I’m not familiar with these projects but I feel heartbroken for those who spent many hours keying for them. So their keying is wasted and it’s just for browsing now. That’s too bad.

I wish we could know well in advance of such projects so we could devote our energies towards them. I’m willing to pull out my foreign language books, too, if I’d only known.

Again, I hope you come out with a list of projects which needs attention before you yank them without warning. Please give us the opportunity to do so out of respect for those who dedicated so much time to key them in the first place.

Please consider a high priority list of projects. We’d be more than willing to concentrate on them. We want all projects to be completed and want a warning if they are in trouble of being yanked.

It’s hard to think we keyers who devote our time and energy on keying on a particular project might have that project yanked without warning in the future. It keeps happening, though.

Please, please consider saying whether or not a project is high priority or being in danger of being yanked without warning! Please consider the keyers and their efforts. Without us, AWAP would not exist.

Our goal as keyers is to have all projects indexed and searchable to the public. And yours is the same yet in a certain time frame if we only knew what that was……

Sincerely,
Jane

Here we go again.
I was a consistent keyer, and arbitrator for a number of years.I may not have been the fastest, but I always tried to do my best.I worked on thousands of immigration records.Thousand of records from the Holocaust projects.I was committed to using a fair amount of my spare time to work on records for the WAP.
Then I started arbitrating The African American Newspaper project.It had been keyed.
They pulled it.
Yes there were complaints.But as you can see they aren’t going to change the way they do things.
Many people made all the points you are making.
It still happened again.
They do need to communicate better with us.Let us know when something needs concentrated attention.The fact is they need more people from Ancestry involved in the WAP.
I still think this is a great idea.It works well when people are motivated behind a project.I worked on thousands of the records from the Palestine illegal immigration project.I pushed to help get that done.That’s the way we should feel about what we’re doing here.When they pull records from us it’s demoralizing.

I went over to the Family Search indexing project and worked on the 1940 Census,and a few other things.
I admit I prefer the Ancestry system.
But this pulling of projects just makes me feel like is it even worth my time anymore?I do still come back and do some projects I’m interested in.But it’s far more halfhearted now.
Jane you said, “Without us, WAP would not exist”.Yes.

I am also sorry to see that these projects have been pulled without warning. I had been keying them but as the records are often hand written and difficult to decipher, I needed to take a break from them. Had I known that by keying other projects I was putting the Pavian records at risk, I would have continued to plug along. Clearly better communication is needed!!

They are still available in my tool. Perhaps the message IS the warning then.

I have to admit I am not surprised by the decision to pull. They were massive projects that moved at a crawl, and for 4 years this equation didn’t change.

Anna’s email message mentioned that there is still potential for them to pull a Lazarus-like resurrection, to complete the keying in smaller bits, in the future.

I appreciate your comments. It is a tough decision to remove a project from those that we are keying. All of the keying that has been completed, up to the time that the project is removed will be processed and added as an index on Ancestry.

One of the main difficulties with releasing larger projects that could take a while to complete is that we update and improve our systems over time. Over the past few years we have started to release smaller projects and often take one larger project and split it into smaller projects in order to have them completed more timely.
The fortunate part is that we have improved our processes, the unfortunate part is that we didn’t start out this way so we have to accomodate for the older projects and sometimes make tough decisions.

We appreciate all that has been contributed and all that you continue to contribute by way of time indexing, time spent assisting new keyers and answering messages. Jane is correct – you all are what make the World Archives Project and we couldn’t move forward without you.

This is a project that I have been slowly working on since it came out 4 years ago. This is a difficult project due to many handwritten records, in Italian, from the late 1800s. There also were many problems with the keying tool (and in arbitration) when we started and some things were fixed but not all.

I took some time off and came back to the project in July 2012 only to see it was still not even close to being complete. So I dove back in with arbitrating the records. I did get many done but there was still a problem in arbitrating when the wrong form was chosen by the keyer.

I received the email from Anna about removing it from our list of available projects and yes was disappointed because of the time I put into it. I am hoping the the work we did put in to this project will be able to be used.

I also still see the many records available for both keying and review/arbitration in the available project. Should we assume they will be removed soon? Or can we still work on them?

HELLO TO ANCESTRY.
I LIVE IN KOPER, SLOVENIJA. MY MATERNAL LANGUAGE IS ITALIAN. IF YOU WANT, I CAN HELP YOU FOR INDEXING THE MARRIAGE RECORDS 1866 – 1937. HOW CAN I HELP YOU? I’M A VOLUNTEER FOR FAMILY SEARCH INDEXING.
BEST REGARDS,

ILONA – ELENA