ATTENTION Curators, please assist

Right you are David!

http://www.geni.com/merge/resolve/6000000008630775544

I can resolve data and work on the main profile a bit if people like. But I'll wait to hear back.

Wow, Erica. that's a great example where two different people got merged into one person. I get frustrated when that happens, as well.

My life is all about the UNmerge now. :<

People really need to be more careful on matching their merges.

Erica, Angus is working on that gridlock with William Robert Harris. I encountered it in a merge last night and forwarded it to him to try to resolve since he is the curator for it.

SHARON

As far as I know, every genealogy website on the net offers the service of hosting family trees for free. Go check out ancestry.com for one example. And there are tons of free desktop programs that allow this too. But that is not my point.

My point is, again, that changes were made to MY personal tree here WITHOUT my permission. Why is that so hard for some of you to understand? Not only was information changed, but in some cases even paternal lineage! We have some researches here using data that is decades out of date.

Now I don't really mind what people write, or say, or do. But when they blatantly start modifying my information, or deleting it, changing it, whatever, that right there is unacceptable. How can you not understand that? And why would defend it? Why would anyone?

All I'm asking is that somehow, someway, the users here have the ability to maintain a separate tree, while still contributing (if they so choose) to the over-all world tree.

I'm sorry. I just don't agree with the current policy of users being allowed to make changes to other user's family trees WITHOUT PERMISSION. That's not collaboration. It's dictation.

TERRY
Do not make this into a semantical argument. Yes, I opened an account here with Geni so my family and I could share information regarding our family tree. That does not, however, imply that every other user here can make changes to my tree without my permission.

If you want to merge my profile with yours, how about asking me? Is that really so hard to understand? If you want to change the the paternal lineage of someone on my family tree, why don't you provide some concrete information on why you think the change should be made.

If you want to replace verified birth and death dates with unverified ones, would you care to explain why?

You see, I got none of this. I simply woke up one day to find this nonsense had taken place on MY family tree, without MY permission.

Don't justify this. You know it is wrong.

Jeremiah, I am experiencing it as you who are deliberately not understanding and shouting at me and others. You also appear to be saying pretty rude stuff about other people’s research, without expecting any comeback in return - which is a little naïve.
I must imagine, though, that there are so many people answering you here that it is likely that you feel as though you’re being shouted down too. So, I’m recalling how put-out I felt when my ‘pristine’ tree suddenly merged into a huge ‘other,’ and names and pictures I’d chosen seem to disappear willy nilly as other people edited and added. I too, felt Geni could have warned me up front, and I even wrote and told their help-desk this.
So, perhaps, the point you are making is that Geni isn’t sufficiently upfront about saying they see themselves engaged in an effort to create a world tree through merging? Perhaps Mike and George can answer that one better than I, as the Geni staff are pretty open to tweaking their product to suit their clients’ best needs.

But, we are all clients, and the rest of us are saying that we are here because this site offers an opportunity to share info, in a way that is deliberately very different to Ancestry – which sells info, but not the opportunity to merge it with others’. Your ‘permission’ can logically be taken as given by the fact that you’ve freely chosen to sign up for the Geni merge-model and NOT for the Ancestry model. That isn’t semantics.

This does mean that we all end up quickly learning not to tell people ‘your way is stupid, compared to mine.’ We have even, through lengthy debates, discovered that the ‘right’ way to do genealogy is disputed across countries amongst genealogists themselves, so we end up being pretty careful not to assume ours is the only way. Much work and discussion goes into this, and right now, you have at least 6 curators (all of us managers and paying clients of Geni too!) actively trying to solve the problem that one of us might have inadvertently been the cause of your distress and to fix it for you, if it’s possible.

Specifically - the 'replacement' of your verified birth and death data shouldn't be able to happen. If you have added Sources to your profiles, they will accumulate on the new merged profile. If you feel the new merged profile data is wrong, you can go in and talk to the other profile managers, letting them know you are fixing it and for these reasons. People actually want to assimilate data in order to get to the best. As you know, the more historically accurate sources, the better verified the data can be considered to be - so they'll welcome your input - and, if yours is as patently better than theirs as you feel it is - that will be obvious, and they will be very happy with you doing it.

Sharon, I'm not going to continue to waste your, and more importantly, my time, by typing out lengthy replies. So I will sum it up succinctly, and re-post it until it gets through.

No one should be able to edit my tree or my profiles in any way without my permission.

As your point: "If you want to change the the paternal lineage of someone on my family tree, why don't you provide some concrete information on why you think the change should be made," Can I acknowledge that we think it sounds as though someone owed you more politeness, and we're trying to figure out how it happened. I see you are now my 21st cousin - which means there's a chance the merge went through on my family line. I am going to send that connection to you and Jenna (who is helping you, I think) so you can identify if it is one of those profiles. It is possible that if we identify the initial merged profile we can undo it for you.

I don't want anything done or undone at this point. Just an acknowledgment that no one here has the right to change another user's family tree without permission.

Sorry Jeremiah, we crossed messages there. To summarise succinctly the reply you keep getting:

No one should sign up for a MERGE-SITE who expects to hold as his inalienable truth, "No one should be able to edit my tree without my permission."

We're doing our best to respond to you and to find ways that would help to avoid it happening without you being contacted; but logic says that - given the nature and aim of the site you signed up for - you're demanding a unilateral guarantee that is completely inappropriate.

Okay, we crossed again - and in the meantime I sent you a long list of possible connections that we can look into to try and fix.

But, if you don't want out - then WELCOME cousin :-).
(That was my decision too, after I'd moaned at Geni .)

We need people who are invested in getting things right, so keep participating. We are very much all 'creating the monster together' , so once you have the feel of the thing, maybe you can help find a solution to the problem of never forgetting to be polite vs being on top of enough merges to keep this incredibly enormous tree from dissolving into unusable chaos.

Jeremiah, Geni does not provide that functionality ("No one should be able to edit my tree or my profiles in any way without my permission"). Sorry.

Geni offers a family-based restrictiion (none outside your family group can edit profiles within the 4-generation limit without your permission), but does not offer any complete restriction outside this limit. Other websides do; Geni doesn't.

If you want to continue to build the world tree, please switch to pointing out specific records that you think now have wrong information and see if we can get a correct world tree backed by sources. I know that I've entered information that's in error, and I know that others have - getting to the right information requires that we accept at least the possibility that information that we think is right isn't.

If you want to store information on ancestors that you share with thousands of other people without those other descendants being able to share information - please find another website to do so.

Harald, Sharon, I understand that Geni does not protect the privacy of its users. That is why I complained.

Sharon, Geni did not advertise that my information could be edited by other users. But it doesn't matter. It is not a semantical argument.

To reiterate, no one s

hould be allowed to edit another user's work without permission. This is a complaint I hope Geni will will work as vigorously to address in the future as they have to convince me that what has happened is okey-dokey.

Jeremiah - we are Geni. No-one besides us is going to feel obligated to convince you of anything. If you have issues with collaborative editing, it is you who should be convincing us of why you're here.
Moving on...

Jeremiah...the point of Geni is one tree, that requires merges. If you are not comfortable with merges, move on to Ancestry.com.

Sharon, Anita,

As I've said from the beginning. No user has the right to make changes to another user's tree without consent. Period. No user has the right to usurp the work of another without permission. Period.

I work for Geni and I'd like to clarify a couple things.

Regarding your bottom-line point, Geni does empower its curators to merge public profiles even across disconnected trees. We communicated this policy in an email that went out the second week of December 2010, entitled Building the "Big Tree." For clarity I'd like to quote the relevant portion of that email here:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
"In order to help accomplish this goal, Geni Curators can now merge together duplicate public profiles that are in different trees. Public profiles are distant relatives and ancestors (your third great grandparents and beyond) that may be shared by many other users. As public profiles you’re connected to are merged with their duplicates, you’ll instantly benefit from other users’ research, and maybe even meet some new distant cousins.

As always, we take the privacy of your close relatives very seriously. Profiles for close relatives that you’ve added to Geni are private, which means that only you and your family can view these profiles. Only your close relatives can merge your private profiles, and even if your tree is merged with another tree, your close relatives will remain private to you and your family."
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

In simpler terms, the goal of our site is to build a collaborative, authoritative family tree for the entire world. We give our users a privacy "bubble" around their own profiles (extending up to third great grandparents and out to fourth cousins) but anything above / beyond that is considered by our site to be a) distant enough that you likely do not have any information on those profiles that require special privacy protection, and b) equally close to other users or potential users that they belong to all of us, not just the person who added / manages those profiles.

We take responsibility for our failure to communicate these policies clearly to our users, and I'm sorry if your formerly-pristine tree has now been besmirched with possibly-incorrect information contributed by other users. I hope you'll stay with us and be a part of something really big -- we're working fervently to implement the features our users need to build and maintain the very best quality record of where we all came from, and how we're all connected. I hear your frustration loud and clear, that your tree was merged without your consent or foreknowledge that such a thing might happen on our site. I'd also like to hear what changes to the site you feel we could make to better communicate and ease the process of building the world family tree. I know, too, that if you'll share with the curators the profiles that you feel have been modified in error, they'll work with you to set it right, document it with sources, and if necessary lock the profiles to prevent future mistakes.

@Jeremiah, you are my distant cousin, and I am glad to see you here. That said, I think that the issue here is not going to be solved by all the discussion og right or wrong. Several people have asked you to help correct the errors, since you have documented sources. There are tools to do this with, and the Curators are willing to work with you to do that. By working with Geni to correct the errors you have in your tree through merges, that helps everyone who has the same ancesters. Please consider doing this.

@ Everyone else. This issue is being beaten to death. Either Jeremiah will work with the Curators to help correct the errors, or he won't. Trying to explaine the purpose and focus of Geni is not working here. Please don't waste your time and energy which is needed to do what you do so well - helping those who find a problem to fix that problem. :)

Just as a side-note, for those who have reccomended that Jeremiah move to Ancestry,com...talk about rife with errors...I have spent hours sorting through incorrect information to weed out the tiny bits of fact on that site...I doubt if he would want to go there.

jeremiah - WHY should no one be able to edit your profiles without your premission ? - once you joined into collboration you lost that 'SOLE RIGHT OF OWNERSHIP' - and in essence you did GIVE PERMISSION for them to be edited by others - as the "main manager" of a profile I believe you have the final say of the information that stay's within the profile whether it is accurate or not on the top of some of some the profiles i have is a notation of control and i have right of who edits them - its not on all of them -

You have the right to choose the data you wish ti remain on a profile - when you finish the merge by clicking "reslove conflicting data' and choosing the most correct data that is presented -

Further more Geni has been VERY VERY CLEAR in their OBJECTIVE of the concept of 'ONE BIG WORLD TREE' - during 2010 its been stated over and over in many of the discussion areas and mad e very clear that the goal is 'one big tree' - more so than when I began on 26 Nov 2009 - shortly after joing less than a week I freely entered into collboration on my Smith - Hinckley line and it tooks less than a couple of days to make totaly choas out of it - by 2 weeks it was a totaly night mare - by the end of the year it was totaly diaster and a nighmare in hell with up to 12x's I got no help, no clear answers from Geni reps other than the repeated 'dump your tree and leave or start over under a differnet e-mail' to me that solved nothing - and why should i freely 'dump my tree" just for another to pick up after 6 months to a year? One suggestion at a time from Geni reps - I got some control back - first was to SHUT OFF ALL collobratorators - that was simple i only had ONE (but she had hundreds) but that did not help as our profiles were still merged and the mess was avalaching daily - -
the next instruction was to follow all the yellow triangles and blue dots and either merge or refuse to merge - - that did not help at all even created greater choas - - - finally I was told to chase the green dots with x's and to break them up if possible by now some of theses ranged as high as 12x's - - the Geni rep said to break these merges up and that i would 'regain my profile - MAYBE' but I was not warned that in doing so that I would become one of the 'MOST HATED' and OSTERZIED person of GENI - only 2 people came forward to help me clean up my tree - and it took four months 24/7 with less than four hours sleep Geni consummed my life - to get all my profiles back - except for one family of 4-8 people before I was conjouled back into collboration and i pulled off all profiles that were not of the Smith Hinckley lines and delicate worked a lineage from me with only the needed profiles to keep connected. 'one parent as unknown' up to the gulick/stoker line which had to be left also

Now we have curators - THANK GOODNESS - no THANK GOD - they have diligently worke don the upper tree which has caused the havoc -

i have not been to this section of my tree since april 2010 - only to peek - afraid to look at it - I don't really care at this moment to do anything with it -

I guess even tho I have become one of the 'MOST HATED' and OSTERZIED person of GENI - I am going to stay and stick around and long as I can to see what the 'BIG Tree" comes to - also with the computer problems I have had since 1997 its a place to put my data to preserve it in some small way - but I am keeping my orginals files and doing another set in TNG ...

Perhaps the Jeremiah discussion could be taken elsewhere so that those of us who actually need help from curators are able to get messages to them and they are seen and answered?

You know what would be cool? If geni could create a 'shadow' of a tree that mirrors the info in the big tree project where there are multiple managers or only one. The information each of us added by gedcom or entering each profile wouldn't change, just the big tree, so both sets of info can be seen, personal stuff each of us enters and the stuff that we choose to mergefrom the big tree, so we can see where our original work leaves off and the shadow of the big tree project begins. Info can be added to your 'tree' at your discretion and when you click on the 'shadow', it reverses. Your personal stuff is the shadow, and the big tree is in the light, showing the current info with curators notes etc. I decided to dive right in the pool and see what I could find, but I'm looking for information for a feature length film I'm writing a screen play and found much more. I can see the frustration that many folks (distant cousins) have when all their work suddenly and without warning- changes! Happened to me. So, lets brainstorm to create a way to keep our individual stuff while also being able to learn more and collaborate in the big tree and pool projects.
btw- love you guys from Oregon! (still amazed to find all of you and to know how we are all connected. had this dream about it a few dozen times since I can remember... but that's another story!)

Anita, was there something you needed help with today?

Hi all, I am new to Geni, and for a project for Cub Scouts, my Son and I documented his family tree, back to the original Lee. the problem is now, the tree has been merged several times over, and we are in need of the original version for his cub scout presentation. Does anyone know how to get back what we entered? Any help will be most appreciated!

Francine in 'Tree View' you can set your preferences to only see a certain number of generations and you can also set it for direct relations only. This should help for your son's presentation.

Hey Francine, here's another take on your dilemma.

Depending on if you actually have to extract the data out from Geni or not, there are probably several ways to go about it.

1. If you know that you have to get the data out of Geni, the easiest way to showcase a particular bloodline—if Lee is a blood relative—is for your son to export a GEDCOM-file with the Blood Relatives option selected and later polish/clean the path in some regular desktop genealogy software and get a customized printout with all the details you want to show.

2. However, as a Geni Pro-member, you could pin a particular profile to see the relationship path in between two individuals. Shifts in bloodlines are displayed with shifts in colors. Currently the path calculating algorithm is 'lazy' and usually only shows the shortest route between two nodes, i.e. it does not stay on the blood track if it finds a shortcut. Still, if you only need a visual representation of the path between your son and Lee, you could ask a Pro-member you know—or even better: a Curator—to simply fetch you a screenshot of the necessary paths. Alternatively, you could start a Pro-trial to be able to grab screenshots yourself.

3. If your son is permitted to, and also has a possibility to access the web during the presentation, another way would be to showcase the paths and profiles in question live on Geni, perhaps utilizing Geni's project feature as a base from where to display the intro/presentation page, the collection of needed profiles, etc. — in a relevant way.

These are my tips, but there are most likely other ways to go about it as well, of course. Here are some links related to what I wrote above:

GEDCOM Export
http://www.geni.com/gedcom

How To: Find Other People’s Relationship Paths
http://www.geni.com/blog/how-to-find-other-peoples-relationship-paths

How To: Create a Genealogy Project
http://www.geni.com/blog/how-to-create-a-genealogy-project

How To: Try Geni Pro for Free
http://www.geni.com/blog/how-to-try-geni-pro-for-free

http://www.geni.com/people/Olav-Linno-Po%C3%ABll/6000000000700358965

Very nice tips, thank you very much.

I saved it as a txt document for myself called "How to showcase a bloodline."

I was wondering if you wanted to copy your post into our new Knowledge Center, available to every Geni member?

http://geni.zendesk.com/forums/337265-tips-tricks

Hmm, perhaps with a bit of polish, why not. By the way, aren't the KB-articles only postable by staff?

Also, looking at the zendesk contents, it's fairly fragmented into tiny pieces of information—as it has to be of course, easily accessible, understandable, searchable and so on. Simplify, simplify.

But. It might perhaps also be an idea for the future to roll out a couple of best practices to some common, and a bit more elaborate scenarios a Geni user might encounter in their daily doings when it comes to school work, history projects and whatnot — tying together several of the "How To's" and "Do's & Dont's" to better showcase what is actually possible to accomplish with the Geni tools and the extensive data set—but that would be impossible anywhere else where a shared "World Family Tree", collaboration, projects, community and crowdsourcing is not present?

I'm sure you know what I'm getting at. :)

Geni nor anyone else should have the need to say,"One can not go into another persons tree and change, add or take away without permission. It should go without saying. You are doing a fantsastic job Jeremiah. Good Luck!