve wasn't complaining about trees, but a specific
    dataset. I think we all agree, trees are dodgy at best. (It doesn't
    help that the various tree-hosting sites don't AFAIK have any way of >>recording how _reliable_ you consider a "fact" [or its source] to be;
    I don't _think_ the GeDCom standard does, and as that's what most use
    for uploads, I can't really blame them. [Many home genealogical >>_softwares_ _do_ have a "quality" field: for example, the one I use, >>Brother's Keeper, has [for sources rather than facts - a "fact" can
    have several sources, of differing quality]: 0 ["Unreliable"], 1 >>["Questionable"], 2 ["Secondary or fairly reliable"], and 3 ["Primary
    or very reliable"]. Others, I'm sure, have similar, but no automatic
    way of _sharing_ that field.)

    But surely your rating in your quality field is only of meaning to you.
    I don't care how reliable or otherwise you think your data ia, if I
    choose to "take" it from you I will make my own judgement about it. I

    We all only have limited time. If a quality-of-sources fact rating was
    evident on trees, some of us would pay heed to it - in combination with
    our general level of trust of the person whose tree we were looking at,
    of course. For example, if I was looking at _your_ tree, _and_ was in a
    hurry, I _might_ not be quite as rigorous (e. g. check only a transcript
    rather than an original document image) for a fact where you'd been able
    to allocate a high quality rating, than one where you'd allocated a low
    one. But it's academic as there isn't a quality field in online data,
    AFAIK. (And we're not connected AFAIK either, though I'd love it if we
    were!)

    very rarely accept information from other people's trees without
    checking Sources myself. If others aren't so bothered ... well, I was
    going to say "who cares?" but I suppose most of us DO care about the
    amount of bogus information which is put about.

    That's connected to the question of public/private trees. Some of us
    feel the more good data is out there, the more the bad will be diluted;
    others don't see why they should make the results of their work freely available (and possibly misused). I can understand both views. [Actually
    that might well be my epitaph!]
    --
    J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

    in the kingdom of the bland, the one idea is king. - Rory Bremner (on politics), RT 2015/1/31-2/6

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