Person talk:Rene Landry (3)

Exclamation points in biography [3 March 2014]

What is the significance of the exclamation points preceding some paragraphs in the bio?

In code, they're called "bangs" and mean "logical not". That does not seem to be the meaning here, however.

--Prcb 00:01, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Really the whole structure and typography of the originally uploaded bio and refs is too painful to read. Phrases are cutoff, the text interrupts itself frequently, parens are unclosed ...

Is there valuable content in this or any of other similarly poorly organized gedcom records from Karen Theriot Reader? There are thousands.

It seems to me that the best thing to do is to delete her stuff and re-upload from a better source. Perhaps merging would be OK, however possibly not worth the effort. --Prcb 00:23, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

The text with the exclamation marks came through with Karen Theriot Reader's GEDCOM. I'm not exactly sure why, but they precede certain event notes. They don't serve a specific WR purpose and can be removed/reformatted. (I typed that text before an edit conflict) ... regarding the quality of her work, I would say that even though it is painful to read, it seems very well sourced and is a good foundation to build on. --Jennifer (JBS66) 00:27, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Karen Theriot Reader's GEDCOM contained 3467 person records. To simply rearrange the bio--including fixing the french accents, moving sources to source records, and rewriting into readable sentences--would take at least an hour per person, perhaps several. This is about 2 person-years of work. Her text that wound up in the bio section is really Reader's notes. It would be much easier to move this text to a note. This would be more efficient, basically fix the cosmetic problem, and keep any useful information.--Prcb 00:51, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Paragraphs starting like "!DEATH:" and "!BIRTH-MARRIAGE-CHILDREN:" are source documentation. This dates from a long time ago (in computer-years). The "!" was a convention used mainly with PAF (Personal Ancestral File, an early genealogy program) which flagged lines which should be printed or made public. The capitalized words are tags of what items of data were derived from the source given in the paragraph. The convention was documented in a book Family History Documentation Guidelines; see this web page for an overview. This predates the availability of structured sources used today. --robert.shaw 00:54, 8 March 2014 (UTC)