Ancestry.com
Media (photos) and copyright policies
Have you got any private trees? Private but searchable? Have you allowed somebody access to your tree only for them to save your photos and completely re-upload them to their own public trees, allowing dozens of other people to share their re-uploaded file without acknowledging you? I don't mean that they use the in-built 'Save to tree' or 'Add' feature that can be found on every single photo and story, I mean that they download these photos to their own computers and then re-upload them in a public place. Doesn't that betray your trust? Sure, the intention is probably innocuous most of them time, but even so, it feels like you let somebody into a private tree, and this is how they thank you.
Ancestry.com's community guidelines, as at 27 September 2022, state: "While using your Ancestry account and the Ancestry Services, you may not: Post or share content that is protected by copyright or trademark, or that does not belong to you, including pictures and historical documents posted by other users, unless you have express permission from the owner of the copyright or trademark for such content. Read our Copyright Policy for more information." ... You would probably think that what I described in the last paragraph is a clear violation of this guideline, right? That is not the response that I got from the copyright team; in essence, in a robotic-style response that they repeated between our six emails and at least two staff members, it boiled down to a single copypaste: "If a user chooses to share photos, documents, and stories from their tree with other users, we also hono[u]r the experience other users have should that tree be made private or if User Provided Content is deleted." ... obviously it barely addresses my problem... first off, the tree was never public, so it was completely moot to mention that. The definition of 'sharing' my tree in this case is just that I invited several people to view it...
"If you share Your Content publicly, other users may access and use Your Content as part of, or in conjunction with, the Services. We are not required to remove any of Your Content once it has been publicly shared." [source] The average user defines 'sharing publicly' and 'publicly shared' as having a 'public family tree'. These terms then are misleading as are the guidelines.
As I do not agree with the most recent terms and conditions relating to media management, and I do not agree with this apparent laziness against their own guidelines, I now refrain from uploading photos to this service anymore and I actively remove some of what I have already uploaded and saved, and I try to restrict how much I save from others' trees. See also 'Why You Need to Stop Adding Names to Your Family Tree' and 'How to Use Ancestry's Hints Without Going Crazy' to better understand why you do not need to save every single hint and person that comes out of the system. ... If part of your rationale is 'I want people to see that I am researching this person', then stop right there – most people do not care for the same reason that they do not care where a photo originates, whether or not it is actually their own relative they are adding, and they do not care enough to review the several hundred mistakes in their huge 10,000+ family trees that pollute the search system and spread errors. What's more, when over 34 or so people save a media item to their tree, you can only see so few users who did save it at first, so your name will not even show up some of the time.
Tangent.
While we're at it, you probably shouldn't add your DNA matchs' ancestors to your own tree(s) without a really good reason. It's honestly creepy to see my father and his parents on some person's tree when he or she is only a match at 8cM (so the liklihood of being relatives actually decreases). No, you are probably not going to solve how you are related to me just by putting all of my ancestors into your tree. If you're going to do this, at least get in touch with me as well or do it in a private tree to explore your curiosity without polluting the search index. You freak.
Having said that, I acknowledge that I too should rightfully be described as a 'family tree collector' and have added way too many names to my first and main online family tree, especially in having 10,000+ people on there. My excuse is that I started this when I was a nine year old, with old A2 posters from my parents' supermarket, I was adding everybody that I could by their first name, and when I hit about 18 it started to dawn on me that I have all these names but it is nothing special because everybody else does too, and it is hard to search my tree effectively and keep up with who is alive and who is dead. One day, it really hit me how bizarre my family tree was when an in-law of an in-law's relative asked to view my (at the time) private but searchable tree for information on one of his ancestors. I have since privated the tree to keep it out of the search index to avoid this situation happening again, and also having some shame for having this needlessly big of a tree.
For the record, I added most of the European nobility that I did in an effort to try and track illnesses. So I have that going for me too. The experience did teach me some interesting lessons and concepts so I do not regret it in that regard, but it is not like I have done any original research regarding them or dedicated time to solving a mystery. Yet.
Wikipedia
It is great because anybody can edit it. It is horrible because anybody can edit it, so it becomes politically biased in the worst ways possible, and there is always conflict running in the background which most of us do not usually see. I am guilty of using it and linking to it though, not for 'research' but in this case to give some of my readers a quick rundown on some topics. For example I have linked to the Church of Scotland article from... somewhere, because I do love Wikipedia's infoboxes. I also contributed to the place myself for about a year (subpar edits) and monitored certain local topics (this discussion caught my eye back when it was active); I often found certain users to have hidden agendas that could skew how 'their' articles were allowed to be edited. It is not blatant and not worth naming names, but it is not like this is an uncommon story.
Others should be discouraged from donating to the Wikimedia Foundation, if nothing else – there is 'a reason' Wikipedia appears at the top of search engines. The experts on Wikipedia's downsides can be found at Wikipedia Sucks.