Re: Genealogical evidence and data model

"Kerry Raymond" <kraymond@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>> 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
> 
> 
> 

Amen. 

I, for one, have decided to only sup****t efforts to clean this mess up by 
making "doing the right thing" (entering and passing on sources) as easy 
and as accurately as possible for the largest amount of people. 

I applaud FTM 2008 and Ancestry.com for doing just that, and am eagerly 
looking to see how quickly LDS and others follow suit.

Praise the computer, and pass the records.  :-)