Thank you for the profile creation improvement

Question

Thank you to those responsible for the recent improvement for creating profiles. Having a prompt to add a place of birth or place of death will make it so much easier to search whether a profile already exists when creating a new profile.

Answer 1

I do hope that 1) people will use the "Uncertain" option when they are guessing a birth place, and 2) that it will be taken as a guess and nothing else by members and visitors alike who come across the profile. In my experience guesses tend to be taken as facts by the next copycat in Internet genealogy.

That being said, I think that on the whole it's probably better to guess a birth place than to leave it blank. Upon creation time, most of the false matches that are dangerously close to being conflated with mine have no birth place and no parents. Those are the ones that I have to check up and mark as false matches. For the ones who have a birth place, it's usually very easy to see that they are different profiles.

Comments

Something as simple as United States or Norway is all that is needed.

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Jelena would disagree that it is always possible to even guesstimate a country / continent.

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Sometimes I have no idea if one of my profiles was born in Norway, Denmark or Sweden. But now I have to assume something.

Philosophically, I'm also pondering the difference between an educated guess and an unwarranted assumption.

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I'm wondering whether a guess of "Europe" would pass muster.

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You can still leave the locations blank and press "Save Anyway" -- the prompt is just there to make sure you really meant to leave it blank. No need to make a guess.

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I think it's a good idea to prompt for a birth place, but I do have some thoughts about it.

In the current revision round of my profiles, since May, I have actually entered a tentative birth place for all my profiles. But I wish that the interface would present a third option beside "Certain" and "Uncertain", maybe just called "Guess", indicating that there is no real evidence for it. It should also show up as such in the main profile page.

The way it comes across now, IMO, is that the contributor is pretty certain about the birth place, although without direct evidence. I've got some of those too, which rightly belong in the "Uncertain" group, but most are sheer conjecture and should be presented as such.

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if you've made a guess at the place, then add a comment in the Research Notes that it is a guess.