Liu Yao 刘杳

That's Private User for you Christopher Michael Eley.

Changing capital to proper case - what's the big deal? Who cares?

Christopher Michael Eley,

What is the big deal about it? I do it all the time. Proper Genealogy standards state that mixed case is the correct way to enter names.

Kevin

Hi Christopher Michael Eley, let me try to explain in a more collaborative way.

Private User does a lot of case changes on behalf of both users and curators so the request may have come from someone else whose family that you merge with or from another curator.

When profiles are entered into Geni into different formats - ie Leanne MINNY or LEANNE MINNY or LEANNE Minny or Leanne MINNY it causes a lot of data conflicts on merges which takes users a long time to clean up manually. Private User helps us out with a technical solution.

Because Geni has different fields for first names and surnames, the Geni standard is for the data to be entered with proper name casing - ie first letter capitalised and the rest lower case ie Leanne Minny (see https://www.geni.com/projects/Coalition-for-the-Standardization-of-...)

Some people prefer to see the surname in capitals and you can do this for every Geni profile by changing your personal viewing settings at https://www.geni.com/account_settings/name_preferences and selecting last name in Capitals.

If you still feel that these changes were not appropriate - you can report any user (including curators) by going to their profile and selecting Actions and then Report - you will need to be very detailed about the changes made and why you think they were wrong. Geni management will review the report and get back to you.

Thanks Leanne M (Volunteer Curator - Australia) - on walkabout🇦🇺 for the detailed explanation on my behalf. You did better than I could.

To answer the original question, you may set your name preference to showing surnames in ALL CAPS, then you'd see exactly as before, and more (for all the other 130M profiles on Geni will be to your liking). However, in your case I notice that you have also filled display name, which I deliberately passed over.

If you are worried that some random guy was looking at "your tree", rest assured that it was my computer who did the work, and no data was altered or removed whatsoever.

Let me know if you still have concerns.

p.s. There's a legitimate suggestion that I should contact the managers first. My defense is that, 1) it's too difficult to automate that process: send to each (active) manager, wait for reply for a couple of days, and decide (with natural language processing) if to proceed or not; 2) that'd slow down the process by a factor of 1000 if not more; and 3), in my experience, by and large, people don't mind. I only wish that Geni could send a word of apology along with the notifications, as well as instructions of viewing revision history and name preference setting. Maybe I could do that as part of the automation...

I agree with the "legitimate suggestion" that you should alert Managers to what you are doing. I was unaware of the reason for your massive intervention. Maybe no need to await a response, though. If top-level management of Geni approve of your actions in principle, just send an explanatory message at the same time as making the changes.

On a slightly separate matter: I have always been taught to use lower case for Forenames and capitals for SURNAMES. That sorts out differing cultures with norms of placing the family name either first or last. It strikes me that Geni has made a bad policy choice here.

Massive intervention is inevitable when the world has 107 billion people in its tree.

Chris,
I too have always done capitals for surnames and you will see in discussions I still type the surname with capitals when I haven't added a link to the profile.

I think it is a by-product of paper-based genealogy where surnames are within the name - easier to tell which is a dual surname vs a middle name or where a surname is not known ie Leanne SMYTH MINNY vs Leanne Smyth MINNY vs Leanne Marie

The good thing about Geni settings is that you can change it so all profiles in Geni display with surnames in capitals if you want to see it that way.

For languages that display the name surname first, Geni has this handled by language provided that the data has been entered into that language. Try adding the same names into the Hungarian language tabs and Geni will display it surname followed by first.

Names are complex with all the different nuances across both locations and times and is probably one of the most debated and emotive subjects on Geni.

Apparantly in some cultures showing all capitals as a surname is considered a big insult. I can't remember where, sorry. There are some countries where a woman is never known by her husbands name and others where they are always known by their husbands surname. Such a complex area.

Leanne

It's also a relic from 19th century newspapers. The Times referred to him as Abraham LINCOLN. In 2019 all caps means shouting or keyboard incompetence. Let's live in the present.

Private, I don't agree that all caps means keyboard incompetence

Leanne: I know a number of people who don't like to use the shift key ... and thus will use all lower case or all upper case. While sometimes intentional (e.g personal preference), I would probably use a different term than 'incompetence'.