EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is a sidebar to "What Are We Going To Do About Bad Data on the Internet?" by Patricia Law Hatcher.

The Sarah Odding case clearly demonstrates that printed articles are not reaching an audience whose medium of publication and communication is the Internet. In this instance, the article was published in a major national journal. Can we assume that corrections printed in local journals and short-run family histories are even less likely to picked up by Internet genealogists? Clearly, we need to communicate in the medium of the audience we want to reach.

While posting the correct information somewhere (whether a list, a home page, or a database) is helpful, the percentage of sites indexed by search engines is continuing to fall, thus making the likelihood that it will be stumbled across quite low. Also, you’ll have one “good” (and hopefully documented site) competing with dozens of incorrect sites.

Most Internet genealogists haven’t been exposed to publications like GC and don’t understand that it is quality rather than quantity that matters. Nor do they know the names of experienced players well enough to know whose word to trust. The solution is obviously to e-mail the hosts of sites with misinformation, but this has both pluses and minuses.

E-mail Pluses

• The same message may be sent to multiple recipients with ease. Recipients might include any home page with the surname, any RootsWeb (or similar) list for the surname, and for any surnames in the next generation, plus the e-mail links for any database such as Ancestry World Tree.

• Response to e-mail is a low-friction process. This encourages response and further communication between person who is requesting the correction and the person receiving the request.

• Attachments (such as word-processing files, scanned documents, or GEDCOM files) can provide additional or more readily-usable information.

E-mail Minuses

• Although the message can be sent quickly to multiple recipients, it takes a lot of time to identify those recipients and to create the message. The message will take longer to create because it should include information on multiple ways for recipients to obtain the full published data if the sender does not own the copyright and cannot send an attachment.

• No matter how gently (or how privately) it is done, some people don’t take well to being corrected. And a multiple-addressee e-mail might be seen as genealogical SPAM.

• If the sender is the discoverer of the corrected information (as in this example), he or she may not feel comfortable touting the find.

• As mentioned above, many of the hundreds of thousands of Internet genealogists are beginners and have never attended a conference, read a genealogical book, or joined a society. They don’t have the training or experience to evaluate conflicting information, nor do they understand the importance and value of documentation, let alone that a source citation must also be evaluated.

• We can’t make the recipients correct their data, even when it has clearly been proved incorrect. If the information is in a database, it often can’t be corrected (the IGI being a case in point here), although they may be able to add the correct version.

The Big Picture
This e-mail solution serves only to fix existing mistakes. There is something broader that we all should be doing. We should be serving as the examples of how to do it right, as described regularly in the pages of GC. If we can’t do it right with the tool at hand, we need to find a tool that lets us put our data on the Internet in a responsible manner.

Any data we place on the Internet should be fully documented. This includes lineages placed in databases. An e-mail link to the submitter is not documentation—it simply identifies the transmitter of the information. There’s a big difference. Nor is it an acceptable substitute to permit the user to spend six minutes to download a GEDCOM file in order to determine if it even has any documentation. If the database does not support readily-available documentation, we need to complain—loudly and frequently.

As George Archer pointed out in the Fall 1998 issue of GC (in a blood-chilling statement, if you are a serious genealogist), only three of the nine GEDCOM-to-HTML programs reviewed by Alan Mann in the previous issue supported documentation. And Liz Kerstens pointed out in her recent Internet publishing lecture at the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference in St. Louis, that even fewer of them support placing the documentation on the same page as the data. Hence the readers who print the page to study it will later find they did not get the documentation to evaluate. (She suggests we use an editor to rearrange the pages, but for many, this is beyond their computer competency.)

Patricia Law Hatcher, CG, is a technical writer, instructor, and professional genealogist.