Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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Can I ask questions regarding fictional family trees?
I have a couple of questions regarding the genealogy and family history of witches and wizards within the Harry Potter universe.
Would such questions be valid on this Stack Exchange site?
Or does it ...
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new tag proposal: house-history or building-history
At the moment we have a tag building.
Since building is both a noun and a verb, I think it might be clearer to have the tag be either building-history or house-history. If not, I would like to see ...
Jan MurphyMod
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2023: a year in moderation
It’s that time of the year again! As we wave goodbye to last year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here might be ...
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Shall we implement the "No AI" banner?
Re: Meta Sites can now request to enable a banner to warn about their policy on AI-generated content
Stack Exchange is rolling out an option to include a banner when a user is writing an answer ...
Jan MurphyMod
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Encouraging new questioners to include relevant information in questions?
This Q is inspired by Ancestors union civil war pension containing a USCT vet on their pension but the issue applies site-wide.
Can we create a resource on the site to encourage people to include ...
Jan MurphyMod
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2022: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange ...
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Use of the ship tag
While answering this recent question:
Finding details about an immigration from England to New Zealand / Australia
I recommended using the tag ship to look for questions about researching a ship that ...
Jan MurphyMod
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improving our answers to palaeography questions
For the questions where people have difficulty reading documents, such as this recent request:
Deciphering Work Profession from marriage certificate
Can we do something to make the answers of more ...
Jan MurphyMod
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Genealogy & Family History SE is turning 10!
Thank you to the whole community for making this a great site to get your Genealogy & Family History questions answered.
The Overflow (Stack Overflow blog) will feature us along with the other ...
PolyGeoMod
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2021: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange ...
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Should we be encouraging/condoning/allowing questions about software piracy?
We're not responsible for checking that people have the rights to publish images and other third-party content here, nor for ensuring that users stick to the terms of service of third party sites (e.g....
user6485
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Genealogy & Family History is graduating!
On 16 Dec 2021, our site is officially moving out of Beta!
Our understanding is that the decision for that was based on reasons that included the length of time we have been in Beta.
In the immediate ...
PolyGeoMod
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Is [onomastics] tag needed?
A tag for onomastics has appeared and has currently been applied to two questions.
Those two questions are about the origin of particular surnames.
Wikipedia describes onomastics in this way:
...
PolyGeoMod
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Unpinning accepted answer from top of list of answers on G&FH SE
Unpinning the accepted answer from the top of the list of answers has been implemented for Stack Overflow.
Would we like to see the same to be done for G&FH SE?
This discussion feeds into this ...
PolyGeoMod
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DNA and incest possibilities
I have become concerned about the number of questions being raised about genealogical DNA test results that seem, to the questioner, to raise the possibility of, in the extreme, incest. Two aspects in ...
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Should we add the History of Genealogy to our 'on-topic' subjects?
We've recently had a question about the History of Genealogy: Who is (was) Gertrude Aubrey Barber, compiler of thousands of Grave inscriptions?.
Strictly speaking it's off-topic, as our scope is ...
user6485
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Should we have a tag for questions regarding research ethics?
Some questions in the field of Genealogy could be specifically about the ethics of research such as genetics, living persons, privacy, etc.
For example:
What are the ethics rules for recording ...
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Reviewing our Custom Close Reasons
All SE sites are allowed a few 'custom close' reasons -- options for closing which are specific to that site (even if they've been stolen from other sites :)
We currently only have the generic: "...
user6485
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Why is this Q&A site still tagged Beta?
When is this site going to be taken out of the Beta stage?
From what I can tell it has been established for several years.
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2020: a year in moderation
As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network ...
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What are the rules about loading images as part of queries?
This arises from confirming-if-my-great-great-uncle-received-his-medal-in-ww1-before-he-died where the original poster, being unsure of the rules, blurred parts of the images included in his query.
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Why are there often no upvotes?
In the early days of this site a small community of users was upvoting good questions to levels that seem unreachable now. A lot of new questions are more focused on individual research now, but why ...
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Should We Include Documentation-type Questions?
A few days ago, @Jan asked the question: "AncestryDNA is changing again? What's going on? (July 2020 edition)". In her question she said it was "a self-answered question intending to ...
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Is it good practice or acceptable that moderators delete comments without notice?
In a recent question there were some comments with parts of them also in another language than English. While I now know the language requirement I don't think that it should be overemphasized. In ...
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Is [land] tag named well enough?
We have a tag for land with 18 questions tagged using it.
Is there a better name that we could use for this tag?
I think there is, and will provide that thought as an answer, but want to give the ...
PolyGeoMod
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Making questions more accessible?
How can we make our Q/As more accessible to visitors? What is best practice for making our Q/As easier to read?
Are there things we should avoid because they are unfriendly to our visitors and ...
Jan MurphyMod
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Improving FreeBMD results
We wanted to ask:
Would it be helpful to see, on FreeBMDresults, the County and/or subdistricts?
Inspired by Harry Vervet's work -
What "hidden" clues are there in the GRO Indexes ...
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Is [complex-families] tag needed?
We have a complex-families tag for:
Multiple marriages, step children, adoptions and other extended family scenarios
and it has a tag wiki:
The notion of the family extends beyond that of a ...
PolyGeoMod
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Are questions being closed too quickly?
I check G&FH at least once day. This morning a new question (Getting birth certificate of German born in Romania in 1895) was already closed as a duplicate because it asked for birth records in a ...
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Lowering the threshold of votes to close/re-open questions?
Updated: As the preferences expressed seem to endorse the change, I have asked the Community Managers (CMs) to carry out a one month test of reducing the number of close/re-open votes to 3 to see how ...
user6485
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2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, ...
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Announcing our newest(?) moderator
It is with pleasure that I announce the return of ColeValleyGirl to the team of Pro Temp Moderators at the Genealogy & Family History Stack Exchange.
Some of you will know that ColeValleyGirl was ...
PolyGeoMod
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Proposed Help Center wording for 'lookup requests'
As a community, we've discussed how to handle 'lookup requests' before, but never written anything explicit into our 'off-topic guidance'.
I'm proposing that we incorporate the following so that we'...
user6485
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Should we close questions with no overt "G&FH content"?
Consider some hypothetical pairs of questions:
1.
(a) As a young child I was taken meet my great uncle X who immigrated from Y in the '70s. There's nobody alive I can ask now, and I'm not sure I'm ...
user6485
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May I ask about name identificaton here?
I heard certain name which is foreign for me. And I want to ask "what names there are in such country that sounds similar to this".
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Closing older questions as duplicates of newer ones?
I've closed How should I record sex change/gender reassignment? as a duplicate of Including name change for transgender person in genealogy to put it on hold for discussion and editing.
Things I'd ...
Jan MurphyMod
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Does our privacy policy (clearly) forbid naming living people?
This is in reference to What-does-it-mean-to-be-a-part-of-xyz-battalion-in-world-war-1?. The original question included an image of a newspaper clipping listing the names of the deceased and his ...
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What do we want to do with the tag "online"? Should we get rid of it?
This https://genealogy.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3296/6485 suggestion seemed to slip through without being implemented -- should we take it forward?
online seems to be used for a grab-bag of purposes -...
user6485
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Closing questions because they are "opinion based"?
As I write this, How (and if) to include name change for transgender person in genealogy? has two close votes, with the reason given being that the answers are likely to be "opinion-based".
Under ...
Jan MurphyMod
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Splitting versus lumping -- which do we want to see
We currently have a number of questions about interpreting a single document:
Deciphering Lunacy Asylum case notes about patients previous history
Deciphering Lunacy Asylum case notes about nurses ...
user6485
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Missed it by that much(
The 29 Beta sites that are 7+ years old no longer have the "Beta" label!
Our site was the 30'th oldest, at 6 years 10 months, so we just missed the 7 year cutoff.
PolyGeo commented without ...
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Using "DNA" tag consistently on DNA questions
I have noticed of late that the dna tag is not being used very often when applicable, or is even being removed from many DNA questions. It sometimes seems to be replaced with autosomal-dna, y-dna, etc....
Harry V.Mod
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Should "How do I ask a good question?" be more specific?
How do I ask a good question? gives this advice:
Be specific
If you ask a vague question, you’ll get a vague answer. But if you give us details and context, we can provide a useful answer.
...
Jan MurphyMod
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Writing canonical question for finding living descendants of person?
The question that prompted this: Finding descendants of Jamaican immigrant to England
We have several "I want to find the descendants of [name]" questions on the site, some of which have been closed ...
Jan MurphyMod
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Would a meta-question about citation expectations be useful here?
https://interpersonal.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3583 and https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8697 are examples of other sites documenting their citation expectations? Do we want to do something ...
user6485
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Protecting questions with problematic opinion-based answers?
Should we protect Are there any privacy issues regarding publishing the image of a grave marker online?
It seems to be attracting answers which are based on opinion, where the newer answers are ...
Jan MurphyMod
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What is acceptable evidence of death for someone born less than 100 years ago?
The term "acceptable evidence of death" has been used in a number of Q&As here, and that is because it appears in the On-topic page of our Help Center:
Acceptable evidence of death needs to ...
PolyGeoMod
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DNA questions -- duplicates?
The following questions just hit the front page of the site by virtue of recent title edits.
Understanding if autosomal DNA match of 2,277 cM is full sibling?
Understanding if AncestryDNA match of ...
Jan MurphyMod
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Allowing links to images of public documents that contain living people?
This is in reference to Explaining unknown person found in family listing in 1940 Federal Census of Iowa?
Here, the questioner is asking about how to interpret an unusual finding in a US Census ...
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Understanding what constitutes celebrity genealogy?
Yesterday I voted to close a question about Learning personal history of Asmus Nicolai Clausen? because I think it is about celebrity genealogy, and that is explicitly off-topic according to our Help ...
PolyGeoMod
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