As I progress in my Genealogy practices, I’ve realized that I need to use a system to determine data validity in my plans. I’m not happy with the one that comes with my software and was looking for a definitive methodology to grade sources. For example, I find that death certificates are generally poor in assuring the year someone was born—Census records when a person is typically better. Draft registrations are probably the most accurate.
When I saw one of the videos from the 2012 RootsTech Conference that dealt with “Reputations Systems for Genealogy, “I was excited. Hopefully, the video will give me some great ideas about how to quantify the reputation of various sites and sources.
As you can probably tell from my tone so far, I was disappointed. For nearly the first 20 minutes, he points out the reputation features of Amazon eBay and StackOverflow.com. Then he launches into a walk-through of the Yahoo Design Pattern Library. Finally, 51 minutes into the 62-minute talk, he starts to talk about the reputation characteristics of genealogy sites. It was a lot of background for little substance.
At that point, he shows new.familysearch.org, which is a bummer because it isn’t available to the general public. He shows how little the site has on the reputation of data and provides his recommendations on what it should have. I think it is in bad taste for a Family Search employee to present things he’d like to see in a Family Search product (even though it isn’t available to the general public). The sad thing is that the development director for that product also presented at the conference. Anyway, he does talk briefly about the reputation elements shown on Geni, Fold3, and Ancestry.
The presenter sounded like he was reading from a script; he had little energy and was not entertaining. All-in-all it was one of the worst presentations I’ve seen from the RootsTech Videos. I’d pass on this video.
[ Updated 31 July 2022 – All links removed because none of them still worked. I also gently edited for typos. ]
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