Commentary on the Changes to the FamilySearch Family Tree

During the past few weeks, I have been tabulating the changes to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree that I have been receiving by email because I watch 302 people. If you want to know all about this process of watching individuals in the Family Tree, please look at the following

https://www.familysearch.org/ask/salesforce/viewArticle?urlname=Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-the-Watch-List&lang=en

Watching individuals in the Family Tree is a basic function of the program that allows you to monitor any and all changes made to anyone you are interested in maintaining. Unfortunately, many people focus on the changes as threats or intrusions rather than as a benefit of the program in including more people and assisting in correcting traditional information about our families. One of the most important factors in decreasing the number and frequency of these changes involves adding supporting sources, stories, photos and other memories. Watching your portion of the Family Tree is the next most important way to see a decrease in the number of changes.

My question was exactly how many of those ill-advised changes I was seeing weekly in the Family Tree were made without providing a source for the information added or removed. After weeks of tabulating the changes, the average settled on a surprising 87%. Yes, 87% of the changes were made without a supporting source. I decided at this point to add a commentary and suspend the review until sometime in the future if the changes continue to be a challenge.

The bulk of the changes observed were made to a very small number of people. In fact, of the 475 changes made to those on my Watch List during the weeks of my study, 310 of the consequential changes were made to only 11 people and one person had 156 consequential changes. Although I did not keep track of the corrections, my impression was that almost all of the unsupported consequential changes we corrected in a very short time. However, those individuals with most changes were mostly a disaster because the information on any given day could be inaccurate.

In all, during the time period of the study, there were 81 people with a combined total of 475 significant changes and 394 of those changes were unsupported by any mention of a source. The time involved for one person to check every single change would be overwhelming. The only thing that saved the data from ultimate destruction was that there were a number of people evidently watching these individuals and correcting the unsupported changes.

Unsupported, consequential changes made to the Family Tree are, in fact, a major issue with the future viability of the whole Family Tree project. I cannot see any way that I can measure how many new people were added to the Family Tree during the study period, but I can only assume that the new people are being added with about the same level of lack of supporting documentation.

As I have stated many times in past blog posts, the problem is not with FamilySearch or the Family Tree: the Family Tree is the solution, not the problem. The basic issue is how to maintain a viable and accurate Family Tree and still maintain an open and collaborative structure? As I have also written before, there is a need for a rating system to rate the credibility of any information in the Family Tree similar to the widely used "star" system and there is also a need for some further requirements helping people to realize that a source is necessary for making changes or adding new information. I am thinking that one way this could be accomplished is to mark any information added or change made without a source statement as unreliable. So, if I entered a birth date and failed to reference a source, the entry would be marked with a red exclamation mark and listed as unreliable. The star system could also be extended to listed sources so that researchers could express opinions on their reliability.

There are probably other solutions that could achieve the same results, but there is a real need to get some control over the lop-sided addition of unsupported information.