Follow
The idea of "long future" is about planning for something other than immediate benefit. In relation to genealogy such a thing is related to the following:
- Maintaining profiles in such a way, that would be beneficial to people researching genealogy 100, 500, or even 1000s years in the future.
- Recording data that maybe self evident at this moment, but would become impossible to reconstruct later.
Some general pointers:
- Record names in the correct fields (Given name in Given name, Middle name in Middle name, Surname in Surname, and Alias in Alias, and how the person was known in "Display name"). Arguments along the lines of "it's more difficult to find women by maiden name, so I put them in the surname", "Bug in Geni sometimes hides patronymics, so I put them as the first name" or similar may help you currently, but will hinder research into name distribution in the year 10000.
- Geographic names change, try to record them accurately at the time of the event. This means that nobody can be born in a country before or after that country began to exist. It is OK to believe that United States began right after its declaration of independence, but unless you believe in time travel, many people were still born in the separate British colonies before that. Try to keep in mind that borders change all the time, and there is no "one correct way", so record everything as it was.
- It is a good thing that children and living people are private currently, but eventually they will become visible. Record the family history as is. It is true, that seeing a name of a dead child may hurt your feelings, but that is an issue with the current interface (ask Geni for ability to hide some profile from your view, rather than deleting it).
- Upload pictures and videos in the original resolution without cropping, and then select the area to display as the profile picture. Every time you think of cropping something before uploading imagine that your great-grandparent would use scissors on those precious photographs that you've recovered.
- When possible provide sources to profiles you create. Surely today it's obvious to anybody that you talked to your grandmother and asked her about the birthday of her father, but after World War 253 somebody may be unable to figure out is this really legitimate information.
- Do not think to yourself "This information will be available on another site". Especially when other sites do not allow downloads of the entire information. If one of your relatives has filled out fields for relatives on Fookbace or other nocial setwork, make sure that you record that data... and source it.
- If you get the idea of starting a fictitious family tree based on your favourite graphic novel or some religious text, do not promote that idea from a "funny funny that will never be". No fictional profile can ever make somebody's genealogical research easier.
Known bugs on Geni:
- Some things are not under revision control, which makes it impossible to know who has filled them out, and thus having yourself as a primary source (without stating it) is problematic.
- The mess that a single incorrect merge makes of a profile is just horrible. If you spend your entire life researching some far relative it can be all but destroyed by somebody five days after your profile is marked "dead".
- Places are being filled in with their contemporary subdivisions by countries, provinces, and counties.
- A lot of information is lost when the profile is marked as diseased