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Confidence scores

Peter Washburn

September 01, 2013 23:47

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As a customer interested in constructing an accurate family tree, I would like a feature that would allow me to assign a confidence score to each piece of information, or at the very least, to each relationship. For me, the point of this score would be to allow me to keep track of which ancestors have well documented relationships and event dates, and which records are unverified or suspect in some way.
The tree would display an aggregated confidence score per person and also per relationship, by displaying some kind of hint - similar to the current leafy hints, but expressive of the fact that it reflects my level of confidence in the accuracy of the data.

Enjoying it so far...

Thanks,

Peter Washburn

7 comments

• 1
  
  Student of Genealogy September 14, 2023 00:33

  Sounds like a good idea. It should be a feature that any Geni user level can use. Maybe a 1 to 10 scale, where 1 is completely undocumented and 10 is solidly verified. Also having a "reason for" comment box to go along with the score I think would be good to add as well.

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  Ulla Quiat (Viinamäki) September 14, 2023 09:43

  Pidän ideastasi. Se auttaisi paljon seuraamaan, millä esivanhemmilla on hyvin dokumentoituja suhteita. Ja sillä; Voin, tavallaan "merkitä" ennustaa, kumpi on valmis enemmän tai vähemmän ja kumpi tarvitsee tehdä jotain enemmän.

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  Marc Palaus Gallego September 14, 2023 11:52

  I totally support this idea too.

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  Jim Henderson September 14, 2023 23:52

  This would be helpful. I would prefer 0 to 9, where 0 is just a guess, with no evidence. Then a well-documented fact or relationship would need just one digit in the display area, 9.

  Have you thought about where to display the confidence figure?

  And what happens when different relatives and curators want to set different confidence figures? (As you know, Geni is a cooperative tree, where we don't talk about "my tree" but "our tree", and members don't always agree about things.)

  I ask these questions because I am a programmer, and I know there are a lot of decisions that need to be made before a good idea can become an explicit recipe that an unimaginative computer can follow :-)

  By the way, Geni has already taken a step in this direction that you might not have noticed. When you click on someone's name in the tree and open the profile, you can see which facts about the person are supported by information in a document. Just look at the end of the fact information. If you see a small picture of a document there, hover over it and you'll see a list of the facts supported by this document. An example would be Prince William of England, where you can see this icon at the end of the third line about his birth. Then on the tab below called "Sources", you can see all the details and even look at the original document. If you are not familiar with uploading documents and "citing" them to support facts, you might find the videos on the subject that I prepared for the Clan Henderson society helpful.

  Perhaps this document symbol provides what you are looking for after all. It's not a 0 to 9 rating but it is a 0 to 1 rating. It's unambiguous -- has a document been cited to support this fact or not. It doesn't need anyone to give a rating to a fact or relationship -- it happens automatically already. It is not open to dispute from other members -- either a document has been cited to support the fact or it hasn't.

  So after all this thinking aloud, I have come down on the side of encouraging everyone to upload documents and to cite them, and to pay attention to the discrepancy warnings that Geni gives automatically, such as child born when his mother was only 6 years old.

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  Ulla Quiat (Viinamäki) September 15, 2023 00:34

  In my opinion, there is 3 documents which are most important: when person has born, when person got marriage, when person has died. Then there is some "less" important: having child, moving from village/town to other village/town or even to other country. 

  So 3 points for those "most important" documents, 2 for "less important". That way we ending to 5 points. Hmmmm.....what about if there 10 childs?...Ok. it start nice, how to count points, but for programmers, we need more thinking. :)

  Edited by Ulla Quiat (Viinamäki) September 15, 2023 00:35
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  Job Waterreus September 15, 2023 09:13

  There are different kind of documents that can act as a source and they can be a source for profile facts but also for relations between profiles. It might get a bit complicated when different users give other scores based on the same source.

  It can get even more complicated when there is not a one-to-one relation between what is in the document and what can be recorded in Geni (like from one document you can estimated the period when a person lived as between 1720 and 1800 and from another that he/she was born before 1750. The Geni profile has a birth between 1700 and 1730.

  What would be the confidence level for that?  (and would users agree on it)

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  Job Waterreus September 15, 2023 20:55

  It is a very good idea for single manager trees, but it gets complicated when there are multiple managers.