Improved adding a new person that has Matching Person and Merging them
The other day I was adding people to my tree and others had already entered them so I clicked that they were a match.
Unfortunately the more detailed information that I had entered was wiped out entirely.
- What are you trying to accomplish? Why?
- That with any new person created that is a match, if there is a discrepancy in the information, for example one has more detail, that it will ask you which information you would like to retain. So people will not have to go back and re enter in all of the more detailed information for a second time.
- What is the challenge or roadblock you are encountering?
- Having to go back and re enter all the more detailed information again
- What is your idea?
- Have a window that appears after you selected matching person that allows you select which information you would like to carry over.
- How would solving this challenge improve your experience?
- It would save time for having to re enter all the detailed information all over again
Comments
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We've discussed this problem here before, but it's been a while. You go through all of that work, typing stuff in, and voila: there's a match! Now what do you do? Do you dutifully avoid creating a duplicate, but lose all of your typing, or do you say the heck with it, create your new profile, then use Merge By ID on it?
The theoretical ideal, of course, is to avoid the situation in the first place by always searching for an existing profile before doing any sort of data entry on a new one. That works for the next three or four source attachments, but it's extra work that's often fruitless -- so then you stop doing it, until the next time it catches you by surprise.
(The one thing that can't work is expecting the algorithm to catch the duplicate before you enter the data: it can't read your mind.)
Your idea is basically like the "heck with it" option, except skipping straight to the merge step, without fully creating the new profile first. Other than not using up an ID, I'm not sure there's really much practical advantage to it, but I agree that it would feel less transgressive than knowingly creating a duplicate does.
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"We've discussed this problem here before, but it's been a while. You go through all of that work, typing stuff in, and voila: there's a match! Now what do you do? Do you dutifully avoid creating a duplicate, but lose all of your typing, or do you say the heck with it, create your new profile, then use Merge By ID on it?"
Personally, I nearly always choose the "heck with it" option and create my new profile, so I'd want to continue being able to do that. My reason for that is that my head is in data entry mode and trying to swap to merge mode - or even worse, a combination of both - is hard work and therefore likely to create errors. It's especially of concern to me where the data on the profiles that I'm creating is, I like to think, better than the suggested duplicate. Which is where the OP came in...
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I would also nearly always go ahead and create a new person. They are never going to run out of ID numbers.
I view this mainly as a safety issue. When adding a new person, the people that pop up as already existing are not shown with all that much detail. If the suggested person has inferior information compared to what you are adding, it can be particularly hard to determine right there if it is the same person or not.
After creating your new person with all the information you have typed in, then you can go to the suggested person and take a look at all the information there including parents, children, spouses, full vitals, all the Other Information, and all the sources to determine if you really have created a duplicate and if so then merge them.
There have been too many posts here in Community along the lines of "Help! I was adding my grandfather and he popped up as already existing so I used that profile. Now I find he has the wrong wife, children and parents. How do I get rid of them? And his death date is wrong. How do I fix that?" Adding first then merging if needed prevents problems. I'd be concerned that combining the Add and Merge routines could risk further obscuring the fact that someone is in the process of highjacking someone else's grandfather.
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"When adding a new person, the people that pop up as already existing are not shown with all that much detail...."
Yes, I'd forgotten that bit - but I remember that the on-screen dialogue asks if it's the correct person and I remember countless times muttering at the screen, "I don't know yet!" Actually, make that shouting at the screen after a few times! 😉
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I'm in the habit of right-clicking on the name in the pop-up window and opening the person's profile in a new browser tab. Only after looking over the full profile, I decide whether or not to select it as a match. Sure, having to re-enter more detailed birth and death data (which is usually necessary) is annoying, but having to do an immediate merge is no less annoying. I favor not creating unnecessary duplicates. (I recently found a profile with 4-5 duplicates. One user had managed to create a bunch of copies for that one person within a couple days.) It's a personal preference, I guess.
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