Mass Merging is Creating a Horrible Mess
😒
Just ONE of the change log from one of the merges is https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/changelog/KZTJ-WST
This is just ONE example of what I keep running into. SO many different individuals have been merged from different families and once a bad merge has taken place, people come in and continue to make more bad merges until there is no recognition of the original family and individuals.
I have used a YouTube video of how to fix tricky, sticky messes in family tree to fix many bad merges by a trainer for BYU. One like the above is way above my abilities to fix and it just keeps getting worse. Each time this happens it continues to affect previous and later generations with more bad merges until soon Family Tree will be so convoluted, it will be useless. And when I tried to fix a mess in a family, got a mean, blaming letter that what I was doing was "on the verge of abuse" in family tree. And what that individual "fixed" is not the same as my original family in Ancestry and RootsMagic. I had to remove my email, relationship viewer and block him to stop his abuse.
Some kind of decision needs to be made how to slow this situation. Just as photos are viewed before accepted, a possible similar process to follow merges. Children under 18 shouldn't be allowed to merge. Or maybe monitoring beginners for a while and follow their merges. There needs to be volunteers to fix messes like the above URL.
I don't have a definite plan. I do know SOMETHING needs to be done before the good people that know what they are doing will give up trying to keep fixing and using FS and let the inmates destroy the database.
Comments
-
Often, unmerging is not enough. There is still some residual contamination of person IDs (PIDs) with details or sources properly belonging to other PIDs.
In the case of KZTJ-WST, I see no sources were attached and details were not standardized either, so it was a very low quality profile. The PID it was merged into, LKKM-H43, is not much better: it has not one indexed FamilySearch source; all three attached sources are external. The husband L67B-CT1 is scarcely better, and has an obvious duplicate.
James Tanner's video explains in detail why Family Tree is not the problem, but the solution, and what to do about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwRSRZ9amlM
0 -
My wife is the child of a Turner family of which shows the other children but not her. She is on the genealogy list of that same family on ancester and ftm. So how do I get her listed on the famil;y????
I have talked twice on chat line with familysearch and etc and they say its not there problem. Of which I find hard to believe that they dont want true facts on their site.
So does anyone know what I can do.
0 -
There have been suggestions on restricting the work that can be carried out on individuals born before around 1600. However, I have found similar problems going through to the mid-1800s.
I agree it is something than will need to be addressed sooner or later - or the whole integrity of details found in Family Tree could be destroyed: no exaggeration. As I have commented here in the past, if FamilySearch does not have the resources to deal with issues involving just small branches of FT (invoking sanctions, where necessary), I sincerely hope they have a contingency plan for when a real vandal, or hacker, starts to do truly damaging work on the program. I'm sure back-up would allow the engineers to revert to (say) the previous day's program contents, but even wiping out changes make in the previous 24 hours would cause a lot of pain and frustration for its users. The open-edit format certainly has its disadvantages - and risks.
0 -
0
-
@Paul W, I have watched FS address actual vandalism. It does not involve reverting the entire database. Any contributors' changes can be selectively reverted.
0 -
I gather vital records and documents from other sources and attempt to insure accuracy and as best I can, fact based connections and add to my at home GED program (Winfam 6.02). I wish there was some way to append those new additions to my GED hosted at familysearch rather than retyped the whole shebang there.
Yes, I've had folks dither with my tree, often introducing incorrect dates and relationships. It is like whack-a-mole and I gave up trying to revert things back.
That being said, is there opportunity to delete the whole tree and reload it?
0
