Should notes have titles + contents or just contents?

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#1

Currently, a RootsCity note has a title, which is expected to be short, and a contents field, which can be several pages long.

FamilySearch notes have titles and contents like the RootsCity model, but GEDCOM notes just have contents (no titles).

Should we get rid of the note title field and just have a note contents field, like GEDCOM notes? If we did this, an unexpanded note would display the first line, up to 80 characters, of the note contents, and an expanded note would display the entire note contents.

What do others think? Are both the title and the content fields useful? Or is the content field sufficient?

#2

As for me, I personally like having titles for notes. When my GEDCOM is imported, I think it would be fine/good if by default the title was the first 80 characters of the note, and then I can edit it if I want to.

#3

For those of us that are coming from FamilyTreeMaker / Ancestry - I believe that a individual person just has one Notes entry. It does not have any concept of a title.

The idea of having multiple notes with titles seems like it could be helpful. However, I wonder if using this capability would present any gedcom portability issues.

#4

For what it’s worth, for gedcom import we can copy the first line of the note (up to say 64 characters) as the title. For gedcom export, we can copy the title as the first line of the note.

#5

To be honest I have only ever used Notes at WeRelate, where it’s just that - a notation. A title sounds useful only if the notion of a “Note” were to be expanded… to say, something like Facebook or the like, where it is a useful piece of content that can stand on its own.

I think Dallan’s comment above from Sep 22 covers it for me, if it’s just a notation.

#6

Just continuing this conversation, notes can now have comments and “likes” now so they’re a bit more stand-alone now, like a facebook post without a picture, than they were in the past. Interestingly though, facebook posts don’t have titles.

Most of the other “items” at RootsFinder: media, stories, sources, and leads have titles. Evidences, which are created when you create an event and contain information about the fact, source, media, and people involved in the event, don’t have a title so we construct a title to display for the evidence based upon the source title or the citation (or the fact when displaying evidences in the news feed).

If we decide to remove titles from notes, we could similarly construct a title to display for a note based upon the first few (say 40) characters of the note text.