Issue 18.12
If you go to www.familysearch.org you will see Trees, those trees include the millions of lineage linked genealogies that came from Ancestral File, the Pedigree Resource File and other patron submissions. Soon, not to confuse you, but FamilySearch will add Family Tree to FamilySearch.org, which is a replacement for new.familysearch.org. This has not been fully implemented yet but I am beta testing it and it is coming, plus in writing this article I realized it will take me weeks to explain it!
PART 1
New.FamilySearch.org was a good system that has been beneficial in helping people document their genealogy and reduce duplication of research. However, it was designed with the premise that all opinions should be collected together on a person and that each user should own their contributions (my tree) and no one else could change them. That led to some issues with the system handling people called IOUS or “Individuals of Unusual Size” that were so big that they could not be combined. Many of the early Utah pioneers fell into this category and it created a problem.
Family Tree is an upgrade to new FamilySearch and it includes a different concept in collaborative genealogy research. The Family Tree will allow anyone to change any data so we will be able to fix the bad data. So we all log into the same database and change anything we want! That will scare some of you, but because changing the data is powerful it will be balanced with a good change log that allows incorrect changes to be easily recovered. This balancing also requires better collaboration tools such as discussions and a watch or notify feature if someone makes a change to an ancestor you are watching.
This will work similar to how Wikipedia works now. Anyone can log in and make changes but they have found that most people only make changes when they have more or better information to add. Also if someone comes along who just wants to cause a problem, pages are watched by so many contributors that want the information to appear correctly that problems are reverted or eliminated within minutes. This is called open source open edit and this is the function that the Family Tree will follow.
Continued next week ….
For more information, contact Shanna Jones shannasjones@msn.com or (435) 628-4900.