Proposal for a new system of curators for Historical Profiles

As one of the group that put together this proposal I would like to stress the fact that what we are proposing is a Team of Curators that although they will have their own areas of expertise, one curator won't be responsible for a small group of profiles. It will be a team effort.
I wonder also if the two categories of Historical Profile are quite clear enough. Perhaps we need other people to comment on this.

Sorry your name got left off of Bjorn's list, Terry!

Well I'll just tag Terry now. :-) Here you go, Terry Jackson (Switzer).

Dear Pam,

I think this is an excellent idea. It is high time we developed a more integrated method for dealing with early profiles, some of which are historically extremely well known. I for one have wasted too much time already undoing other members' errors, in cases where even a quick Google search would have given a clear and correct answer.

Best wishes,

Bob Turner

Some good thought and work has gone into this proposal. I would love to be a curator for some of the English nobility. Keep up the good work.

Janet

Speaking as someone with some experience of similar setups on Wikipedia:

Yes, I think this is the right direction to go in.

One additional qualification that Curators need to have: The ability to work cooperatively with others.
We can have the world's leading expert on 1400s Sicilian nobility here (picking a random example) - and it will do us *no good* if the result of having him on board is that we spend more time fighting than editing.

I like the idea of curators being chosen by the users based on experience with interacting with them. We also need a way to throw out curators that prove themselves unable to cooperate with others.

Go for it!

As a manager/owner of some of the older profiles, I think this is a great proposal. It's often difficult to confidently accept some merge requests due to the lack of info in one of the profiles.

Good job by the team that put this proposal together. I hope Geni is receptive.

Sounds great. I know I would be one of the ones who has accidentally linked to the Big Tree and Bjorn Brox courteously asked that I change living ancestors from the 1600s to deceased ancestors.

I love this idea for the simple fact that I will not be getting loads of requests to merge profiles. Secondly, the idea that there will be.... comprehensive information on Historical figures would make everyone's life a bit easier. My only concern is the takeover of a line that only attaches to me and maybe a few other people. I can not imagine someone liking an EXPERT coming in and futzing around with the fruits of their labor. Outside of that I think it is a great idea and I say GO RIGHT AHEAD.

Noah Tutak@Noah & @mike It is interesting, is it not what a positive response this proposal is receiving so far?

@Arthur (AJ): This line you're mentioning, will that be people born before 1600?

When suggesting the "boundaries" for this common Historical Tree with only Historical Profiles, we guessed that for people born before 1600 there will almost always be many many users who connect to them - thus more useful if we share One high-quality instead of hundreds of duplicates for the same people, with hardly any info.

There could of course be special cases where the cut-off point would be set at an earlier date.

Very positive proposal that merits our support. Key is to have a working group that takes a non-partisan approach with an eye towards historic accuracy. The group could be established with set terms and volunteers could rotate through as persons come forward with desired experience and resources.

I would like to add my voice in supporting this proposal. Currently so much time is spent merging together multiple historical profiles and trying to clean up the tree - this time would be better spent on original research to add to the tree. Just think - no more unanswered merge requests, blocked profiles and 600-year-old zombies. Fantastic!

I agree as well, the time has come.

Good - this addresses some of the concerns I have had. I do not know why you have chosen "persons born before 1600" as a group. I would have chosen perhaps "persons who migrated to America before 1640" as a set, and perhaps some other set as well defined by specific parameters. The objective as I see it is to simplify and clarify the material that is gathered for these sets of people, and make it possible for additional material to find its way to the history because of this process of simplification and clarification. I would be interested in being part of such an effort. Lois Dean Courtney.

This is a thoughtful and elegant solution to the current mess of historical mis-merges! I would be very happy to hand over management of historical figures to those with the knowledge and patience to sort through it all, in order to focus on the parts of the tree I enjoy and have expertise in.

)Pam,

I like yho7urf 0prfo0p7usa9l, verfyh m7ucyh
!

Thanks, Lucia! @Lois and @Arthur: We are working primarily on the European aristocracy (and their ancestors) when we get to around 1600 and before. Very few of us on Geni have done original or primary research on these ancestors--most all of it comes from the peerages and other published sources which have often been rehashed. Very few people contribute any new information when they upload thse older branches of their family tree, but rather, they just upload what they have copied from the internet or from older genealogies. And most of these are shared--very few of us have distinct lines, since in most cases the only families in Europe for whom genealogical records were maintained prior to about 1600 were the nobility, and these were a few dozen families who married in with each other, in general.

NOTE: Most of the Geni users involved in this project are those descended from European roots. I am not familiar enough with Asian, African or indigenous genealogical research to know if there are records stretching back more than 400-500 years for these families or whether they are represented on Geni.

I think the ideas in this proposal have a lot of merit, and I appreciate the time that has gone into this well thought out proposal. I like the idea of have moderators or curators. I would make these Geni Pro's who have been selected by an existing curator. To make this a self policing community, we could have curators lose their privileges if, say, 2 or 3 curators mark them as problematic.

I like the idea of a curator being able to mark a profile as a master profile, and then only other curators would be able to edit or merge this profile.

This seems like a good follow up to the new privacy rules I have proposed in the forum (http://forum.geni.com/topic.php?id=58211)

I'll continue to monitor this discussion, I'm curious to hear more from each of you.

Noah, I'm curious why you would limit this to the smaller subset of your user base, namely only the Pros.

Is this due to being able to ID people? That's easily solved.
Is it because this would make the coding easier? That's also solvable - make them Pros, you could even make them long term "trial Pros" if you're worried they'll take the prize and run.

The net value gain for Geni would certainly justify the minor costs. We're talking about a group with a few dozen people at most. Never mind that most candidates are already Pro.

@Shmuel, whereas I can fully appreciate the need for the Curators to have all the PRO tools and the need for numbers of curators may well mean a need to use non-Pro's and I don't have a problem with the next bit I can empathise that Noah et al will have to consider this in their decision making process. The catch is that Pro Curator A has paid his PRO dues and becomes a curator and does his/her fair share of work and then finds out that Curator B who does similar or even less work has PRO tools but has never had to pay for them, he/she may well be disenchanted. I repeat that I would be fine with you and any other volunteer Curator having PRO tools but I can imagine this might be the argument against.

Shmuel-Aharon Kam (Kahn / שמואל-אהרן קם (קאן I'm surprised that you think this will be a few dozen people at most. I was thinking of a much larger group, easily growing into the hundreds, if not more.

I'm thinking about two things: First, Pro users have access to some advanced tools, such as tree matches, that will help them in their efforts to curate the tree. In the future we plan on offering additional Pro only tools, such as bulk merging tools, that will be useful for curators. Second, there was mention of giving all curators access to Pro only tools. My idea is just reversing this.

Also what Terry Jackson (Switzer) said :-)

Noah having NO idea how large your user-base actually is, non-Pro, Pro, non-active, active or VERY active, or how many active forum members for that matter. I can't really say.

What I DO know is what goes on in the "merge group". Both group discussions combined (public: http://www.geni.com/discussions/6000000007138855554 and family: http://www.geni.com/discussions/6000000006801299750 ), have 93 participants (and that's being VERY generous, ignoring the very heavy overlap). Many of these are "requesters", doing few merges themselves. I'm pretty sure that the number of "power users" that is NOT part of this group is pretty small, because sooner or later you HAVE to bump into the profiles managed by these managers.

So while we MAY need hundreds of curators, I strongly doubt you will FIND them. Personally, I think "hundreds" will be unmanageable and NOT be that much an improvement over the present situation.

Terry,
we all know that the sheer amount of work involved merging the historical lines or being a curator, is WAY beyond that which the VAST majority of users (Pro or non) is likely to ever do. People take this job upon themselves because they WANT to do it. So I strongly doubt they'll be "disenchanted" so easily. Do Wikipedia moderators bean-count what the others do to "deserve" this status? I strongly doubt it. They too have tools specific to this "rank".

Also I think that people could imply from what you said, that people would pay their Pro fee, IN ORDER to become Curators. Is that really healthy for the system? Shouldn't it be based on merit alone?

Noah Tutak Thank you so much for your affirming feedback. I look forward to hearing more of your ideas as to have Geni might actually be able to implement this plan. It seems to be getting positive responses from 95% of the people who have commented here and on the Forum.

I think the questions about numbers will work themselves out and are not worth arguing about. I suggest that you see how many people desire to be curators. I do think the core group of mergers (to which Shmuel refers, which are on the Merge Groups 6 Public Discussion, for example, as well as another core group hiding in the woodwork who have previously been active but are not as public now--Kris Stewart comes to mind) will be fewer than 100 active at any given time, but I think this group's composition will ebb and flow during any given month so that probably no more than a couple of dozen will be *actively* working as curators even though many more may in fact be approved.

As to the question of Pro or not--well, it seems to be that there is a bit of an identity crisis going on right now within the Geni community as to exactly what the differences are between Pro and non-Pro users and the benefits and privileges of Pro status. I think that's something that you and your staff need to carefully consider and clarify (perhaps better than it's clarified now, since lots of Pros seem to be questioning whether they should continue to pay). As for myself, I joined Geni not to get special benefits but merely to throw my financial support behind the great work (and the potential) that Geni does and has. It's a contribution to the cause, to make sure Geni stays afloat. Because there's nothing else out there quite like this. And I am so appreciative of the fact that the CEO of Geni is willing to listen to his users and allow us to help shape this into an even better, user-defined system. Thank you.

I became Pro to be able to search for three different branches of our relatives and I was fortunate it to find them.

Since becoming Pro and seeing the potential of a site like this, I too have decided to remain Pro so that I can offer my financial assistance, as little as it seems, to help grow this product.

Keep up the great work guys.

Latest comment from Noah regarding this proposal:
"@PINKLE We will make the changes to collaborators first, and then the conversion of profiles to public and private and implement the new privacy rules. I don't see any of the curators proposal happening before these changes. "

Well folks, get out your wading boots, because the septic tank is about to burst.