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THIS IS A PROPOSAL. Please discuss!
This project is about the theme of profiles where the existence of the person is known only from a few, non-primary source. Such profiles are frequent in multiple classes:
- Legends, stories and "sacred works" of various kinds
- Fictional account, which may or may not have been taken seriously by later readers
- Invented persons in otherwise historical documents
This project proposes a rule for marking such profiles, and gives a series of tags that can be used to make these profiles easily visible when working in the tree.
For fictional and invented people, it's likely that the best approach is to delete them; this project covers profiles where, for some reason, their presence in the Geni tree is tolerated.
How to tag a profile
Write the tag, between curly brackets, in the SUFFIX field of the profile. If the profile uses a display name, consider adding it there too. Like this: {Bible}
What tags to use
We have three groups of tags:
- Tags naming a class ({fictional}
- Tags naming a type of source ({saga})
- Tags naming a specific source ({Bible})
Tags to use are given below. Only the most-specific of the tags should be used.
Class tags
- {fictional} - earliest occurence is in a work that seems to be clearly intended as fiction. Example: Harry Potter, Sir Lancelot of the Round Table. Note: Most of the time, these profiles do NOT belong on Geni.
- {invented} - earliest occurence is in a work that seems to be intended to be taken as fact, but evidence indicates that there was no such person in reality. These profiles are useful for calling attention to the fact that a "well known" profile is invented, in the cases where we can't put in correct information, and where just deleting the profile will be soon followed by someone adding it back.
- {legend} - earliest occurence is in a work where we cannot be sure how it was intended to be taken, and where we have little or no historical evidence for the period. Example: Irish genealogies showing descent from Troy.
Source type tags
- {Saga} - subclass of {legend}, pointing to the Nordic sagas known mainly from Icelandic manuscripts
- (What else?)
Source tags
These indicate well known sources that have often been used to construct genealogies of legend.
- {Bible} - the genealogical information in the Bible, as traditionally understood. The Torah is a subset of the Bible for this purpose.
- {Koran} - the genealogical information in the Koran
- {Veda} - Indian Vedic literature
- {Snorre} - Specifically, Snorre's "Ynglingesoga" and his king-sagas. "Gylfagin" and "Skaldaskaparmål" should be marked "Saga".
Extending the list
It is RECOMMENDED to start a discussion before entering new tags in this list, and it is RECOMMENDED to add a tag to this list before starting to use it.