Re: Genealogical evidence and data model

> But, I'd venture to suggest that out of any 100 genealogists at least 51%

> _still_ want a program to record their conclusions so they can print it 
> out.  This doesn't mean that 49% is insignificant, it just means it's
the 
> minority.

I agree with the sentiment. I think your statistics are overly hopeful 
though :-) When I look through the GEDs that people sent me, it is very
rare 
indeed to find any source information (I'd put it at less than 5%). 
Obviously almost everyone has boxes and filing cabinets of letters and 
certificates and so forth, so they do have source material but rarely do 
they enter any of it into their software program of choice. I think there 
are a lot of reasons for this.

Firstly, most people think in terms of "facts" not "evidence and
conclusions 
and confidence levels" -- that's simply their world view. So they don't
see 
the im****tance of sources after the "facts have been extracted from the 
sources". They are not professional researchers.

Second, even if people think it is im****tant to record sources, it can be 
mighty tedious to do so, both in terms of the volume of data to be entered

and the fact that a lot of the software out there just doesn't make it
very 
easy (lots of clicks to get to the right screen, weird data models, 
confusing screen layouts etc). So that's another reason sources don't get 
added.

I doubt the people in this newsgroup having this conversation are 
representative of the broader genealogy community. A number of people have

mentioned their "day jobs" and it sounds to me like most of us are 
university-educated and quite a number of us are IT professionals and 
scientists (or at least reasonably well-informed about such topics). While

we clearly have some strong views on how genealogy should be done and how 
the genealogy software should be built, we constitute some tiny pro****tion

of the market for genealogy software. So if most people just want to
record 
facts and print out trees, the software will be built to sup****t their 
"world view" not ours (sadly!).

Kerry