Fostering Collaboration - An Impossible Dream?

Question

I get sad sometimes when I see people failing to live up to the WikiTree Honor Code.  In particular in not collaborating with other WikiTreers.  Some people try to hoard "their" profiles so nobody else can work on them, and contra-wise people try to add "sources" without knowing what they're doing and creating work for others others who were minding their own business.  Then when these archetypes butt heads, sparks fly, and one or both of them rush off in a huff And often people who see what's happening and try to fix the problem just stir things up and make them worse (I sometimes do this last myself.)  Are there things we can do to make things better, or is it ultimately an impossible dream to have so many people with their own ideas and interests work together collaboratively?

Comments

Dave, I've been pretty disheartened myself lately.

Personally, I think that style guides and standards assist collaboration.  They provide a framework, ideally with a clear line of sight to the mission of wikitree-- within which we can collaborate more effectively. Without them, it seems like chaos and anarchy.

I realize not everyone concurs with this view.

I also can't help but wonder how recent political events in the US are affecting our states of mind.  No one's really  talking about it and probably for good reason but I'm sure seeing that stress in many other areas of our society. Can't help but think it's showing up implicitly here.

---

I hadn't thought of that. By I do know my stress levels are sky high and I've stopping watching the news and spend that time on WikiTree instead. I escape into the past.

---

Emigration is the only answer.  Can't somebody go and discover a new continent or something?

---

Jillaine,

Well, since you bring up one unmentionable I'll bring up another.  Our pastor yesterday had a sermon on Law vs License and how neither are good.  Instead, structured freedom or Gospel or collaboration (love your neighbor) is the way to go.  But that's hard to have happen.  That's' why seeing one more example of working to cross purposes gave rise to this question.  I don't have a definitive answer, though I think a greater emphasis on training and testing might help.  G2G is supposed to do that sort of thing, but I've been surprised to see that many people almost never interact on G2G while having large numbers of contributions. Maybe a lot of them read but never post, but that's not really healthy either.

---

I've also been very aware of Leadership/Staff's absence from g2g lately.

---

Spoke too soon; I see Chris W has responded below.

---

ahem...:-)

---

And Mags has joined us! (I've also seen Abby in g2g today... glad you all woke up after a tryptophan-induced Thanksgiving coma... )

:-)

---

Having experienced the apathy recently, I can well understand folk becoming frustrated. Wiki, where genealogists collaborate .... it this supposed to be a joke ?

Dave Dardinger, are you rather assuming that everyone shares your religious beliefs ? This is a multi-national site, every religion lays claim to be the sole custodian of the truth.

At times I am so glad that I am atheist.

---

No, I wasn't assuming others share my beliefs.  I was explaining where I was coming from, but I explicitly stated I didn't have an definitive answer.

Answer 1

I don't know.I really try to collaborate as much as possible. But it gets so tiresome dealing with profiles that have only one source and it's an ancestry tree.  Or cite facts that are real, but couldn't possibly belong to the profile - like a person who died long before the civil war having the record of a person with the same name civil war military record cited.  Or a person who died in the very early 1600s being born in Boston. I suppose a piece of it is that a love of genealogy doesn't come with a knowledge of history.

Answer 2

Hi Dave,

I work in the field of Open Source Software. This area is extremely collaborative by nature. I can see where it is definitely possible to achieve this.

However, even Open Source Software is not some egalitarian utopia. It does take effective leaders to set some guidelines and principles for each project, in order to enable that collaboration and foster real growth. 

Even with that, people will always be people, and some people can't set aside their emotions long enough to figure out how to play nicely with others. There are some that just don't understand, and will never understand, what WikiTree is all about. So they will project their wants and desires onto something that, in reality, doesn't match that.

There seems to be this recurring theme that people want to adhere to some standard. For some reason, it seems that genealogy attracts people that have a "perfectionist" streak. Not always, but I've seen enough of it here already. 

In the absence of clear guidelines or standards on how to do certain things here, then conflicts develop. We need clear leadership here. Sometimes people need to make a stand on certain things. 

Sometimes, I don't always see clear leadership. Quite a number of threads on the forum have pointed at confusing guidelines. Yet they somehow don't seem to get fixed or resolved. It's not even clear as to who is responsible for clarifying guidelines, or even what the process is. It seems to remain a mystery, and it just sits.

And certain processes are cumbersome too. Merging can take up to 30 days to be approved. There's some arcane process for dealing with unresponsive managers, and also takes a while.

I understand the need to try and work with people and that can take time. Sometimes I get the impression that there is a concern about treading lightly around people. I wish there was a bit more balance. But then it would go back to clarifying rules, guidelines and procedures where there are inconsistencies and confusion.

You still need to have a good structure, and clear, consistent leadership, to have effective, working collaboration.

 

Comments

Hi Eric,

I agree with you and Jillaine that clear rules help avoid conflicts. Feel free to directly bring something to my attention if you notice problems arising because a rule is unclear.

You can also help develop the rule: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Developing_New_Rules

Chris

---

P.S. Our conflict resolution procedures are intended to help identify where policies are unclear or missing. If this isn't happening as well as it should, we'll have think about why.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Problems_with_Members
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Conflicts

---

Eric,

Speaking of merges, I initiated one yesterday which should go pretty quickly.  Strangely enough I'd entered a new profile and that same day the other party entered the same person.  Actually it wasn't too unlikely, because we'd been in contact on the same family.  But I don't know if she missed the one I'd entered, or there's a delay on others seeing a new profile someone's entered.  Anyway, I looked at the possible matches on my watchlist and noticed a couple of clear matches I need to work on.  One is a different LNAB so I need to check and see if the other spelling or the one I have is the proper spelling of that person.  The other is one of those super common names - some Samuel Clark(e) or something like that.  Unfortunately I can't ignore that one since he's an ancestor of mine.  Ah, well.  A geneologist's work is never done.

Answer 3

Collaborate research has to have both rules and a starting point.  Some people regardless of what they claim are not really TEAM players.  I understand there must be a balance between privacy and collaboration, freedom and equality.  Things you thought you know about your family history must be tempered by things others know about your family history after all sometimes their family history intersects with yours.  We need to be working for WIN/WIN situations instead of settling for WIN/LOSE situations.  I try to help others as much as possible while maintain the privacy of living people.  I have found profiles over 150 years old that are still not open profiles.  True, some of these are public profiles and not private ones.

I'm not out to sabotage other people's profiles with misinformation either, but sometimes I've found information and sources on their profiles that they never had and they could help build up my family if they would give me in the information I need.

It's a matter of cooperation and education.  To create a collaborative family history, one has to be diligent and receptive.  One also has to surrender some freedom to work for the betterment of the larger family tree.

Answer 4

WikiTree might need to decide whether it's a platform or a project.

Putting it another way, when doing stuff on here, are you doing it for yourself or for other people?

It makes a difference when considering rules, standards and enforcement.

Comments

Hi RJ,

I'd be interested to hear you elaborate on this. I've often debated whether the average WikiTreer (or the most productive WikiTreer?) is motivated by an altruistic desire to grow a free, single family tree and help others. Is that what you're getting at?

Chris

---

I'm not sure I am in the same place with WikiTree as when I started. I can tell you I began here for two reasons. 1. Frustration with Ancestry.com. 2. Being reasonably sure I am the last of the family genealogists. My most likely (only) successor is 5 yers old and I am 62. So if the research of 4 generation of amateur genealogist were to live on, it was not going to be on Ancestry unless I  put in my will 20 years of Ancestry membership in her name and still no guarantee. Here I know it has a home (in theory) forever.

---

Wikipedia is a project to produce a product.  It has a lot of rules (implemented and enforced by a lot of templates and bots) to standardize the product and remove the personal style of contributors.  And there are no Article Managers, at least in theory.

But Wikipedia has a lot more users than contributors (by several orders of magnitude).  The contributors presumably enjoy what they do, but they don't usually expect to be the major users of their own contributions.

A platform on the other hand would provide resources and facilities to support large numbers of users pursuing their own aims and objectives and personal projects, with no more rules than are essential to minimize interference.

---

Thanks, Susan. Ensuring that family information I've collected remains available is a big part of why I contribute as well.

RJ, thanks for the explanation. Without a doubt, WikiTree, like Wikipedia, is intended to be a "project to produce a product."

But it's a big, sprawling project. In many ways, it's larger than Wikipedia's, even though their product has a larger audience.

Think about a profile for a grandparent or great-grandparent. The potential audience for that profile is how many people? Even the most obscure articles on Wikipedia are likely to have larger audiences. As you say, they have a lot more visitors than contributors. We do as well, but it's a smaller ratio.

If we had no privacy controls, if we only had profiles of non-living people, I think we'd be more like Wikipedia. Like WeRelate.

By the way, I know you don't have your living family on WikiTree, or not connected to you anyway. That's fine. But it's worth remembering that you use WikiTree in a way that's very different from the average contributor.

We have a lot of different types of contributors on WikiTree. I think that's OK.

We do need standardization and rules to reduce conflicts, especially as you get into more widely-shared profiles. And we have to expect conflicts. They're inevitable. Even on Wikipedia, with all their rules.

Answer 5

I don't have any actual statistics, but it's my impression that a significant chunk of this problem results from new members diving in without having done a lot of background research.  They may be familiar with other genealogy websites, but have missed the points about collaboration, a single tree with one profile per person, and expectations sbout sourcing.  Once the light bulb goes on and they decide to stay, such members often cease to be a part of the problem.  There is, however, a continuing new supply of such members, so I doubt that the issue can ever be fully resolved.

Answer 6

It's a learning process. We all start somewhere different with different expertise. I am just starting to meet other people working on the same trees. It is fun to connect with different branches and link to existing trees. I have proposed several merges, some of which have happened, some sidelined while someone researches minor differences, some sitting in limbo for a month waiting. I realize that people want the highest of standards, but when you see all the trees created with imports and few references it is hard to take the strict rules seriously. There are goals and a work in progress. Still, the trees are a starting point to prove or disprove. The trees fill the vast void and give you a place to start looking.   I would like to see more work on linking to sources, all kinds, to help with the sourcing. It is interesting working in small towns where the family lived for a few hundred years. There is a lot of intermarrying and people are in a few local cemeteries. You can go back and forth between cemeteries and trees and vital statistics and printed genealogies. New England has so many genealogies. It seems the battle areas are in working on the people that first settled that are in everyones trees. I am not interested in fighting about the detail of these, I want to see the broad scope of what happened to families over the years. It is still fun, when it isn't it will be time to move on and let others deal.

Answer 7

No need to get depressed about the state of Wikitree. It takes some people longer than others to realize that the tree (singular) is ours collectively. Those that continue to think of it in terms of my tree vs your tree eventually find a more suitable venue for their efforts & leave Wikitree.

Because of this pattern, sometimes you might feel like you take two steps forward & one step back. However, making Wikitree accurate is not a race. Viewing  the trend line towards accuracy should give you some satisfaction & reassurance that this will continue.

Comments

Doug, I agree with one caveat. WikiTree is my tree, it is my tree of choice. I bring to it my family research. So I have an invested interest (by my time)  in every single profile. Granted my investment is stronger on people I am related to. And when new people to WikiTree arrive and turn a accurate well-sourced profile into a mess, I get pretty protective of my investment.

---

Everyone has an invested interest in their ancestry. Many of us have invested thousands of hours improving Wikitree for everyone. But the term my tree has no place on Wikitree.

I also have family trees on Ancestry which are mine, but here, it is different. There is only one tree. The fact that we put our information here invites collaboration & the mistakes that come with it.

---

Hi Doug, i think you misunderstood or I didn't phrase it well.

 I am a disability advocate. We are a diverse bunch. But there are some who have one disability and all they care about is that disability. They rarely advocate for others with other disabilities. They are people with a disability and not a part of a disability community. (That correlates with ancestry)  

Than there are others who may have one disability and advocate for all with disabilities and consider themselves members of the disability community. One community. My community. That's how I think of WikiTree.

Isn't that you feel? What a I missing here?

---

I think we both share similar views Susan.