Add an abuse label to report editors who make mass-merges
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/changelog/9MLD-N27/merges
...resulting in five husbands, four parents, 67 children, and 163 sources. Should these people really still have free reign at the tree?
Her husband has about double that:
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I am sure there must be a number of users who have made errors One appears to have been making contributions to these profiles since 2012, but the recent ones have become increasingly strange - including, yesterday, adding ID GKQQ-JBD in the name of "Court, Right?".
I assume you have tried to communicate with this user, although whether you will get any serious response is another matter.
I believe this is possibly the most "extreme" example of this type of behaviour I have encountered - even after years of probing into "far reaches" of Family Tree and finding many individuals connected with multiple spouses, often from both sides of the Atlantic.
I just took a look at one of the "original John Cartwrights" (MLD-NK5) and his wife Susan ("Cartwright") 9MLD-NK4. Just one daughter, Elizabeth, has been added to this relationship - although I quickly found a further 10 children that appear to be theirs (using Find My Past). No marriage found for them, however.
For now, I would just select the couple who are of particular interest to you and add their direct relatives (children and parents) as far as you can ascertain the accuracy of your findings. Then detach all the other relationships that have been added in error - together with removing incorrectly added sources, custom events, etc.
As far as getting FamilySearch involvement in this, from past reports I believe you will find it very difficult in persuading them to take any action: whether reported as "Abuse", or otherwise. I have spent the equivalent of several weeks of my life in trying to untangle this type of mess and would be only too pleased to see some of these irresponsible users sanctioned, or even banned from contributing to Family Tree. The trouble is, there appear to be so many of them and the FS organisation just does not have sufficient resources to "police" its huge amount of users. So, in short, even if it was agreed this type of action does constitute "abuse", there would still need to be a dedicated FS team to evaluate each case individually - probably requiring the employment / redeployment of a large number of volunteers / employees, just to address the more serious issues of this nature.
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contributions to these profiles since 2012, but the recent ones have become increasingly strange
That is consistent with a progressive dementia. I would back off, wait a few months or years, then repair the damage.
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There is already a Report Abuse option in the Tools box. Have you tried that path? It can be time-consuming, but I have had some success.
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By the way, the problems with Susan Cartwright 9MLD-N27 (a duplicate of 9MLD-NK4) seem to have started on September 2, 2022, when her change log shows a user added her to John Cartwright G7PW-75Y. Originally, her ID had been created as the spouse of John Cartwright 9MLD-NK5 - father of Elizabeth Cartwright 9MLD-NK4, baptised 1822 Lambeth, Surrey.
Since then, the change log shows merges (by different users) with individuals of totally different identities - first and last names! It appears there is more than one user who has messed up badly here. But differentiating between carelessness, inexperience and vandalism would require a lengthy investigation that I don't think anyone at FamilySearch would be willing to undertake - even if you reported as abuse.
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Thanks for bring this to our attention. We will forward your idea on.
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I did contact the editor, and she mentioned it was her "visually-impaired son" and that she didn't know it was a shared tree. I mean, I get that most of these cases are going to be people who think their tree is private or some other misunderstanding, rather than malice. My comments were intended more to suggest that adding "Vandalism" or something that conveys intentional or unintentional egregiously bad editing to that menu might help route the message to the appropriate agent, and let other editors know that they can report that when they see it.
I was also kind of hoping that maybe FS agents could roll back profiles and undo the damage better than regular end users could. After posting this, I ended up bookmarking 46 different profile pages that were the result of mass-merging -- literally a few hundred family lines got affected. Due to the way Restore works and how sources stick and children become attached to multiple sets and permutations of parents after unmerging, there's just no way for us to undo that damage.
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