ATTENTION Curators, please assist

This discussion is a continuation of https://www.geni.com/discussions/156925 wherin one of your friendly neighborhood Curators suggested we create a discussion as a focal point for users requesting help from Geni's curators (see https://www.geni.com/curators for more information about curators).

The purpose of this discussion is to enable you to easily post requests for assistance. Posting requests here will get you a much faster response than contacting us privately, as all curators can see this discussion, as well as many other users who can assist as well.

Presently what we can help you with is:
* "killing zombies" - Zombies are historical profiles that are wrongly marked as living, and thus block merges. Please continue posting these requests here: https://www.geni.com/discussions/142109
* Make public – if a historical profile is wrongly marked as private, we can ask the system to check if it should be marked public.
* Complete pending merges between ANY pair of public profiles.

A MAJOR caveat to our work is that we can only help with profiles/trees already connected to the so-called “big-tree” (really a forest) of almost 50 million profiles [UPDATE: now over 116 million!]

If you found a duplicate tree that is NOT yet connected, we can’t help. You’ll have to go the usual root - initiate contact with the manager(s) of the other tree.

We most STRONGLY recommend that you ALWAYS first try and contact the other managers. You WILL get better and faster results that way (we are a last resort).

We also HIGHLY recommend that anyone who is serious about merging in the shared parts of our tree, join the Collaboration Pool. You will find there 500+ people there all wanting to help each other out. Read about it and JOIN here: https://www.geni.com/discussions/74031

While initially we would like to concentrate on cleaning up the shared parts of the historical tree (such as European Royalty), we can and will assist anywhere needed. We will soon also start discussions that are for specific “areas” of the tree, for better focus.

What we can’t and WILL NOT do is:

* Do YOUR work for you. If you see duplicates in a tree, and can stack them, please do so, BEFORE you ask us to complete the merges. Do the maximum that you can. There are 5,000,000 of you users, and only 24 Curators... WE need YOUR help at least as much as you need us. This is a TEAM effort.

* Before you ask us to merge a "stack" of pending merges, do through the stack yourself, and check if all of the profiles belong there. It is NOT too hard, and you'll save everybody a lot of work and grief. You might find the following guide useful: http://wiki.geni.com/index.php/Resolving_Merge_Issues

* Connect new trees to the “big-tree”. If you want to do so, please have the courtesy to explain to the manager(s) of the unconnected tree, what this means and involves. MOST problems in the “big-tree” are due to people being dragged into it, against their will or without anyone explaining what this means.

* MOST importantly - We will NOT force ANY decisions on any one. If you have issues with the other manager(s), please try and work them out first.

Feel free to join the discussion, we'd like to hear your opinions as well.

Thank you,
The Geni Curator Team