Possible Duplicates as a Recommended Task
It would be nice to be able to filter for Possible Duplicates as a Recommended Task. I would like a way to see all the possible duplicates the search engine has identified all in the same place.
Comments
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Please, no. I already have enough messes of merges done by people who weren't familiar with the data. I don't need to find more Johann Schmidts who have 22 wives, over a 50 year span, over 500 miles of territory, several historical countries, and 92 children. There aren't that many traveling salesmen.
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I couldn't agree more with Cheryl's comments. f there's one thing worse than finding multiple duplicates of one individual it's finding an ID that has become a combination of multiple individuals.
Unfortunately, FamilySearch suggestions for "Possible Duplicates" are not treated as that by many users, who accept them at face-value, whereas a detailed investigation (of whether you really are dealing with the same person) is often required.
Based on my experience (as illustrated by Cheryl) I don't want users to be given any general encouragement in finding "duplicates" that are likely to transpire to be totally separate individuals.
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I'm afraid I would have another concern about this. I really get the impression by looking at profile pages I am following, that a lot of people work strictly off the Recommended Task list and just attach hints without ever actually looking at the profiles involved, either before attaching the hint or afterwards to see the result of attaching them. This is based on seeing a bunch of non-standardized places, transcription errors that never got fixed, and duplicate information left on profiles as a result of just attaching hint without doing anything else to clean up the profile afterwards. While this is annoying to find with hints, it can be downright destructive with merges.
Adding merges to the Recommend Tasks list, because of this lack of evaluation before and after completing a task, would just be too high risk.
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