"Gedcomming"

Hi Paul,

Being able to discern who-did-what is an important skill on Geni. Mostly you'll find the information you need on the Revisions tab, but please post a link to the profile and I can walk you through it.

GEDCOM is a tough subject. A decade ago Geni supported GEDCOM import in its entirety, meaning everyone who brought their tree going back to Charlemagne and beyond, created duplicates of all those profiles. You can imagine it didn't take long before it became unsustainable. So we turned off the GEDCOM import feature.

Now imagine being me, standing at a genealogy conference trying to tell someone who's been building their family tree for 20 years that they have to enter every profile by hand into Geni. A lot of good researchers understandably walked away shaking their heads. And the quality and quantity of information on Geni suffered as a result.

So earlier this year we brought back the GEDCOM importer, reconfigured to import 5 generations and then stop and look for tree matches. If none are found on a particular branch, it continues the import 3 generations at a time. This is our compromise; you can bring us your GEDCOM but we're not going to import it all the way back to antiquity. Your point -- that it enables users to import bad data rapidly -- is valid, but it's also true that it enables users to import GOOD data rapidly. We rely in part on our curators to choose when to not merge the bad data, and instead send it to us to decide what to do with it.

I appreciate your responding so rapidly.

GENI seems to haveGEDCOMs under control ... but I would very much like reading GENI guides to GEDCOMing and in fact anything and everything that exists.

For instance, what is done manually and what is transferred automatically by a GEDCOM or a Smart match ?

I understand that they add seem to add branche of profils which we merge the duplicates as always or does it list the duplicates as a guide ? Is there a danger they replace replace contents within an existing profil before merge phase of duplicates ?

I noticed a message this morning I guess is related to it today: "Jonathan Seth Wolfson a achevé la fusion des profils de Charles Jobin".

I have noticed icons on profils lately that signal a Gedcom in progress for a profil on some profils but not at all, on all surrounding profils. Is that the possible ?

Just point me in the direction of the help and guides section and I'll try to catch up on my homework.

I may even become a fan of these features.

Most of the documentation is at https://help.geni.com/hc/en-us/sections/206535847-GEDCOM -- you may also want to read the blog post at https://www.geni.com/blog/the-return-of-gedcom-imports-on-geni-3103...

All merging / data management is done identically to how we merge manually-created profiles, and none of it is done automatically. (Instead, the GEDCOM importer is written to import a few generations at a time, stop and look for tree matches, and then only continue importing on branches that don't appear to match existing profiles on Geni)