Talk:Find a Grave

Requested move 27 July 2019

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved (non-admin closure) ~SS49~ {talk} 14:57, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

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Find a Grave → Find A Grave – The name of the website is "Find A Grave" and the name of the company is "Find A Grave, Inc.". This is not a grammar or WP:MOS issue. Bitter Oil (talk) 21:10, 26 July 2019 (UTC) :This is a contested technical request (permalink). Anthony Appleyard (talk) 04:42, 27 July 2019 (UTC)

• @Bitter Oil: Better discuss this one, And see next section above. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 04:43, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
• @Newslinger: And here. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 04:44, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. The consensus reached at § Requested move 13 November 2015 is still correct. MOS:TM states: "When deciding how to format a trademark, editors should examine styles already in use by independent reliable sources. From among those, choose the style that most closely resembles standard English – regardless of the preference of the trademark owner." A significant portion of independent reliable sources spell Find a Grave with the word a in lowercase, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Tribune-Star, the Deseret News, BBC, Fox News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Miami New Times. As there are also reliable sources that use Find A Grave with the A capitalized, we defer to standard English: MOS:CT states that a is not capitalized in title case (the case used by proper nouns including Find a Grave). — Newslinger talk 05:13, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose per MOS:TM / WP:TITLETM and the RM discussion of 2015. Nothing has changed. The proposer just doesn't seem familiar with the Wikipedia guidance and appears to think we should consider self-published styling as dispositive, which is exactly what the guidlines say not to do. —BarrelProof (talk) 13:15, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose, and consider early close... No chance this MOS violation comes to fruition. Nohomersryan (talk) 19:22, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
• Comment The name of the company and website is "Find A Grave" (with a capital A). It is also a trademark (servicemark) in that form (registration #5252586. It is a proper name. That form of use appears in many many sources, although I know it appears with lowercase "a" as well. So, per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization), WP:PROPERNAME, and WP:COMMONNAME, the "a" should be capitalized. Please take note that the Make-A-Wish Foundation titling example used in a much much earlier discussion is no longer true. Feel free to start your MOS arguments overt there to get it moved back. Cheers! Bitter Oil (talk) 21:09, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
  • There is one key difference between the Make-A-Wish Foundation title and the Find a Grave title: the vast majority of independent reliable sources spell Make-A-Wish with A in uppercase, while a much more substantial portion of sources spell Find a Grave with a in lowercase. The hyphenation of Make-A-Wish also makes it a poor comparison to Find a Grave. — Newslinger talk 21:34, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
    • Both Make-A-Wish Foundation and Find A Grave are proper names. Hyphens don't make a difference to that fact. It would be very helpful if you could count the number of sources that use "Find a Grave" and the number that use "Find A Grave" and report back, perhaps with a spreadsheet tabulating the quality of the source by readership and circulation, and also by date (before and after the trademark was issued). Thanks. Bitter Oil (talk) 21:56, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
      • As explained in MOS:CT and MOS:TM, we generally don't capitalize a in title case unless it's the first or last word, or unless the lowercase a form is not commonly used by independent reliable sources. Proper nouns use title case. The trademark registration (a non-independent source) is not considered if independent reliable sources exist. Regarding research, the burden of proof is on the editor who supports the page move. — Newslinger talk 22:46, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose change per Newslinger and MOS. GirthSummit _(blether) 22:51, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose per Newslinger, BarrelProof, Nohomersryan, Girth Summit and per previous discussion, above, in November 2015. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 03:17, 28 July 2019 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

BillionGraves.com ?

How about at least mentioning their competitor BillionGraves.com, which, curiously, does not even have a Wikipedia entry? Bhami (talk) 16:41, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

should it be used as a source?

i dont think find a grave should be used as source, why? because i have seen several errors, and also its because it is community, what do you think?

Correct its junk WP:FINDAGRAVE-EL.--Moxy- 13:15, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Yes, the photographs of the tombstones or grave markers should be used as a source just as any other public record is. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 23:34, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Incorrect. How do we verify it's of the same individual? Seasider53 (talk) 23:54, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Even if the right person .....you can put anything you like on it....most famous example Scott Wilson (2016). Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed. McFarland. p. 165. ISBN 978-1-4766-2599-7. Crawford, Joan (Lucille LeSueur, March 23, 1904 – May 10, 1977) San Antonio born film star.... Her ashes were placed in the vault beside the coffin of her husband, with the crypt listing her birth year as 1908..--Moxy- 00:03, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Agreed, it is a proper source. Is it infallible? Of course not, but neither is any other source used in Wikipedia. An editor needs to be discriminating. If Find a Grave has an entry for someone whose dates of birth and death are already well documented elsewhere and the decedent's entry has a photo of the gravestone with that same info, it is pretty hard to refute that the person is indeed buried there. Is it metaphysically possible that the photo was posted for the wrong cemetery? Yes. But not very likely. On the other hand, I have personally seen entries while doing historical research on topics that some people just enter the names of family members who are supposed to be buried in Cemetery ABC (and who might be), but the posters haven't actually been there to photograph the grave marker. They might be right, but that is not knowable from the entry on-line. But, it is not appropriate to write off the entire soure because of some mistakes. After all, it is not true that you can put anything you like on the website. Or at least, you can't maintain it that way. I have myself found typos (e.g., misspellings of names that don't match the photo), but those can be fixed (or challenged if need be, although I have never seen it come to that). There is a blank where some users will post biographical sketches beyond what appear on the actual gravestones. Those are typically cited to newspapers (often with scans of the pages attached). But, for confirmation of the fact that someone was buried in a spot, an entry with a photo of the marker is compelling evidence of the burial and the info actually placed on the marker (presumably by a family member or close friend). ProfReader (talk) 02:14, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

The sentence that ends with "...a resource for genealogy research" probably does need some clarification.

Starting with semantics, the Find a Grave website itself does NOT qualify as a source, i.e. not authoritative, though it can be a resource to find sources. Much of the information there does not qualify as a "source" u

Under the Genealogical Proof Standard, "source" has a very explicit definition which includes a way to assess provenance via citations. "Resource" is not as defined in genealogy. The photos of the graves themselves do qualify as a source, with caveats, such as trusting the photographer to post them in the correct cemetery (embedded GPS is a somewhat trustworthy). Obituaries and other posted documents also qualify as "sources" if proper citations are included (usually not).

Most professional genealogists, including me, have a deep skepticism and distrust of information found on Find a Grave, since it lacks proper citation and quality-control features. Of the ~1200 suggested edits I've submitted in the past year, about 20% were to correct factual inaccuracies. About a quarter of my suggestions are "automatically" approves without any human checking my "facts" and almost none of the suggestion made to me come with any source citations. In short, as great as this site is, the website and most of the volunteers do not have the rigor needed to make the website a "source," though it is a "resource" of sorts, just not trustworthy.

How to clarify all that into that sentence will be a challenge. Samatva (talk) 02:32, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

FindaGrave as a reliable WP source discussion

A discussion about FindaGrave cemetery and interment listings is underway at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. – S. Rich (talk) 16:33, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

That discussion was archived. Please see the moved discussion here. – S. Rich (talk) 20:06, 19 November 2023 (UTC)