On 8/5/2011 2:13 PM, Darren Duncan wrote:
Mikkel Eriksen wrote:
A big thing is to differentiate between "errors" and "warnings".
Most things should be warnings, only literally impossible things
should be errors. Thus, a parent having a child at age 10 should be a
warning (even younger parents have been recorded after all), but a
parent being younger than their child, that should be an error.
Also, such age checks should only matter for biological children, I've
gotten warnings from software because a step mother was "too old" to
have a child at that age (no matter that she didn't actually have that
child).
I would be much looser than that, even to the point that it is nearly
impossible to have importing errors.
And here's one of the main ideas from my own genealogy database project.
A good database needs to be able to store and organize contradictory
information, such as a parent being younger than their child, rather
than throwing up its hands and saying it is an error.
As you probably know, in real life there can be many sources for related
subjects, and it is often the case that they may contradict each other.
We need to be able to record all sources and what they say, even if they
don't agree.
A related main idea of my own project is:
Conceive that the database is not recording actual facts, but rather
assertions or statements. We are never completely sure that something is
true or false, but rather that just there is agreement or not. So the
database is not saying "this is true", but rather it says "X says Y and
W says V and so we (the database) say "M is N", where some of those
letters may be the same.
-- Darren Duncan
Absolutely, one of my most frustrating Genealogical mis-adventures was
add some data from source A then later deleting it and adding different
data from source B, etc from 3-4 sources, until I finally figured out
that one of the early sources was flat wrong and many people had used
and referenced that source. So in my notes I also documented all the BAD
sources and tree information to document the fiasco and to avoid changes
in the future.
-Steve
