ATTENTION Curators, please assist

Terry, in addition to what Alicia has posted, you have to realize that at no point previous to an unapproved merge did Geni ever inform me that my information was going to be subject to the whims of every other member of this website.

Many members here put up a hodge-podge of information they've culled from various sources, including sites like wikipedia. And this is information being bandied about on so-called "master profiles."

I don't want to denigrate anyone's work, but people who assume wikipedia to be an appropriate tool for research or serious genealogical study should not be given the right to edit or change other people's work, especially when those other people are using more legitimate reference materials.

The fact of the matter, no matter how you spin it, is that every user here has the right to build their family trees the way they see fit, without unwanted interference from others.

The "World Tree" may be Geni's aim, but it may not be the aim of Geni's customer base. And therefore, every user should be given the right to decide. Yes? Or would you presume to tell users what they should and should not like?

I like Geni. It is convenient to use, the site itself is attractive, and it has been a lot of fun for me and my family to use. But if the people in charge of this website can't understand the needs of their users, how long do you actually think this website will be able to turn a profit?

My guess is not long. And then people will take the ridiculous advice of finding another provider seriously.

I have found Geni to be a very good tool. I also use Ancestry and JewishGen and a personal tree program, but there is a distinct advantage to Geni. I was able to put in my family information going back maybe 3 generations and from then on some branches I could hook into the big tree. Where the big tree was wrong, I pitched in to fix it and I found users and volunteer curators who could point me to reliable sources. For some branches, I had to put in up to 9 generations back until I could hook into the big tree.

I have found that up to 6 generations back, you have your family tree mostly to yourself and don't have any issues. From 6 to 9 generations back, you find distant cousins and benefit from their knowledge. After 9 generations there are so many descendants, that you need to work with the curators to make Master Profiles or where they exist, to improve the Master Profiles. I have learned things about all sides of my family that I would never have learned as quickly without the big tree. As a curator, I share your frustration at some of the side effects of the social media approach to genealogy, but I can promise you that knowledgeable users like yourself and volunteer curators are working hard to clean up the historical part of the tree and using tools to ensure it stays correct and well documented. This is an exciting time to join Geni and for someone like you Jeremiah, who is interested in historical profiles and understands the value of reliable sources, you will find a lot of company here.

@Dea Lowry..done^u^

I understand your point, Hatte.

My point is that I am a customer, and I believe I have the right to choose which services I want to use, and which I do not. It should not be anyone else's choice.

Additionally, my family tree goes back over 2,000 years. For the sake of simplicity, I try to keep my tree centered on paternal lineage. I'm sorry to be blunt, but I could not care less about a long lost cousin thrice removed from my 23rd great grandfather's side. Honestly.

But with this whole "world tree" business I can't even easily access my own information without wading through the thousands and thousands of profiles filled with questionable material that has added on to my tree without my consent whatsoever.

It's just incredibly frustrating to me that you guys are trying to rationalize this. You know its wrong. You know we shouldn't be subjected to this without prior consent. This is our personal information, our long hard hours of work going down the drain.

I do not want to be connected to anyone else's tree. Period. Everything on my family tree should be added by myself or my own family members only. Not complete strangers whom I have never met. How anyone could fail to grasp this concept is beyond me.

Steven Patrick Frank

Col. Lawrence Smith is my 10th great grandfather. (That and a cup of coffee, I know).

I would love to sort the Mary Hichon issue once & for all. I corrected Mary Debnam based on your notes in Major Smith's profile. What do you think is the best way to deal with Mary Hichon? Is she an "unknown name first wife" or ... ?

Jeremiah, there's no Geni-service to choose called "I want my tree to be private".

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I understand, Lars. That is why I am complaining.

Jeremiah, excuse me for being blunt (I'm not usually) but if you went into a campsite, would you complain that you didn't get a hotel room with all mod cons?
You have joined Geni, a collaborative site and you are complaining about having to collaborate.

@ Kathy Thank you :)

I just want you all to know that I love the idea of a world-tree, and this was one of the reasons I joined Geni.
All records I put up have official sources like birth certificates ect.
If anyone does not like the collaboration idea they can keep the profiles private or might want to think of using genealogy software on their computer and not publishing the tree on the internet ?

Jeremiah, I have ancestry.com that I have switched to and would love for you to transfer records to this site and have your own personal site. I do not think some people understand the issue of verifying material before accepting as true lineage. P.S.
If I went to a campsite and built a fire , I would not mind someone sharing the warmth , but please be considerate enough not to just shove me aside and take over.
Thanks

Ancestry.com trees can be very good back 6 generations or so (when there is documentation obtainable from the records on the site). Before that I find them far more INaccurate than Geni. The quality of the "overviews" here in the historical tree has increased exponentially in just six months. It's actually quite an achievement.

@Deborah, I don't think anyone is being 'pushed away from the warmth' on Geni. In fact in order to not upset originators of some historic profiles Wiki information has been (for now) left on and other more reliable sources are being added although as Jeremiah points out we realise that Wiki is not the best source available but we are trying to keep with the collaborative nature of Geni. We aren't all good genealogists using the best sources or methods but hopefully with the collaborative scheme the best will be drawn upon to improve the less reliable. This is a work in progress and very often I feel that it is people like you who know how to do the research and use sources that will become the most valued members of Geni as it develops so please don't give up on it. Instead, if you have suggestions for improvements either for Geni in general or for profiles that could have better reference why don't you tell us curators and we'll discuss them and pass them on to the Geni Team.

This is not a campsite, Terry. This is genealogical research. But to use your analogy, I wouldn't expect any modern conveniences if I went camping. But I would expect the tent I put up to still be my tent when I woke up in the morning.

Not a bunch of other tents sewn into mine with guys chanting about the "oneness" of it all, and getting defensive when I kindly ask them to let me use the tent I built. That's not collaboration anymore, that's a little closer to drinking the Kool-aid in Jamestown.

There's a difference between sharing information, and blatantly superceding correct information with inaccurate information because of a flawed vision with good intentions.

And finally, in regards to that, there is a huge difference between good intentions and good results.

I simply wanted to voice my complaint about not having the option of privacy, both personally and intellectually. But yeah, you go ahead and keep speaking to your customer about your wants, instead of addressing their needs. That has "win" written all over it.

P.S. Those of you who enjoy the "collaborative effort", fantastic. I'm so glad. Now, as for me, I ask again, why not give me the right to choose? Seriously. Is it so inconceivable?

@Jeremiah, I use a free offline program called Gramps to keep a clean record of my tree ... versions for linux, Windows, and Mac. It doesn't take care of the issues you are having, but at least it doesn't add additional work for you because something does happen.

Private User a couple questions:

(a) Would you be willing to pay a subscription fee to keep the data you enter "private"?

(b) Many folks who are concerned about others editing their data use desktop software such as RootsMagic to maintain their tree. If software like this had that ability to sync to your Geni account, would you be agreeable to maintaining your tree in a separate application and syncing it with Geni for the betterment of the World Tree? And could you explain your reasoning behind your answer?

Thanks,
-George

(George - I love the idea of syncing! Wistful sigh.)

KATHY

I didn't choose to collaborate with anyone. That's my whole point. I just woke up one morning to find that changes had been made without my consent. The profiles for some of my earlier ancestors had been merged with "master profiles" already inputed in the "world tree."

Jenna has already tried to help. But nothing can be done. My work was superceded by the "master profiles" on the world tree.

The problem is those "master profiles" are laden with information culled from unreliable sources such as wikipedia. Furthermore, as I stated before, for simplicity's sake I wanted my tree limited to paternal lineage. The world tree doesn't allow that.

And with 5,000 links to each person, it is impossible for me to navigate.

I've sent Kathy the links if you're interested where the problems start. The problem starts with "Joan of Kent" and goes up from there.

STEVEN

Thanks for the advice. I have several programs on my PC already. Right now I am living in a different country than most of my family, so I opened an account on Geni so that all my family members could work together and/or share information about our family tree.

All the work I put into uploading our long family history into the Geni database has been wiped out, thanks to the "collaborative" efforts of unauthorized third parties.

GEORGE
A) I would be willing to pay a subscription fee to a website that has verifiable information, such as Ancestry.com. I am not going to pay for privacy. That is the right of everyone, and it shouldn't be sold at a price.

B) I'm not clear on what you are suggesting. If you are implying that Geni.com offer users the chance to maintain their own personal tree, while the information they have is uploaded into a seperate "world tree", then my answer is yes. That is acceptable. But unfortunately, that is not an option at the moment.

My complaint, from the beginning, is that most of my own personal tree was wiped out without my consent, and replaced with complete and utter nonsense. Again, I hate to denigrate the work of some of our users, but I repeat, Wikipedia is not an appropriate resource for genealogical research. Period.

This is getting ridiculous. I've had more unauthorized merging issues. I've had members drop all the way down to my 7th great grandfather, editing everything from birth and death dates, and even changing the parentage.

This is totally unacceptable. What's next? Does someone want to come in and change information regarding my grandfather now? Because I'm sure the educated posters here at Geni know my family better than I do.

I literally have no words left to describe how outrageous this has become.

I don't have any choice now but to cancel my membership with Geni and go somewhere else.

"Wikipedia is not an appropriate resource for genealogical research. Period."
together with
"my family tree goes back over 2,000 years"

Yeah, sure.

Private User thank you very much for the feedback.

I understand your notion towards paying for Ancestry, etc. We fully support that model. We don't currently involve ourselves in that model though. Transcribing documents is a significant process and we don't feel it is in our interest to pursue.

My reasoning for asking the question regarding the "pay for privacy" notion is this: sites like Geni make zero dollars from allowing you to use our great UI or allowing you to store data on our servers if you have a private tree. We lose money on people who use our service for free, no matter how active they are on the site, no matter how many profiles they add.

We make money by offering a subscription for advanced/collaborative features that would only be possible with combined efforts from our users. If every member maintained a private tree, it would be impossible for us to sustain the site because we would not have these collaborative features available in a subscription package.

We *always* want to allow non-PRO users to contribute to Geni as much as possible. To my knowledge, everything that a user can do on Geni *can* be performed for free.

But, please understand that our goal (and all current supporting revenue models) revolve around our vision to create a single family tree for the world, where one person is equivalent to one profile.

If this is something that doesn't interest you, I encourage you to tell me:

(a) How much you would be willing to pay for the software to allow you to do what you want to do privately (we're not opposed to providing this, but we can't do it for free, and we don't offer it right now. And no one is offering a good experience in this arena for free).

(b) How much are you willing to share your data outside of your private collection...because ultimately, without widespread collaboration, genealogy will fail.

Again, thanks for your time and candid remarks.

-George

Hi George.

If the main aim of Geni.com is to provide a collaborative experience, then perhaps that is the type of service I would charge money for. Maybe it would play out like this:

"Want to build your own personal family tree? Use Geni. It's fast, convenient, and best of all, it is FREE."

"Want to view other family trees/profiles, want to link your profiles to the world tree and work with others to help it grow? Now you can, for the low, low price of......"

Is that too naive? (I mean that seriously, not sarcastically.)

Lars, if you have nothing constructive to add, please don't add anything at all. I wasn't disrespectful to you, I'd appreciate it if you weren't with me. Thanks.

Jeremiah, if you already know your family tree goes back 2000 years, then you already have it down somewhere - so you're putting it on Geni - a collaborative genealogy site - expecting them to host it for you - free. George points out that Geni can't afford to offer that service free. Your reply doesn't engage with that at all.

Jeremiah, I wonder if you are aware that you are contradicting yourself. You say "I didn't choose to collaborate with anyone. That's my whole point. I just woke up one morning to find that changes had been made without my consent."
and then you say "Right now I am living in a different country than most of my family, so I opened an account on Geni so that all my family members could work together and/or share information about our family tree."
The nature of Geni is that any of the people in your family that you collaborate with can choose to collaborate with other people and they can choose to collaborate with more people still and so it goes on so that very quickly your tree is accessible by people you don't know. Are you going to say that YOU should be able to share but nobody you share with is allowed the same privelage? What makes you so special? Surely your brother or cousin are just as special.
So you pitched your tent and you said that your family could pitch next to you and invite whoever they wanted and very soon they did and now you are surrounded by tents and it's everyones fault but your own.

Yes, it has it's disadvantages but there are ways to work with these. You can set your preferences in Tree View so that you can only see direct relations. You can set your privacy settings and you can make close family profiles private.
Most helpful of all would be to give a profile url and say what exactly is wrong with the references quoted and upload your sources for that profile. Let's all work to make the information as accurate as possible. As a curator I have left Wiki references on many master profiles because they are what somebody has placed on their ancestors profile and instead of just 'losing their work' I add a more reliable source. If they don't agree I also point out the discrepancies so that these can be researched further. Do you really think this is such a bad idea?

Everyone needs to slow down and appreciate the fact that there's a tremendous opportunity here. With Jeremiah's sources for his deep tree, he'll be able to set the record straight not just for his own family but for millions of Geni users. The curators will, of course, vigorously defend any profile / relationship that's well-documented.

Has Jeremiah's dated and other info really been changed or overwritten? Or is it still preserved in the Conflicting Data area, just waiting to be sorted out?