WE'RE WATCHING YOU

We are watching you! The watch function in your family tree is a great tool. First, it keeps track of any changes made to watched individuals. Second, it gives you the name of a COUSIN who has an interest in your tree. Plus, it gives you an east way to contact that cousin.

James Tanner, in his blog, Rejoice and be Exceeding Glad, has been doing a statistical study of changes on his tree. He has been tracking 302 people in his tree so see how many of the changes had sources attached. The results are REALLY EYE OPENING.

"My question was exactly how many of those ill-advised changes I was seeing weekly in the Family Tree were made without providing a source for the information added or removed. After weeks of tabulating the changes, the average settled on a surprising 87%. Yes, 87% of the changes were made without a supporting source. I decided at this point to add a commentary and suspend the review until sometime in the future if the changes continue to be a challenge.

The bulk of the changes observed were made to a very small number of people. In fact, of the 475 changes made to those on my Watch List during the weeks of my study, 310 of the consequential changes were made to only 11 people and one person had 156 consequential changes. Although I did not keep track of the corrections, my impression was that almost all of the unsupported consequential changes we corrected in a very short time. However, those individuals with most changes were mostly a disaster because the information on any given day could be inaccurate.

In all, during the time period of the study, there were 81 people with a combined total of 475 significant changes and 394 of those changes were unsupported by any mention of a source. The time involved for one person to check every single change would be overwhelming. The only thing that saved the data from ultimate destruction was that there were a number of people evidently watching these individuals and correcting the unsupported changes.

Unsupported, consequential changes made to the Family Tree are, in fact, a major issue with the future viability of the whole Family Tree project. I cannot see any way that I can measure how many new people were added to the Family Tree during the study period, but I can only assume that the new people are being added with about the same level of lack of supporting documentation."