April Is for "About Cleanup" -- 2025!

In the week that’s left in April I’ll try some cleaning this year. Of course, clean as you visit the profile is always best.

There’s a utility: delete duplicate text

https://www.browserling.com/tools/duplicate-lines

The problem is the formatting gets broken, so I don’t end up using that much.

Sometimes I archive the old “about” as an attached text document and start over.

I've been removing quite a bit and am surprised to see some of the profiles that people add. I just removed one where it looked spotless to me, so I checked to see if there were problems when the person added it, and...nope, it looked spotless then, too!

And lots of profiles where the problem is something as simple as copied-and-pasted FindAGrave data that's already in the Geni data fields. That's the sort of thing that can just be deleted from the "About" wholesale, no need to add the profile to the project.

Maybe we need to give really clear directions on what to add here? I think that might help people out.

We don’t want to re-direct members to other sites. We want to keep them on geni. So I’m OK with copy & paste from public sources.

We do need narrative in profiles and a repeat of the vital statistics from an external source. Otherwise, in my geni world, I have no real ability to resolve data conflicts without re researching, which is a lot more painful then repeated data.

I might be explaining incorrectly...

You know those profiles where someone pastes a block like this into the "About", and that's all that's there, along with a link to FindAGrave?

Name Elvis Aaron Presley Birth 8 Jan 1935 Tupelo, Lee County, Mississippi, USA Death 16 Aug 1977 (aged 42) Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee, USA Burial Graceland Mansion Estates Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee, USA Show MapGPS-Latitude: 35.0452652, Longitude: -90.0228119 Plot Meditation Garden

We've got loads of people adding those kinds of situations to this project. We don't need those -- just make sure that info is all in the profile's data fields and then delete that text from the "About".

I'm also finding a lot of profiles where people are adding profiles they seem to want to have expanded, like ones where there's just a raw link to a source but no writeup. That's not a cleanup situation; we don't want those here.

Honestly, it's interesting to go through and see the sorts of things that people think belong here! But it's also kinda time-consuming to have to keep deleting things that should never have been here in the first place. So, guidelines will probably help folks out. :)

We've got loads of people adding those kinds of situations to this project. We don't need those -- just make sure that info is all in the profile's data fields and then delete that text from the "About".

Please don’t delete that data unless there’s replacement text; and use Find A Grave’s “source” link to add a good citation to the profile’s “sources” section at the bottom of the “about.”

We don’t want to send members to other sites, but we also should show where we get our data from.

The best solution with that info, instead of putting the profile in this project or deleting the info, is to simply, well, clean it up. :) And all it takes is hitting the "Enter" key and using a few colons and hyphens to make it look like this:

Name: Elvis Aaron Presley
Birth: 8 Jan 1935 - Tupelo, Lee County, Mississippi, USA
Death: 16 Aug 1977 (aged 42) - Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee, USA
Burial: Graceland Mansion Estates Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee, USA
Plot: Meditation Garden

I just timed myself and it took 23 seconds. It's infinitely better to take those 23 seconds and do it yourself than to put a profile where that's all that's "wrong" into this project, only for it to get buried amongst the 1,000+ other profiles.

That’s exactly what I want to see. Thank you.

I also use bullets on the menu to keep it as a neat list, which prevents a run on sentence that gets hard to pick apart.

And it’s helps to keep this text block at the top of the “about,” as it show in the “merge compare” screen and takes the guesswork out of a merge.

Somehow, despite diligent removal of profiles through cleanup, we're way above where we were days ago. 😭

John Albert Rigali, help me understand what needs to be cleaned up with these:

• Henry Uvedale
• Joan de Camville
• Margery Lytton
• Joan Uvedale
• Sir Henry Bedingfield, 2nd Baronet of Oxburgh

Thanks for responding.

I think maybe we need to clarify the purpose of the project, so it's good that we're having this conversation.

Our goal here is to add, fix, and remove profiles that are so messed up that they are genuinely indecipherable to the average person -- profiles full of GEDCOM data, for example, or where the same Wikipedia/FindAGrave bio has been merged in fifteen times, or where there's 500 lines of unbroken text that desperately need some paragraph breaks, etc.

"Disorganized" is subjective and ambiguous, but the ones that I linked to were honestly super clear and organized to me -- they had a bio, a sources section, appropriate spacing, etc. They may not have been idealized specimens in the eyes of some, but they got the job done fine. So we don't need things like those here; we need the worst cases.

I would urge caution about trying to implement a preferred personal formatting standard, especially if it means marking other collaborators' perfectly acceptable work as needing cleanup. (People will -- and do -- get offended by that.) We just don't have the time/bandwidth to focus on idealized vs. essential.

One of the fun things about Geni is seeing all of the varied styles users come up with and learning from each other. As long as the info is clear, the Geni world is wide enough to accommodate a lot in terms of presentation. I have a general format I've used for years, but I tweak it all the time based on new ideas I see and appreciate in other users' work. Being flexible and letting other users' styles shine, even if it isn't exactly how we'd do things ourselves, is I think the only way we'll get this project back down to manageable numbers.

Copy-and-paste is fine within reason, and for the reasons Erica stated. You shouldn't be pasting entire books onto Geni, but pasting an essential paragraph that's attributed is very much appreciated. Pasting an entire obituary from 2010 is almost always a copyright violation, but pasting vital segments from that obituary isn't and can help us keep lines straight. Pasting the attributed intro from a Wikipedia article is the best method we have for adding bios to most celebrity profiles. And so forth.

This has been an interesting conversation for me. I would also note that perhaps there are different “needs” in different parts of the tree; we don’t need the same kind of template for a contemporary celebrity, for example.

Maybe I'll use Joan de Camville as an example we can work from:

- The parts labelled "changes need to be made by a curator" -- if those changes need to be made, I'd flag it in the "curators, please assist" thread or the medieval help thread, because otherwise this sort of thing is liable to just sit for years without anyone noticing. :)

- The blockquotes look fine to me; not sure what Erica Howton thinks. Wouldn't be grounds for me to add the profile to this project.

- We don't delete broken links, because it still denotes a source. So good decision to leave it there -- thank you! (I feel like I'm constantly adding back links people remove...) In those cases, you can look in the revision history to find the date that the URL was accessed and made that note next to it, something like:

Sources

• https://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=jweber&i... (accessed 26 March 2012; page currently unavailable)
  

I find that "currently unavailable" wording is helpful for getting people to stop deleting. :)

The currently-oldest profile in the project is a great example of one that indisputably should be in the project...and I'm not linking to it, because otherwise we're going to get a hundred people coming and saying "Why was this tagged, I don't know how to help!!". :) But that's one where we've got about a dozen different merges happening in the "About" and it's a mile-long mess, including in at least three languages I'm seeing while quickly skimming.