Requesting critique of profiles

Question

I have created several profiles and I would very much like to have someone take a few minutes to critique them and offer feedback regarding how I might improve what I am doing. The profiles I have focused on are my own, my dad's, my grandfather's, and my great-grandfather's since these will be the profiles seen by others in a Y-DNA Name study.

Below are the profile's links.

[[Ballow-92|Keith Ballow]]

[[Ballow-93|Billy Ralph Ballow (1930-2015)]]

[[Ballow-94|Isaac Newton Ballow (1874-1935)]]

[[Ballow-95|Thomas Samuel Ballow (abt.1833-abt.1882)]]

Thanks for your time and effort.

Keith

Comments

Thank You to all of you who took the time and effort to review the profiles and offer suggestions. I appreciate it very much!

Answer 1

Incorrect ONS sticker on everyone's profile except your own.  YOU are a 'member' of the Belew Study.  Your father, grandfather, and great grandfather are not, because 'member' is only for the living.  On their profiles, you need to put

{{One Name Study|name=Belew}}

Comments

Thank you! I will make the corrections!

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Ros thank you this helped clear up the question I had for my family names too.

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I guess I still am confused. The Stephens in my family that are living, do they get anything such as {{One Name Study|name=Stephens}}

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If any of them are WikiTree members and are actually working on the Study, they get the Members version.  If they are not even a WT member, they don't.

Answer 2

Well done Keith. Great profiles - each is well sourced.   Enjoyed reading each one.

I usually add live links to profiles for family members mentioned in a biography and was going to suggest that, but then realized that links to the profiles for each of them are just above in the data section and easily clicked on there, so no need to link them in the bio.

Only improvement I can suggest is the sources that are just the webpage link. I prefer to place the web link in brackets [ ]. If you leave a space after the weblink and then type a description title with brackets around it all, only the title you have added will show in the listed sources.  Example: [https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F61H-CM4 Marriage record for Isaac Ballow on FamilySearch]. The whole citation shows here on G2G, but on a profile only the description will show.  

Or even better on FamilySearch they usually have a ready made link you can copy/paste that will display like "Texas, County Marriage Index, 1837-1977," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F61H-CM4 : 10 March 2021), I.N. Ballow and Jessie Gipson, 01 Jan 1908; citing Rusk, Texas, United States, county courthouses, Texas; FHL microfilm 1,020,947.

Comments

Thank you very much Patricia. I will try out the brackets around the source's links. I think I may have discovered that on some of the later profiles, but I did notice that I still have some that just show the URL without any type of description in the profile text. In other words, I have not been consistent in the formatting of my profiles, and I need to clean that up some. Thanks again for taking the time to look and respond.

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If you are open to using a browser extension you can use the WikiTree Sourcer extenion to automatically create the source citations in various formats suitable for WikiTree.

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I don't find bracketing especially helpful as it "hides" some of the source citation information. I think people are really in two camps about this and feel strongly about whichever one they're in.

I do agree that including full citations to the exact record is useful. Good citations will last over time: When that link goes bad or a website doesn't exist any more, a good citation will still tell you exactly where you might find the original record.

FamilySearch's pre-written citations are slightly better at this than Ancestry, but not always. On Ancestry sometimes you really have to dig to find out where they got the information. They're a repository of copies, not the original record holders (though they seem to like people to think otherwise ).

For the example that Patricia used, the reference to FS's internal database that they lead with doesn't really tell you much, but adding that it's an index rather than an original record could tell us a lot.

Marriage record (index) of I.N. Ballow and Jessie Gipson, 01 Jan 1908, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F61H-CM4, FHL microfilm 1,020,947, citing Rusk, Texas, United States County Courthouse. 

Knowing that it's an index tells us that there might be another record collection that has the originals, that there might be additional information in the originals, and that there might be transcription errors in this record. (I don't mean that to sound like a criticism for using an index or transcription. Sometimes it's all we've got.)

I also love that you did in-line citations! I personally find it really helpful to know where different bits of information came from. In-line citations is some "advanced WikiTree'ing!"

Over all, really nicely done!