DNA Mapping and sources

Hi Delia Robertson - Thank you for the compliment I'm delighted at your interest in following up on Dries' line, and will see what can be done to advertise that we want help walking the line and checking sources. This is exactly what I'd hoped would be one of the results of this project. Go you two! :-)

On the red flags - of course you are correct about the prerequisites for an academic research paper on any of the aspects that this project throws up. First prize is if the DNA descendants of the extrapolated ancestors add every scrap of documentation we can find to strengthen the paper trail; and make their trees completely public. (Just as you and Dries are going to do on his line. Short pause for another happy dance :-))

But =If this is not done, the work, in my opinion, will be unreliable and seen as such. And then what is the point?= is worth replying to because it highlights a misunderstanding of the aims and methodological differences between crowdsourcing data vs those of working on your own. Broadly these are the differences between deductive vs inductive reasoning; between the starting points of analysis vs synthesis. Both are essential to knowledge creation and their top down/bottom up processes actually meet in the middle, imo.

1 Crowdsourcing data on a collaborative site like Geni is a top down process that accesses, quickly, huge amounts of data that is not often available in the academic repositories of knowledge. The downside is that the data product is haphazard; unstructured; and unverified – so the long term follow up processes are in categorising; verifying, and adding specificity.

2. Building a site from the bottom up, like you did on the fantastic First Fifty Years Project, is a process of a few people, focusing on verified specificity, and using academic citation. The downside is that the data product has to be narrow, and it will take years to access data that exists outside domains uncategorised by academia.

Jo Public’s personal DNA results, linked to her pen and paper family tree kept in her top drawer aren’t going to come out of the woodwork unless sites like Geni make it easy and beneficial to share. If we tell Jo that we only want her data if it is packaged in a way that makes it ‘academically’ useful for us (eg her tree is verified, or if she makes it all public) then she is quite likely to tell us to go fish. But , the collaborative goodwill of Jo and Dries Potgieter to share their data is what is going to help us verify and extrapolate the academically available data to a whole new level of research specificity and scope.

So, =the point= of the project is this:
1. To advertise to and encourage our SA users to share their DNA results in any way that is easiest for them.
2. To allow more serious researchers the opportunity of collaborating with Jo to analyse, verify and use the info, as it accumulates.

Sorry, if this is long. As you are doing exactly this with Dries, I think you know all of this already.
Useful for me to formulate the aims more specifically, though. Thank you.

Excellent contributions by both of you. In particular, I like your distinction between crowd-sourcing and academic data, Sharon. You hit the nail on the head.
Let's see how far a 'hand-holding' of the two approaches can take us!

:-) Thanks Johann.
I forgot to add that when collateral cousins on a family tree test with the same Y or mtDNA it serves as pretty strong verification of the paper trail tree to their mutual ancestor. This is an important aspect of verification for which crowd sourcing is particularly well suited.

Thanks @Sharon Doubell for the lengthy response.

It was not my intention to set rules and regulations for participants - merely to highlight the hazards of not having each child->parent relationship documented; and if the individual concerned does not choose to collaborate with anyone else in this regard, the difficulties the lack thereof imposes on others to verify the information.

The potential consequence is that generations of people, in many directions, could believe potentially erroneous relationships and build and build on them only for the whole edifice to come crumbling down for who knows how many.

Be that as it may, I don't see any harm at all in encouraging people to source their data, to share those sources and to remove privatization from deceased individuals. The choice remains theirs.

Perhaps something could be included in the introduction to the project that explains more about sourcing and why it is so important. This, in my view, would not only be appropriate, but also really useful for those for whom sourcing is a bit of a mystery and something they don't realize is important.

I appreciate you sharing your interpretation of crowd-sourcing. In my view it is far more accurate to say Geni is crowd-aggregating, or perhaps crowd-sharing.

The inherent problem with it is that there is, for the most part, no knowing what is good research and what is not. That is one reason I have never added my research - personal or FFY - to Geni.

Another reason is that you can easily lose control of your work to managers and curators who have their own agenda. I know this is not generally the case, but I know several people to whom this has happened and Geni management is not at all sympathetic in these cases.

In another example, I have privately shared some of my research which has turned up on Geni. In each case information (for which I have sources) in some individuals has been changed; or, in some profiles, totally incorrect names/relationships/dates/places added. When I have contacted the manager(s) of the profile and offered to help and make sure it is all absolutely correct (with sources) I have been ignored, or insulted, etc.

It is surprising the number of people who have absolutely no interest in being accurate or who include only that information which buttresses their own preferred interpretation.

All of this is background to why I think getting sourcing for your very worthwhile project is so important. The more sourcing added, the more people will see and appreciate the benefits of it. The end sum is that people will be confident they can reliably use information from the project.

All the very best.
Delia

I cannot speak back very usefully to 'what is not generally the case' besides sympathising and saying that this is indeed part and parcel of working with people in groups - on any project, and I have experienced it too. eg There must be at least 5 different versions of my own very extensive family tree taken from GEni and put onto My Heritage with all my family photos and some irritating errors - like getting my Surname wrong :-) But, in the end - this is exactly what we're trying to achieve by putting our trees somewhere dynamic that ensures they will be available for posterity. I would not have substantial parts of my tree without other people's preparedness to put their own data out there; and that spirit is what is increasing the Geni world tree at such exponentially enormous rates that it is changing the manner in which genealogists and genealogy sites can operate.

If the crowd sourced data is "crowd aggregated"- then it will skew towards accuracy in the long term; and genealogy is a very long game :-)

Projects such as this one on a collaborative site are, imo, best viewed as work-spaces. "The end sum is that people will be confident they can reliably use information from the project" is not the aim of the project at all. Somewhere in the long future it may happen that it becomes this, but that will be a by product.
This is not intended as a reference project: It is functionally useless as an object of passive consumption (especially, as you point out, because it hasn't yet been systematically verified): it's intended as an invitation to collaborate on eliciting, analysing and refining the data we can all collect here together, so it presumes those interested will participate. (As you are, of course, doing.)