I tried to determine if Proven, Disproven and Disputed are a part of some sort of genealogical standard. The best I can tell, they are not. But whether they are part of a standard or not, I think this feature of RM is very weak and needs improvement.
For me, the biggest weakness is the use of the word Proof. I come from a science and math background, where the following is a common joke: Proof is for mathematics and alcohol. In other words, math does proof, but science doesn’t do proof. If science ever claims proof, it’s almost certainly bad science. I don’t think genealogy does proof, either. A mathematical proof is an absolute that no scientific evidence or genealogical evidence can ever match.
There actually is a standard called the Genealogical Proof Standard. I don’t think it’s a very good standard, anyway. But I find the name of the standard to be very off-putting because only math does proof. Instead, I think we should be talking about the evidence and the quality of evidence. And even beyond that, I think we should be talking about analysis and the quality of the analysis. That’s because it’s often the case that no one piece of evidence answers a genealogical question by itself, no matter how credible is the evidence. Rather, several pieces of evidence have to be analyzed together in order come to conclusions that answer genealogical questions.
That being said, if RM supported evidence quality properly, I think the evidence quality indicators should be searchable and should able to be used for making groups and for color coding. If so, then they could be managed in a practical fashion. I do agree than RM needs to support more adjectives to describe the quality of evidence. But I’m not sure I see the point unless RM also supports the ability to manage the quality of evidence indicators. And by that, I mean the ability to search, report, make groups, and color code on the basis of quality of evidence indicators.
I don’t really see how RM’s Tasks feature fits into this picture. For example, how could I ever use the Tasks feature to create a list of my ancestors for whom I don’t have good quality evidence for their date of birth. That would be easy in RM if RM supported the needed adjectives for quality of evidence and if RM supported the needed tools for managing those adjectives. I do some of this sort of thing now by introducing dummy facts into my database. By dummy facts, I mean facts that never appear in narrative reports or Web sites I create nor in GEDCOM I create. But I can search the dummy facts and make groups on the dummy facts and so forth.
I don’t see a good way to indicate the analysis of the evidence in RM. That’s one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Such analysis is of necessity a lot of text along with images and transcriptions of the evidence. That seems like a better fit for Microsoft Word to me than it is a fit for RM.
Maybe I’ll talk myself back into using it again at some point, but for now, I will let my “big picture” tasks drive my research and look forward to some other visual clue to the fact “proof.”
