Deletion as policy?

I don't think we've had that discussion yet. I know there is a strong feeling about many curators in favor of doing it that way, but it needs to be clear from the start if that's the intention.

Along the same lines, there are some (probably) fictitious profiles that have now been disconnected, although a search for sources and a discussion would have been better.

For example,
... of the Burgundians

In some cases, there's information attached to N. N. profiles (or the near-equivalents "unnamed wife of xx", "mother of yy".

Examples can be "XX saga says that YY married a daughter of ZZ", "it has been theorized that the mohter of AA was BB, but this is disproved by evidence WW" and so on.

So I think some uses of N. N. or the equivalents shouldn't be deleted. I think it's good to have the discussion, so that we can tell curators who go on a N. N. cutoff spree that "we don't have consensus on that".

I don't see them as actively harmful.

Yes, there's a difference between "topping the tree" with a N.N. and other uses of it. And "unknown spouse" can't be deleted, there often is a theory. I don't mind collecting and examining the profiles.

Unknown spouse is an interesting case. Many of them could be deleted, but in some cases the fact they exist gives contextual information.

For example, two wives, one is known, one is not.

Or, a wife who has been falsely identified as a particular person but is in fact unknown.

There is no harm in collecting these profiles, as long as we understand they need to be examined individually, and we will not be able to ask that all profiles be deleted en masse.

There are definitely cases in which they can be deleted, but in others that they can't be deleted.

In Jewish Genealogy, there are lots of family histories in which the wife wasn't even named.

The Russian Empire was known for doing Revision lists and ignoring the females in the towns and cities. The men were included as they were used for conscription to the Soviet Armed Forces.

Please do NOT delete or disconnect Unknown profiles to which I've added a Curator note, without contacting me. They represent a lot of research work as an attempt to prevent the re-adding of spurious parents.

I would like for the "recent" fictional profiles not to be deleted, besides the famous hoax profiles.

By recent I mean the invented medieval lines that seem to be spawned from the web trees. The Wheelers have one, and I just found one from the Cooke family.

The reason is that those people could not have existed (I know this because they have impossible names), they DO exist in the web trees, and if we don't leave them on Geni, with their clear Fictional labels, they are going to get recreated, in one form or another, by users.

Just keeping them from being added to the top on one tree won't keep them out, AND I think we do a service to the community, teaching about the fictions.

There are some 'named' profiles added here, such as Elizabeth Taptico

A number of them also seem to have some "genealogical info" as shown in the profile list view (several can be seen by reducing the list to the 33 Master Profiles, but there are others as well with "About' text).

The named ones i did NOT put there they were added by other curators and i have not touched them in anyway or enquired why yet

I don't understand this project.

Surely a discussion at the profile level (tagging all profiles directly connected to the profile + all profile managers) would achieve a better result plus keep a history of the discussion that can be accessed from the surrounding profiles. The end result would be a decision to delete or keep the profile but a history of the discussion would remain.

Deleting a whole lot of profiles merely because they have been added to a project does not make sense to me.

I'm also in the category of "what's the purpose?"

If it is simply to identify "N.N." type profiles, that to me is of little value.

If it is a place to attach / collect already-disconnected-'unknown'-profiles-with-intent-to-have-them-deleted-as-they-have-no-genealogical-information-in-them (whew!), then I can see a purpose for this project.

I also agree that there should be discussion encompassing the relevant profiles *BEFORE* disconnecting them, in most cases.

I removed Elizabeth Taptico from the Delete Bin project.

Is there an easy way to tell who added an actual person (not a placeholder) to the delete bin project? I don't see the "add to project" in the "revisions" tab of the project.

Also removed Isaac Hall, Sr. - I imagine an error / add to project.

re: if we don't leave them on Geni, with their clear Fictional labels, they are going to get recreated, in one form or another, by users. ... Just keeping them from being added to the top on one tree won't keep them out, AND I think we do a service to the community, teaching about the fictions.

Yes, please.

I get "good news! I found the parents of William de Baliol"! emails.

If I can point the member to the {fictional} tree, I save time and ill will. They can then ascertain the evidence for themselves, no wheels re invented.

I can see a purpose for a delete bin project for N.N. profiles. It would be much easier for a programmatic profile deletion, and to have them assembled in a project makes for an easier programmatic deletion.

It also can serve as a central conduit for discussions on whether to ask Geni to delete the profiles or not.

>> if we don't leave them on Geni, with their clear Fictional labels, they are going to get recreated, in one form or another, by users

Agreed. I don't like seeing fictional profiles on Geni and I truly hate finding a connection to them, but even more than that I can't see the point of creating and re-creating, researching and re-researching the same things over and over again.

Users need some way to see -- at a glance -- that we've been down this road before and it's not helpful to do it for the 27th time. We have to see that the parents are unknown, or that the spouse or child is fictitious.

Erica, why not just delete them if they should be deleted.

It takes the same amount of time to delete a profile as it does to add it to a project but saves the Geni programmers the coding time that could be spent on developing new functionality.

The added benefit of deleting it ourselves is that there is an audit trail back to the person who deleted it. So if I had a query I could contact the person who deleted it.

Amazing. we get a great new feature to finally get all the trash out of the tree and im the only one using it and everyone else is starting a witch hunt against me rather than use it themselves.

The purpose of creating an Unknown parent of placeholder profile is to warn others that research has been done to establish that the parents are not known in the historical record, and so should not be replaced with a named profile without joining a Discussion about the sources.
The purpose of NN is to show that the we don't know the name right now, but are waiting for the Name if people want to try to find it.

im messaging an idea to Mike

@jason we have disagreements on what constitutes "trash" and what constitutes "places where we store information". You are acting unilaterally.

It's clear that we have never had agreement that placeholder profiles should be deleted when relationship locking was rolled out. That seems to have been a leap of logic that you took on your own.

It's good that you are talking now, rather than just continuing on in silence, but we really need to respect the need to talk *before* we institute sweeping changes on the tree.

"places where we store information".

an empty unknown profile contains no information. they are just there because they keep getting added back or bought in by merges. now we can stop that. If the profile contains ANYTHING that is beyond unknown then of course keep it.

names like "Unknown wife of Gorr"

you have no proof they were ever married

"You are acting unilaterally."

unfortunately the curatorium is an indecisive bunch that never agrees on anything. starting a conversation about a contentious issue always results in the same people taking one side and the others taking the other side.

I agree with Harald. Your idea of 'trash' may not be the same as everyone else Jason.

I think that our ambition should be to get rid of them all. I think that in reality we will need to keep some. I think that we need to progress slowly rather than just automatically delete them all.

My N.N.s are, for the most part, placeholders, and they are useful.

As an example, I know of two unnamed children of Moses Tenenbaum (my GGF) who died in 1899 in the same epidemic that killed Moses. I know their surname was Tenenbaum but I don't know their given names. I also know the year they died. Their mother, Moses' first wife, is also an N.N. Deleting all these people would be very bad because it's entirely possible that I'm the only person who has this information, and no other descendants who might be researching this line will know about what happened, unless they can see these N.N. profiles.

https://www.geni.com/family-tree/index/6000000026998214526

Rhea thats a great example of the type of NN profile we need to keep.

Rhea,

That is an excellent example of what type of these profiles need to stay. Another example, is when we know that someone is connected to someone else, but don't know the names of the people who make up the connection.

Kevin

I just added a bunch of "N.N. wife 劉 Liu" (no relation to me ^_^) who are way up high in the tree (200s BC) and they are truly unknowable. I used "search more", very easy, so this project does serve a purpose.

If in the end we still need to check one by one, then the real purpose of the project failed. If you feel any in the project need to be saved, go ahead and remove. Not necessary to start a discussion.

I think if there's any content in the profile other than the name (death date, curator note), or if it would separate the tree, they must not get deleted by a script. If you think curator note no longer serves its purpose now that we can lock relationship, remove your curator note. I think we can trust all the curators not to remove a colleague's note without asking first.

Lastly, we can all feel a little attached to the time and efforts we've put into Geni. I too have wasted countless hours now that Geni is better at handling this or that. We should look forward.

And how shall you control some curators when they thinks they know best about which to keep and which to delete without feeling any need at all to discuss whatever decisions they make?