CC7 Intermediate Completion Labels

Question

I'm looking for some way to mark profiles as intermediate levels of connection completeness.

I've been really enjoying expanding out my CC7. I've loved the tools that exist, especially Ian Beacall's excellent CC7 Views. I also love the ability to mark "No More Children", "No More Spouses" and "No More Siblings". My process is going through profiles one-by-one and attempting to research, document and add all of their direct connections. When I believe I have completely researched a person's direct connections, I mark all three and that leaves a clear message that their connections are 100% complete. In a perfect world, I would slowly work out through my circles, researching each person and marking them all 100% complete.

However, of course, we always have brick walls. These are the people that even after extensive research, we cannot find some (or all) of their connections. In the context of CC7, this is not just for direct ancestors, but also for all sorts of connections (like the wife of the sister of my aunt's husband). These people are not completely researched and I would like to come back and check on them from time to time to see if I can find any new records, but I would like to be able to mark/label their profile in some way to indicate that they have been researched to some extent, but are not complete.

Especially, I'd like this label to be visible to apps. Either existing, like Ian's CC7 Views, or to a new app that I might want to make. Without this ability, I am finding these apps to be less useful, because they will keep telling me about the same brick wall profiles that I know are incomplete over and over again. Instead I would love for there to be some way to say: "Yeah, I know they are incomplete, but can you show me the profiles that I haven't even researched at all yet?"

I sort of imagine profiles falling somewhere on a spectrum from direct connections complete to mostly unresearched and it seems that it would be helpful to be able to label these profiles on where we think they are on that spectrum. I imagine there could be many categories that profiles could be placed, but here are the ones that jump to my mind most clearly:

1. Complete. I have evidence to believe that this all parents, children, spouses and siblings have been added.
2. Intentionally Incomplete. I know (or believe) this person is incomplete, but I am not adding all family members for privacy reasons (ex: they are still living).
3. Brick Wall. I suspect (or know) that this person is missing direct connections, but after sufficient research, I cannot find them.
4. Mostly Unresearched. This person was added as a relative of someone I did research, but I haven't had the chance (yet) to investigate them specifically or to add all of their direct connections.

The way I imagine this, all profiles would start in the "Mostly Unresearched" category by default. Then, as I go through my CC7 circles, I would mark each profile with a label (from above) to indicate what intermediate level of complete their direct connections are. The hope and expectation is that after spending some time researching any person, I can move them to one of the "researched" categories (Complete, Intentionally Incomplete or Brick Wall) and then move on. And then I have the clear first goal of simply investigating every one of them to the point where I hit a wall. As I said, I'd ideally want this to be done in a way that apps are able to see. This would, for example allow them to filter down to focussing on the unresearched profiles or to show percentages of my circles that fall into each of these categories, etc.

I don't know what the best way to implement this would be. Categories? Templates? Built into the DB? For app makers, are there any ways of marking that are more (or less) easily accessible to apps?

Another interesting question is how would this work with collaboration? When it comes to people most closely connected to me, I feel that I can pretty comfortably mark them into one of these categories based on my own personal understanding of what they mean. I might be comfortable marking someone as "No More Children" if their obituary lists all children I have found and no more. However, I imagine that some people might have different ideas of what counts as 100% Complete. For these situations, I assume the best approach would be to add comments into a "Research Notes" section to describe why you think the person is Complete or if they are Brick Wall, where the research became stuck, etc.

Answer 1

With "Missing Links", I added a "hide" option for sort of the same purpose -- to hide people who were missing relatives but where I had no more research leads or where I didn't want to add their living family members. This used a local database in the user's browser.

The problem with a local db is that other users can't see it, so doing that probably isn't a solution for CC7. A category might be the best way to mark these.

Comments

Aha, thanks Jamie, great to know this exists in Missing Links! I would love to get this into profiles in some broadly visible way so that others can see them, different apps can see the same view and I don't lose them if I change browser, clear my browser cache, etc.

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Missing Links is going to be replaced by CC7 Views (just because they both basically do the same thing, but ML is much less efficient), so I'd definitely like to come up with something like that for CC7 Views (and other apps).

I'll let other app developers (and maybe the templates and categorization projects) chime in though on what they thing would be best.

Answer 2

Good idea. I basically agree with the four categories you propose. In the perspective of making the Tree grow through new connections, the last one (mostly unresearched) seems to me the most important one. Be it for each personal CC7, or from the Tree global viewpoint, finding easily the profiles which offer extension opportunities would be great.

Wikipedia uses the word "stub" for articles needing further research. Could also be called "bud" in its original (botanic) meaning, but not sure how it would be perceived given the various other meanings this word has taken.

Comments

Perhaps Twig 

Answer 3

I think this is a good idea in terms of adding categories.  The apps can get a profile's categories via the API, so this could definitely be used in CC7 Views.

Comments

There's a requirement "If a category could contain millions of people create a narrower subcategory." How would that be handled?

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That's a very good question.  I want to say that these could be extra maintenance categories, used like other maintenance categories (i.e. "Australia, Mostly Unresearched"), but this would probably upset the project leaders and coordinators who would probably suggest that this would be stepping on their toes and creating much more work for them.   

Having said that... I think that these could be extra maintenance categories, used like other maintenance categories like "Australia, Needs Profiles Created" (for example) (i.e. "Australia, Mostly Unresearched").  We'd need project leaders as a whole to agree that this is a good thing and that it wouldn't be creating more work for them but helping people classify which profiles need more work and which don't.

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Looking (and thinking) again, it seems that categories exist for #3 and #4 already.  

#3 There are already 'Brick Wall' categories.   https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Family_Brick_Walls .  It's surname-based rather than location-based, but maybe using this would work.

#4 Just looking at the top-level list here - https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Maintenance_Categories - there may already be some appropriate categories, including Needs Biography, Needs More Records, Needs More Research, Needs Profiles Created, and Needs Research.  I imagine that not all lower level categories have each of these, though, and some of them do some to overlap.  Maybe it requires the creation of more of these (maybe 'Needs Research'?) where appropriate. 

That leaves #1 and #2.  

#1 Maybe this could be done by the editor checking all of the checkboxes in a profile.  The app could go "if all of the checkboxes are checked AND all of the important fields are filled AND the LNAB is not Unknown --> mark as 'Complete'."

#2 A new location or surname-based category? 

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I'm a little worried about the complexity here if we have to automatically subcategorize in an app :( I wonder if there could be an exception to this "no million person category" for cases where the category is basically a label.

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For your #2 point, Intentionally Incomplete, there could be a category created called

[[Category:Needs Living Profiles Created]]

which would indicate that there are more profiles to be created, but currently the person is living.  A research note would be in order stating what type of profile was needed, e.i., spouse, sibling or child and if known the number of each to be created.

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{{Unsourced}} does add a category that could contain millions.

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Thanks, Chris. Is your point that this idea of Shawn's is a winner? It would simplify things to have these four simple categories.

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Possibly for this reason, the template page advises:

You can enter {{Unsourced}} without a parameter, but it's best to enter a country, state, province or other place name.

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Yes. In the same way, we could add this simply (top-level style, if that's not a problem) or use location or surname things as I mentioned.

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Ian, don't ask *me* what my point is. :-)  I guess it's just that the categorization idea shouldn't be ruled out.

Parallel to {{Unsourced}}, we could consider proposing a Research Note Box for Needs Research with parameters for sub-categorization. To Bernard's point elsewhere, it would be like "stub" on Wikipedia.

My thoughts here aren't well considered. I will say that we have talked about doing some sort of database tracking for "genealogically complete" indicators for years, but I can't imagine us doing it internally any time soon. Too many questions that the community would need to discuss and too many other priorities.

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If we're not too worried about the size of categories, I think Shawn's idea is a good one.  I do think we could use the existing categories more, too, however, and  whatever comes of this idea, there will be changes to CC7 Views in the near future to use the existing categories.

Answer 4

Maybe you could look at Personal Categories ?

Comments

It looks like it would have to be personal categories, as the CC7 relationship starts from each member, so one person's CC7 needs more research (or family added) will not be another persons.

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Unfortunately there are restrictions on personal categories. In particular, they are not supposed to be permanent on Open profiles. Although this has not yet received discussion and approval as a policy, it could be a problem in future.

Do not use personal categories on Pre-1700 Profiles or Project-Protected Profiles. They are generally only recommended for use on Private and Public profiles. When used on Open profiles, their use should be considered temporary. That is, only use the category for as long as you need it. When you are done your personal project, remove the personal category from the Open profile.

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I doubt many people will have a CC7 going back beyond 1700, I'm mid 60's and my CC7 appears to be all post 1700, and if someone is categorising for CC7 research purposes that's not permanent (as long as they remember to go back and remove the category),

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Personal Categories are definitely possible here, but I'd prefer something global. Whether a profile has all direct connections or not isn't specific to any user. The only thing specific to the user is whether or not that profile is in their CC7. While I talk about this in the context of CC7 in my most, nothing restricts it to that, you could use it for CC8 or circles around other profiles, all people in a category, etc.

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But wouldn't category 1 "Complete" be intended as permanent?

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Yes, my intent is for this to be permanent. It would be something like the "No More Children" button. Many people wouldn't set it, but if someone wanted to be clear and thorough, the would set "Complete", etc.

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So your use of "Complete" only means the "connections" are complete.

So you just need to use the following category:

[[Category:Needs Profiles Created]]

If a profile doesn't have that category, then it is assumed complete.

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That category means it is known that profiles do need to be created, which is not the same as not knowing whether profiles need to be created.

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If it's just for marking when all relationships have been added, would a "Complete" marker be needed? If a person has both parents and all 3 "no more..." boxes checked, then that is basically the same as "Complete".

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I agree Jamie that we don't need a new category for complete, we could use (both parents added and all 3 "no more ..." boxes checked) for this. That said, I could imagine a category being useful here because (1) that could make it more consistent with the other levels or (2) apps might have easier access to categories than these check boxes?

Specifically for (1), if I start documenting this process for others to use and it involves this odd mix of checking boxes or adding categories depending on the situation, that might be confusing. I don't know if that's a big problem, people deal with many idiosyncratic things on WikiTree :) but just food for thought.

As for (2), I don't really know how easy or hard that is from apps. In general, I'd like to make this as simple as possible for app developers to access so that new apps could use it too without a ton of complicated logic!

Answer 5

For Complete, you don't mention parents.

Are you considering a profile Complete, if it doesn't have both parents entered?

Comments

No! It needs all direct connections including parents. I just forgot to mention that. Updated my post to add them.

Answer 6

Categories bring along maintenance costs in terms of the volunteer effort to create, organize, maintain and monitor them.

How about a complete check as part of the Bio Check app? Something like the Style Issues column where you get content like Missing Father, Missing Spouses Status, Missing Death Location? That way in one table you get sourced and style and completeness and you can switch to the summary report for the count of sources and inline references. And you can do this for CC# or # ancestors or watchlist

Comments

But Kay how would Shawn indicate to BioCheck which profiles he has already decided are type 1, type 2 or type 3? If I understand his goal correctly, he wants to avoid being told repeatedly about the same profiles.

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Kay, could you tell me more about the maintenance cost here? I know that for most categories they would need monitoring and human work, but my thought is that these categories wouldn't since they are really more like a sticker or tag on a profile indicating what a user thinks is true about the connectedness.

Answer 7

Very interesting idea, Shawn, and a great plan to organize your research!  (I suspect your desk must be much neater than the cluttered mess which is mine!)

As others have responded, and you wondered about, I think Personal Categories sounds like the way to go.  As Ian suggested, that is something that app developers can then grab onto from the API and do something with.

I actually have something built into the Fan Chart in the tree apps collection that will do that for you.  This past summer I added a feature to allow you to Add Badges to each ancestor's wedge, based on Categories or Stickers assigned to their profiles. (You can find this option in the GENERAL tab).  SO ... if you have a Personal Category for Needs More Research or Done Enough or COME BACK SOON ... or however you structure it - you could add that badge to quickly see where you have work to do.

The disadvantage of course is that it's most likely the direct ancestors in the fan chart that are best sourced already.  HOWEVER if this is something of value, the same approach could be added eventually to other apps.  The one I'm working on now allows you to build out a super big (and wide) family tree.  I've wondered if adding badges to it would be useful ... perhaps ... you make a good case for it.

 - Greg