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The Madness - It has begun
(34 posts)-
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Thanks to Geni's latest "Popular Profiles Enhancements" a lot of the historical profiles are getting LOTS of attention from casual Geni users, who it seems have little experience of what the "big tree" means, or what being in ANY shared tree entails, if they have ever merged a tree at all.
So of course everybody wants to be part of the "popular" tree, and looks for a way to merge with it. The result - merge madness! In the past two days since this feature came out, FIVE different trees have been all merged through a single profile that I manage. NOT one of the five people involved ask me to Collaborate or join Family Group. They just went ahead and merged (finalized). I have NO idea how this is possible (as they show no connection to anyone I know). What this means is that what used to be a carefully maintained tree, is now a huge duplicate mess of a tree that I can do absolutely nothing about. I spent a couple of hours dealing with about 10 profiles, and they are STILL a mess, never mind the hundreds of others... I have invited all of the five, to join my Family Group, but only one even responded.
I'm sure this is happening all over the "big-tree" with other of those most popular profiles. There goes all of the careful work of the "power-mergers". I have changed my "managed profile" settings to the most severe, to hopefully slow this tide. But I doubt that that is enough what with "editor" rights and such. I suggest anybody else who manages these popular profiles does the same, until Geni provides some means/tools to handle these crazy situations.
The News Item
Kelly Jean Jankowiak merged a duplicate profile for Noam .. 2 hours ago
is a nice cute touch, but it doesn't DO any practical good. What we need is a warning screen BEFORE the merge goes through, explaining that in order to merge trees
Congratulations! Your tree was merged with another tree. You are now connected to 28523128 people on Geni.
1) they will be required to accept some form of cooperation (Family Group or Collaboration) from the manager(s) of the tree they are merging with.
2) have to change their profile settings such that people outside their family can actually SEE them (all of the trees merged above are locked up tight).
3) respect the other managers wishes, especially in the "main trunk" areas where literally years of effort have been invested.Basically, what we need is some form of Moderation (yesterday) and tools to merge entire families/trees (ASAP). But in the mean time, I strongly suggest y'all batten down your hatches, and prepare for Merge Hell like you've never seen before!
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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It looks like they have disabled the Popular Profiles list now, but Geni should reconsider having such a list until they have tools for protecting these profiles and their managers.
- Mimi gets a lot of fan mail and requests to get in contact with the celebrities she manage.
- AnneMa get dirty personal messages from people who think some of her managed profiles are contact ads just because it contains a picture of sexy woman
- Queen Elisabeth II and others gets personal messages in their guest book
- Profiles like Jesus and Muhammed needs to be protected for edits, photo tagging and messages in the guestbook.
- Profiles should be blocked for merge requests.
- Managers of disputed profiles get spammed
- There should be a BIG warning if someone tries to connect two profiles in the middle of a line instead of doing it controlled from the top or another endpoint
- There should be a BIG warning if someone tries to merge two profiles in unconnected trees
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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Nothing like coming back from a bit of time off to find something that pisses me off! I can not even BEGIN to weed through the THOUSANDS of collaboration requests and inbox items on Geni!!! Not to mention now I have ANOTHER 10,000+ profile dupes to merge!!! Arghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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Geni should hire a CHNO (Chief Human Nature Officer) to tell them what will really happen when average people get into these nice mechanisms. Shmuelakam and Brox should receive salaries from them for constantly telling them how to fix their own stuff.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
All I know is if collaboration were free, I'd be doing my part to help. Again, this is yet another good reason, to me, why pro is completely insane. I mean, you PAY Geni to fix THEIR stuff. It boggles the mind.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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There is a lot of active mergers, Shmuel for example, that is NOT pro and are doing a great job in cleaning up errors and merging duplicates.
Both Pro's and none-Pro's need the same to be able to help up: Permissions to merge and edit. None-Pro members invite to family group and Pro can in addition invite to collaborator group which gives them access to others profiles and not the opposite, which is quite unfair and the reason why I always also invite to family group if a none-Pro member shows initiative to help with merges.
There is however a lot of other nice features in Geni you get as Pro member, and as I use to say: Drop one coffee per month and you can afford being a Pro.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
As you say, it's unfair that collaboration is one-way. The solution is to make it two-way and free for all. The nice features can keep people paying for pro but let's give permissions to merge and edit to everyone. Family group is no substitute, as it's clearly meant for something else (which is why adding everyone to your family group messes up your front page, address book, etc.).
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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If collaboration was made mutual (two-way), how would everyone feel about us making all existing collaboration relationships mutual. This would mean that anyone you are collaborating with would suddenly have collaboration (editing) rights on your profiles.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
@Noah, mutual should be by choice. Sometime you collaborate with someone who has entered a 100 profiles - you do not necessarily want him to be able to edit your 2000 profiles.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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@Noah I could live with that
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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I'm a supporter of mutual collaboration on *that* profile. Right now, I think collaboration let's me mess with anything non-living in the other tree. It should just be on the profiles where our interest overlaps.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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<p>If collaboration was made mutual (two-way), how would everyone feel about us making all existing collaboration relationships mutual. This would mean that anyone you are collaborating with would suddenly have collaboration (editing) rights on your profiles.
</p>I am not in favor of anyone who doesn't have any skin in the game to initiate collaboration requests. By "skin", I mean true enthusiasts who 1) are able to prove that they are serious enough about genealogy to have created or manage a significant number of profiles (hundreds, if not thousands), OR 2) has paid for an Pro membership for more than a single month.
In other words, people without skin in the game (as described above) should be allowed to accept, but not initiate Collaborator requests.
For the rest (i.e. the more serious lot): Collaborator status should always be mutual when between "enthusiast" or Pro members, and always be one-sided when between Pro/enthusiast and all other users.
Dave K.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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I'm also in favor of mutual collaboration by default, given that you could remove them if you so choose from your collaboration section.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
It seems to me that there must be a way of protecting profiles you 'know' to be correct and don't want messed with and sharing (2 way collaboration) the others similar to how we can 'share' a profile but that doesn't give full editing rights just veiwing rights. I feel a need for both these categories for whilst working on the historic profiles it can be demoralising to get one set of relationships in order only to find a day or two later that someone has managed to undo all the work! On the other hand there may be someone out there that could solve difficulties caused by a third party on my own tree!
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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@Pinkle: I agree. But there is a difference between being CORRECT, and being COMPLETE. I too have many profiles with known correct information in them. But every once in awhile, somebody else comes along with an aditional tidbit of info that I had never researched- like the date of a 2nd marriage, or the place of burial.
I actually wish there was a way to mark each field with a "confidence factor" (e.g, %, 1-5, color G/Y/R)- so that when there is a pending merge, the person who is choosing amongst conflicting data has this additional information available before making a choice of which data to keep and which to discard. If something is marked 100% confident, then that data should be locked- changeable only by whomever entered it.
Not just profiles, but certain connections as well. There are branches of the tree that I have researched extensively. I KNOW that I've got the connections correct. But nevertheless people keep merging replicates of GEDCOMs with errors and clobbering my hard work getting everything connected correctly. So I want to be able to rate the confidence in connection accuracy as well.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
Geni Team
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@dkaleita you're thinking very much along the same lines as we are. We're driving this toward a "confidence factor" on citations to sources.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
@Mike this can't happen soon enough! Looks hopeful though.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
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Everytime I go to my Home Page see 'Are You Related?' to Queen Elizabeth or Francis Ford Colla or whoever, I get so damned annoyed that I wish there is a little X on that feature that I can disable it.
I waited for a while to see the value to this..if someone in very plain simple English can explain it to me...I would be forever beholding.
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
@ragjaws - if this isn't useful for you, I would suggest hiding it with a simple Greasemonkey script
// ==UserScript==
// @name Hide Geni ad banners
// @namespace <http://taguri.org/>
// @description Hides popular profiles link
// @include http://www.geni.com/*
// ==/UserScript==function addGlobalStyle(css) {
var head, style;
head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
if (!head) { return; }
style = document.createElement('style');
style.type = 'text/css';
style.innerHTML = css;
head.appendChild(style);
}addGlobalStyle('#popular_profiles_home { visibility: hidden ! important; height: 0px ! important; }');
Posted 2 weeks ago # -
ragjaws, the value is to Geni: you get excited that you can prove you're related to (celebrity) and so you sign up to pro to find out how. Geni said in another thread that they want to make it useful to everyone but didn't elaborate on how. I'd like to know how but, to be honest, I'd rather just disable it too.
Posted 2 weeks ago #
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