When I said that this would be and "occasional" blog, I didn't expect that spring pollen plus 2 infections would keep me away from writing for a month!
When I'm under the weather like that, I try to keep going with activities which won't lead me to make mistakes. I'd heard about WikiTree, so I decided to give it a try. This was just transferring my information and offering it to the public, wasn't it? I wouldn't make any real mistakes here.
Boy, was I wrong! WikiTree advises that a new member should start small, so I "trimmed" my GEDCOM and uploaded it. Somehow I managed to upload 3027 individuals — NOT a small amount. (This is only the second GEDCOM I've requested from my software and the first one where I saw the results of the upload.) Data went into the wrong fields!
OK, I could have anticipated this, and it's no big deal. But it does mean that every entry should be edited. If I edit 10 individuals a day, it will take a year to fix this. (Well, 10 entries from the Watchlist will actually be more than 10 individuals since I'm doing husband and wife pairs at the same time; but even if I cut this down to 6 months, that's LOTS of work.)
So, this is all part of the learning process — and I love to learn; so what is my problem? I made what I consider to be a truly BIG mistake, one that goes against my personal principles. In the past, I have never posted public information about family members unless I had AT LEAST supported the information with a census entry or two. You KNOW that in only 2-years of research, I do not begin to have documentation on 3000 names.
This makes editing my WikiTree entries imperative. I must do it as fast as I can. I must find ways to show which data is sustained by research and which is (mostly) hearsay. I must remove some very odd dates I had used in my software as codes to me. (I had forgotten that these codes would become part of the GEDCOM and therefore be thrust upon an uncomprehending world.)
I have put BAD data out for public view! (And I dislike it when folk do that.) I must find ways to warn other users of WikiTree that much of this data is unsupported.
Luckily, WikiTree (as its name proclaims) is a wiki area. People are invited to offer corrections, and I believe most users expect some errors in wiki-data. Still, I have given me a LARGE HEADACHE to contend with.
PS: While I was looking at my WikiTree entries in order to be correct in my reporting, I noticed that each entry is accompanied by a public bulletin board area. So I stopped blogging long enough to add a caution to each individual I have edited today, as well as to my personal entry. I find that I will have completed 30 individuals today. At this rate, I'll catch up in 100 days (3 months).
Here's to facing our frustrations.
Frustrated Sue
I am not familiar with with wikitree...could you delete your tree and upload a corrected one?
ReplyDeleteI was going to say something very similar to Heather. I'd contact WikiTree and ask if you could have the gedcom removed. Explain why. They should be very cooperative.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought about that approach! Thank you for the idea. I will need to prepare a new GEDCOM first, so it would take some time — but a WHOLE lot less time then all the editing would take.
ReplyDeleteThank you both for your suggestions.
Great suggestions. I was simply going applaud you for your determination. Many of us (and I speak personally here) would take a good hard look at the problem and move on to something else. It's important to remember that some of this wonderful avocation/occupation involves real work.
ReplyDeleteFun, fun, fun...
ReplyDeleteI was going to wait and upload my tree to the rootsweb worldconnect site when I 'corrected' all my sources to the 'proper' format but, like you, calculated that it would not be completely done in my lifetime, so I went ahead and just did it. Glad I did - I have made invaluable contacts and, as time go by, I upload updates that fix my source citations as I go along.
Regards,
Theresa (Tangled Trees)