Pro Tools: Tree Checker Top Trees

Sometimes, it's the little things in life. Small, seemingly insignificant things can bring a sense of fulfillment and help keep me motivated. Such is the case with Ancestry Pro Tools Tree Checker. When accessing the Tree Checker recently, I noticed a "Tree Rating" showing at the top of the results. 

The Tree Rating is calculated using the following:

• 35%: people with no documentation
• 30%: people with possible errors
• 25%: people with only tree documentation
• 10%: possible duplicate people

My tree shows as a 9.9 (presumably out of 10), making it a "Top Tree". Now, I know I try hard to evaluate every single hint I attach for accuracy. I know I typically (but not always) have a hint I'm using when I attach people (though sometimes they're added ahead of time because I found a relevant record I haven't worked with yet and I just want to record the name). I currently have 66 people with no documentation and 2 with only family trees as documentation. My tree is a relatively modest 2,523 people at this point. When I noticed the rating a few days ago, my undocumented number was a few higher, working out to about 3% of my tree.

In theory, I really like this little badge. It lets me know I'm doing a good job. I started wondering if Ancestry would use this information in the future to perhaps highlight trees people might want to refer to when researching and thought "this is a wonderful idea". And then I stopped to think, there is absolutely nothing in the calculations to evaluate the accuracy. So long as I have one hint of any kind (other than a family tree) Ancestry will recognize it. There's currently nothing to indicate the hint has to be accurate for the person. This means all those trees, created by simply accepting every presented hint, will also be marked as Top Trees. 

This little addition to the site has the potential to be powerful, but only if there's some credibility behind it. Because I don't blindly accept hints, perhaps my score is more or less reliable for me (based on the current criteria), but could I use this score as an indication of some other random tree being correct? Nope! I don't believe I could. I'd like to think this is a first step towards a useful new feature, but it remains to be seen.

For now, I'm using it as a personal motivator to go back and attach a record or 2 to the folks missing them. It's more of a test to see if the score jumps to 10 if I can get the number down to 0 people with missing information. And it's a fun little project for a few days. I hope as time goes on, this lnew addition turns into a truly useful tool, but for right now, I see it as a personal motivator only, not as any kind of metric for true reliability in evaluating user trees. If you have Pro Tools, give it a look and check your score!