Krotoa (Eva) van Meerhoff (van die Kaap), SM/PROG - Inappropriate Material?

I've received a message from Y. about content on Kratoa's profile:

Hi Sharon
I see you have become the curator of my Krotoa profile. For this reason I am contacting you about Krotoa's profile.
Krotoa (Eva) van Meerhoff, SM/PROG
There has been some additions to the "About Me" section, one which I would like to bring to your attention. The last one. Perhaps you are able to advise on the appropriateness of such an addition as I find it somewhat inappropriate that someone is using this platform to make their political ideologies known. I don't feel comfortable with this type of article being placed on a Geni profile. What are your thoughts on this?
Regards,
Y. DROST

As her message concerns a shared profile, I felt it was up to all of us to contribute to the decision:

my initial answer: (sorry about the caps, but without bold it is the only way to give vast pieces of writing some headings to help sore eyes :-)

Hello Y.
I see we are 8th cousins.

I BECAME THE CURATOR of the profile for Krotoa BECAUSE I MADE IT INTO A MAIN PROFILE - which means that in any merges etc from then on, the information on this profile is considered to be the best to be deferred to. So that's a good thing; and you're right - it means you have a Curator watching out for it.

Before I did that, though - IT HAD BEEN MERGED with numbers of other duplicate Krotoa profiles, which meant that THE MANAGERS OF THOSE HAD BECOME JOINT MANAGERS WITH YOU on the merged ‘uber’ Krotoa profile. (The aim of Geni being to produce 1 world tree - and from the SA point of view, we aim to have 1 South African tree so everybody benefits from the full links of everybody else.)

This means the Krotoa profile is not yours only anymore. (Although the programme sees that your profile was the oldest and gives you the honour of being its creator.)

In the merges - which have been happening for a long time prior to the making it a Main Profile - as much information as possible is kept from each of the merged in profiles. So the NEW ‘ABOUT ME’ BITS MAY NOT HAVE BEEN ADDED TO, SO MUCH AS, ‘ACCUMULATED’ from all the other About Me's of the Kratoa profiles on Geni.

This is fantastic because it BRINGS TOGETHER EVERYONE'S HARD WORK on their profiles in adding sources. Sometimes (and you are saying you think this is so in this case) contradictory opinions are placed next to each other. For me, as an historian – this is exactly what history is made of. STANDING THE DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES NEXT TO EACH OTHER and weighing up the validity of the argument in the face of a completely opposite (or sometimes only slightly differing) perspective on what ‘truly’ happened.

Now, from what I see – the piece you are objecting to was actually added by me from a blog I found on the Cape-Slavery-Heritage Website. If I recall, I was seeking out reviews of Dan Sleigh’s book ‘Eilande’ and this was what I found. To be honest, it doesn’t strike me as more political than any of the other entries, and it reads to me as politically conciliatory, if anything. I added it because it seemed to provide quite an indepth research study of the characters surrounding Krotoa – so it never seemed to me to be pushing a modern political agenda, beyond, I suppose, saying that there are gaps in what has already been studied. But most historians think that about the past, otherwise they’d be out of a job :-).

But it is certainly worth discussing how far from the Truth it appears to you to be straying; and whether it is designed to give offence. In so doing, we could get an even more indepth understanding of the events surrounding Kratoa; and come to a provisional conclusion about how it might be most historically useful to present them on this profile for other people to assess if they land here. This is exactly the way good history is made.