Proposed Revision to Category Structure for the Holocaust Project [closed]

Question

As recommended by the Categorization project in THIS QUESTION, the Holocaust project has set up a free space page to:

1. Identify all issues with current hierarchy drilling down from Holocaust
2. Determine the best solution to these issues
3. Propose modifications to the current hierarchy
4. Solicit discussion of these issues and proposed new hierarchy by representatives of all interested projects, as well as all interested members
5. Culminate with finalization of new structure

The free space page where all the above activities will take place is now open for business - ALL MEMBERS ARE INVITED to check it out and PUH-LEEZ contribute your ideas on how to improve the Holocaust category structure.  We want this to be the mostest bestest structure ever and, unlike Abraham Lincoln, we intend to please all of the people all of the time.

Comments

Thanks to everyone making it a great, historical project!

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Could a Moderator (or Gaile) close this thread, please? There is a newer proposal here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Proposal_for_Holocaust_categories_2023

Answer 1

Thank you for your hard work, Gaile. It is on my list to check when I get home from church tomorrow morning.

Good night.!

Answer 2

So happy to see more logical high-level categories in the structure of the project.

Answer 3

hi Gaile,

Not involved in this project at all, but one suggestion would be to change Immigrants to North America and Immigrants to South America, those are simply too broad and nebulous, too many countries involved.

And what is Stolpersteine?  Would help to have a small definition of what it is so anyone not familiar with this topic can suggest things appropriate to it.

Comments

Can we please, pretty please stop discussing location categories here? Jan, we know your agenda about them very well. You have posted about it multiple places, and it's quite off-topic here.

For the record, and though this is off-topic, look at Help:Categorization#Examples_of_Ways_to_Categorize_a_Profile the first method is "place they were born, lived, married, or died". It's part of the official Categorization help page (it's been for years). Fact is, lots of people love to categorize in this way. If you don't like it, the proper way of doing it is to propose a change, see https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Developing_New_Rules.

Thanks all!

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Yes I.R., in several threads I questioned the benefits of having categories redundant with basic data items. But any contribution not cheering the powers to be is ignored or considered impolite or off-topic. No answers. Only cheering is appreciated.

Be assured, from now on I will not contribute to any discussion on categories, including this one.

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About the difference between ghetto and camp - the term "ghetto" is not necessarily associated with the Shoah, to quote from Wikipedia "The term was originally used for the Venetian Ghetto in Venice, Italy, as early as 1516, to describe the part of the city where Jews were restricted to live and thus segregated from other peoples. However, early societies may have formed their own versions of the same structure; words resembling "ghetto" in meaning appear in Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian, Germanic, Old French, and Latin."

Als, the description "Ghettos were basically existing geographical locations such as villages, towns or cities which used the existing infrastructure to house people and would last from only a few days to a few years." is interesting because it would apparently fit Drancy, which is always called a camp.

@Gaile the Vel d'Hiv Roundup was the mass arrest of over 13,000 Jews in Paris on 16 and 17 July 1942.They were parked in an indoor stadium called "Vélodrome d'Hiver" hence its name. Hardly any of them survived. Not a shining moment in the history of French gendarmerie.

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This where the old adage there is always an exception to any rule. 

Unfortunately I did not expand my original conjecture on Ghettos as existing geographical locations such as villages, towns or cities which used the existing infrastructure. I should have pointed out that it would be sections or areas of those geographical locations where that were separated from the rest of the town, village, whatever.  As your Wikipedia notation quotes about enforced segregation from the rest of the populace, this is why they became known as Ghettos, a segregated area from the general populace.

Using a strict interpretation of the above, actually the Velodrome itself would be considered a Ghetto. However, the use of the term Ghetto is normally associated with those places noted as such in the Eastern zones of German occupation and not the Western Europe. Drancy was what was euphemistically known as an Internement or Detainee Camp.  Camps in the West were not generally called Concentration Camps, though in harsh reality they were, so as not to offend the local populace who might find the actual reason for them as unacceptable. Nazis were afraid of bad publicity in the West. Drancy was a Transit Camp where those who were arrested were kept until relocation to a death or labor camp in Germany or Poland.  Those unfortunate to go there were from all over Western Europe and not just France. 

The Vel d'Hiv was just one aspect of Operation Summer Wind where the Germans started to round up Jews in France and I believe those countries bordering France to the North for eventual deportation. It has become, due to its notoriety, to be recognized as a seminal name for all of the round ups that occurred in France around that time.

This now bring out what to do with those actions in the Western Zone of German Occupation as the nomenclature and direct activities associated with the Holocaust can be slightly different than those in the East.  There were no designated Death Camps in Western Europe outside of Germany.

Camps in the East were labeled Konzentrationslager Whereas those in the West were named Häftingslager or Detainee camps as in the case in Norway.  The Nazis didn't care about propaganda in the East as they eventually wanted to remove all inhabitants for Lebensraum and German colonization.

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Jan

Anything that is entered on Wikitree would fall into unmanaged redundancy as everything is able to be manually changed. So if there is a change in location for example the person editing is responsible for changing all instances of that location, Do they always do that, NO! I have seen categories changed but not location fields and Location fields changed but not Categories.

There are multiple instances where location names are misspelled on profiles (Over 3000 caught by suggestions alone) which a Wikitree+ queries would not likely find. So no method of searching (Either Categories or Wikitree+) may capture every instance of profiles but these two methods complement each other with good and bad points and all are reliant on the data entered by our fellow Profile Managers.

In this instance the question is about Holocaust victims and survivors and your responses had gone off topic into your agenda of not supporting locational categories which is against the Help pages for Categories. I.R. also provided the correct way of suggesting changes so that isn't shutting your opinion down but trying to redirect it into a format that may or may not work(I put that as I can not confirm whatever suggestion you make in that format would be implemented).

Wikitree+ can not confirm that every instance of people that have Birth or Death locations of Amsterdam and Sobibor are related to the holocaust whereas a Holocaust category would as people would not likely add that category without a source that it was accurate. For those that survived Wikitree+ wouldn't find them at all with a simple location search whereas a category would group them.

That is the aim of the Holocaust project to provide a structure which would help people add the correct categories they want to the profiles they manage.

Do the categories have to be on every profile that is related to the Holocaust. No because anything on a profile is subject to the whims of all of us that are Profile Managers and if a certain profile manager does't like to have a Holocaust category on a profile they manage then they have the right not to have it on the profile. A profile manager may decide not to add anything in the Location fields and in that case a Wikitree+ search would not find that profile. It is all subject to what we as Profile managers actually manually add to the profiles.

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I go away for a few hours and lookit how all hell breaks loose - it's just not fair!!!  Now I gotta sit here and knock a bunch of heads together to make y'all play nice in order to accomplish my goal of enjoying the benefit of all the valuable thinking y'all can do so well and all the incredible knowledge that y'all so often and so generously contribute here.  There are two reasons I desperately need to have everyone invested in working toward this goal - because I don't have a whole lot of knowledge of either history or genealogy and because (I presume) we all share a common goal of making WikiTree work as well as possible for the benefit of all humanity - researchers, the general public, and WikiTree members.

I am about to post individual comments dealing with the multiple cans of worms that have been opened during my brief absence - historical facts, the relationship between categories and data items (funny, nobody brought up that the text content of the biography is another redundancy that, immune to automation, may or may not match data and categories), and at least there's one topic that is on my turf - technical workings of databases and search capabilities that are able (or can be built) to maximally exploit data - even though it was only identified as "IT".

Please - I'm going to request that everyone take a time out to give me the opportunity to respond to it all before adding any more.  I will do that in a new "answer" here because this comment chain is getting way too long and if I use comments to a new answer to split all the topics then there will be one place to deal with each of them, without concern about taking this thread off-topic.

I'm begging for your indulgence because I need it badly.  Without going into chapter and verse, some background is that my husband is very seriously ill and has been for 1.5 years.  I cope with - on average - 2 crises per week, most of which literally have life-and-death repercussions.  At this point, it's starting to take a physical toll on me - I have a laundry list of issues (fortunately none that are really serious) literally from head (where I have a growth on my face at the same place where a squamous cell growth was removed 2 years ago literally don't have time to see the doctor about) to toe (where I have a Morton's neuroma that interferes with my balance and hurts when I have been on my feet a lot).  Other than trips to the grocery store, physical therapy, and doctor visits, I have been housebound and my life has deteriorated to the point that WikiTree is - literally - my only social life because it is the only place where I can drop everything at a moment's notice when I need to and do it in whatever time slices are available, without any prior planning.

THANX everyone for honoring this request for time to finish what I have to say before continuing your separate mini-World War III battles!

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According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, several hundred thousand Jews escaped between 1933 and 1939

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/escape-from-german-occupied-europe

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The Sam Waterston movie Miracle at Midnight is about the rescue of virtually the entire Danish Jewish population to Sweden essentially over one night

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IR, it seems like every time I turn around I discover another new (to me) and completely horrible Holocaust story.  Your description of Vel d'Hiv is the newest of these, but thank you for the explanation.

From your description, it sounds like this was a similar event to Krystallnacht (hope I spelled that right).  I had not thought of adding a category for that one, but if we add one for Vel d'Hiv then we should probably have Krystallnacht also and there are other events that might then also be included.  I'm thinking of what happened in Lithuania during a 2 or 3 month period when the Germans invaded it.  For each town they reached, they rounded up all the able bodied Jewish men, marched them out of town into the nearest forest area where they were forced to dig huge ditches.  They were then all put in the ditch and shot.  The following day they brought all the rest of the Jews in the town, shoved them in the ditch on top of the bodies of the men, and shot them, too.  There were at least 20 towns that I know of where this was done … probably a whole lot more.  We don't even know the exact date it happened in each town, but that would be another bunch of categories for each of these events.

I feel like we're being overtaken by "category creep".  Based on other posts about categorization, I have seen the guidance that categories should only be used for things that have genealogical value, so I'm not sure we want to have a large group of categories for each event of this type.

I'm not a good person to be making a call on this because of my lack of understanding of exactly what does and does not have genealogical value, but based on my desire to keep the category structure under Holocaust as simple as possible, unless someone can make a case for the genealogical value of all these categories for all these events, my inclination is to vote no to having a category for Vel d'Hiv.  Maybe a free space page that could be linked to profiles for any people who lost their lives there would be a better way to honor them.

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Gaile, nobody has defined ''genealogical value'' to show that this sort of thing should be excluded.  It is certainly relevant to the people who died in these massacres.  Take things one step at a time, as your project progresses, such can be considered for addition or omission.

Answer 4

NOTE: This "answer" is the first of a few that will split all the tangent issues from comments on a previous answer into separate answers to better organize discussions of each.  I will end the last with a statement to that effect, lifting the moratorium on comments that I requested in order to allow me to spill my guts on all of it.

TOPIC:  Camps and Ghettos - what they are and/or are not
We all agree that there were ghettos and camps, where people of a variety of descriptions, although mostly Jews, were incarcerated/imprisoned/whatever by the Nazis starting a few years before World War II and continuing until the end of it.  Not yet mentioned are that there were also outposts of some of these places, whether they're called that or subcamps or who-cares-what, some of which ended up growing so large that they became separate camps.  Also not yet mentioned is that these camps have been classified - there were labor camps, prison camps, concentration camps, extermination camps, and maybe I've missed mentioning some other types.

I don't want to get into an argument about the definition of "ghetto", nor do I want to see any other people get into it.  All that is relevant to the issue of designing a category structure for the Holocaust project is that there were such places.

Please … OK??? … Thank you.

Answer 5

TOPIC:  Trying to apply the idea of a universal structure plan to fit the category structure needs of all projects.
LJ said, among other things, 

"There should be separate Mid Level Categories for Camps and Ghettos."

I would prefer not to use technobabble peculiar to categorization that has the effect of implying that how category structure for different topics is designed needs to be standardized.  Thus, I don't want to use terms like "mid level" or "landing zone" or whatever else is in this genre.

All I want to talk about is how a category hierarchy can be designed to best suit the needs of the Holocaust project, which would start as subcategories of Category: Holocaust.  The first level of these will not necessarily all have subcategories of their own - I expect that some will and some will not.  It is not etched in stone that structure will be uniform under the first set of categories, so we can't say that is or is not a "mid-level" or apply any other piece of jargon to it.

What we need to do here is to decide what types of categories we need and how to best organize them to benefit interested parties, who may be family members of Holocaust profiles, researchers, or anyone in between.

There is a word that raises a red flag for me … "should".  When anyone tells me "you should …." I have a standard response - "don't should on me".  Please, everyone, can we deal with these issues by contributing ideas instead of announcing what we "should" be doing???

Please … OK? … Thank you!

Answer 6

Topic: Data, Biography, Categories, WikiTree+, and Their Impact on Search Capabilities (aka "IT")

Finally, a topic where I feel I have some expertise … but that doesn't mean I'm going to try to say "xxxx is how this is best done".  All I want to do is clear up what may be mis-communications between those who have addressed this topic and explain how all of the above does (or does not) work.  I have my blinders on and my only focus is how to best make the Holocaust category hierarchy maximally useful to everyone from family members of individual profiles to researchers, and including WikiTree members and also other projects.

What Jan wrote about data redundancy is 100% correct, although non-techies may not have fully absorbed his explanation, so I will attempt to explain it more simply:

When we have more than 1 place where the same data is stored, that is termed "data redundancy".  There are two ways that redundant data may be updated:

1. When you make a change to a value in 1 place, the software that processes that change could include checking all other places where the same data item is stored and changing them to match the value of the 1 item that was updated.  This is a very good thing because it ensures that data is always consistent (i.e., you won't ever see birth and death locations as United States for a profile that is in Category: South Pole but not in Category: United States - please indulge me - I know those would be high level categories, where profiles don't belong, but this is only for an example).  The problem is that it would take a lot of time and effort to program, add significant processing time to the act of storing data changes, plus may not even be possible to do in all cases.
2.  In the absence of software ensuring data consistency, when you make a change to - say - a location field then you also have to check the biography to make sure that, if that location is mentioned, you also change it there, plus you need to check that there is no category for the previous location value and probably also add a category for the new location value.  This is asking a lot of the member who edits a profile, but if it is not done then there will be contradictory information in the profile and nobody will know which is correct.
3. No matter which way data is managed, a monkey wrench is thrown into the mix by the different languages in which location names are entered, as well as spelling variants that creep in no matter how hard you try to standardize place names.

We all agree that an important purpose of data is to offer the ability to run searches.  I will put forth the statement that the most important thing about doing searches is knowing how to create a search statement that is narrow enough to exclude results that are not of interest yet includes ALL results that are of interest.  That said, the capabilities of WikiTree to search data is - I hate to be so harsh - downright Neanderthal.  WikiTree+, on the other hand, has pretty good search capability.  I'm sure you're going to be surprised when I say that best of all available search engines is google.  This is because google allows entry of a pretty good group of Boolean constructs (I think there should be an umlaut on one of the o's, but not sure which one.  Maybe I can't spell so good, but I promise you that I can sling the and's, or's, if-then's, and other Boolean terms around with the best - I once prepared material and presented training to government intelligence analysts on search skills).  That allows you to create search algorithms that are much more precise.  Ah, but I've digressed - sorry 'bout that.  

Categories are a way that WikiTree kind of mitigates what it lacks in search sophistication.  You can find a list of profiles that have something in common by looking at a category page … however, that is provided that the category is in a well designed hierarchy and that all profiles that share the common characteristic have been put in the appropriate category, which is a very tall order.

WikiTree+ is probably not familiar to many members, but Jan's examples of the kinds of searches you can do there are good ones, so I won't try to expand on it.  I do think, though, that we need to highlight the WikiTree+ capabilities better - maybe a series of G2G posts about what they are and how to harness them to meet your needs.

If anyone wants to do more advanced google searching, feel free to contact me and I'll help - can either construct your search algorithm or 'splain you how to do it yourself.

I would like to see everyone stop arguing about which way is best to search for information and whether or not all the rest of WikiTree's categories are good to have.  My only concern is to make the Holocaust categories maximally useful.

Please … OK? … Thank you!

OK - My rant is now officially over.  THANX to everyone for allowing me my soapbox and, although I hope you don't, you can all get back to the free-for all now!

Answer 7

Six categories and only six. No subcategories

1 Murdered ( for victims in events like Krystallnacht, Warsaw, Paris

2 Died in a camp

3 Survived a camp

4 Emigrated

5 Fate unknown

6 joined an Allied Army or recognized resistance group

I see no need for separate categories for each village or city the victim was born or lived in.

I see no need for separate categories for each camp and ghetto . There were thousands.

 I see no need for separate categories for each place to which emigrants went.

This is all  information that can be written in the bio .

I work with a rabbi who was one of my college advisors, whose mother was a Dachau survivor. I have been doing Holocaust for nineteen years, listening to people who were there. In my opinion, simple, graceful memorialization would be most appropriate.

In my opinion, this project should not become a battleground

Put your egos aside. The theme of this project is REMEMBER

Answer 8

The Zappler family - mother , father, 3 children

Interned at Theresienstadt

Prior to 1939, the Nazis were allowing Jews to emigrate.

The Zapplers could only send one child. Eldest son Moishe/Moe/Murray went to New York. His mother and sister died in Theresienstadt . His father and brother died in Dachau

Murray joined the US Army in 1942, serving in military intelligence  . In February 1945, his unit was captured by a German unit led by Hauptmann Kurt Bruns. At learning that Murray and another GI Curt Jacobs were Jews, Bruns had them executed. Shot in the back.

Answer 9

Hi,

The german death camps main purpose was to execute the holocaust and exterminate the Jewish European population. Next to that majority activity it was also used to kill other civilian groups (resistance, Sinti, handicapped)

In my humble opinion the tree structure should be:

level

1 Civilian casualties

2.1 Holocaust

2.2 Death camps

2.3 forced labor camps

3.2 Europe

3.3 Far East

4.1 Germany

5.1 Dachau

5.2 Bergen-Belsen

4.2 Poland

5.3 Auschwitz-Berkenau

Just a suggestion because the issue is confusing

Peter

Comments

This thread is many years old, and is actually now obsolete (and should be closed); a newer proposal for Holocaust categorization is here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Proposal_for_Holocaust_categories_2023

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Thanks, Jillaine. i have closed the question.