Hello fellow genealogists. Most of you have seen me around, working hard, trying to connect everyone I can, in the French-Canadian tree. Mostly, I build trees from scratch for other members, but when I have time, I tree and make everything as accurate and complete as possible.
Lately, I have observed a trend going on that has caused the hard work of the serious researchers to go backwards. People are doing mergers and forgetting to resolve both data conflicts and tree conflicts. There are even people who don't care about anything except mergers and never do anything else. Not only does this negatively impact our connections to our ancestors, but also our "true" relationships to other genealogists. Several of my closer relatives no longer show as relatives and my ancestor count just took a mighty drop. What has happened in your tree lately???
May I suggest that each and every person look for all the outstanding data conflicts and tree conflicts for the profiles they merge, or are responsible for creating. It's already difficult with the seeming endless supply of duplicate profiles, as some people don't check to see who is in the tree, first, but rather just add and add.
Anyway, I respect a good many of you and admire your work. It's a real pity that something that has taken so much effort to do, is slipping away because of these particular problems. If I was a collaborator with all the genealogists in this area, I would pass my days, just fixing things, as I know that we can't make any progress with outstanding problems. So, with that having been said, if you could just check what you are managing and see what you need to do to fix it. For the Curators, may I suggest that you caution the less experienced users on what they are doing and the negative impact. I know you are just volunteers, but there is a reason why you are what you are. You represent the best of us, therefore, who better to guide the novices.
Thank you all for your time and understanding. I am very much committed to the World Tree, especially in my specialty areas. I am just not capable of this kind of massive clean-up duty and don't collaborate with everyone here. My abilities are limited. This has to be a group effort. If everyone just did an hour a day of conflict resolution, we could eventually get this under control.
Respectfully,
Byron Whitesides
