Merging license required please.
Hello,
May I make a suggestion?
Problem: When I get a rare moment to login and work on family history I spent much of my time having to unmerge names that have been incorrectly merged.
Suggestion: I really think it would be helpful to require completion of a merging training prior to being able to merge individuals. A nice, video explanation that explains what to look for, and why there is so much more than a matching name to merge. You could make it fun like Merging License or something like that.
Also, please make fixing these problems much easier. When I can look in the history and see the incorrect merge, please offer an easy "undo merge" button with an easy way to message the contributor who merged to explain why the undo has been done.
Thank you
Comments
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I would wholly agree with the idea that some sort of qualification should be necessary before merging. Whether that's the completion of a training module or extensive experience with simpler aspects, I don't really know but either way round something is needed. (It may not be just merging that needs a qualification but that's the obvious one).
I do like the term "Merging License"! 😉
I would say, though, that I'm not convinced that an "easy undo merge" is possible. Any update that's taken place after the erroneous merge could belong to either profile (or even neither) so that's not feasible in a single button. I find there are numerous approaches needed to disentangle incorrectly merged profiles, not all of which are helpful in all circumstances. My gut feeling is that pressing an "easy undo merge" button might make the situation worse. Maybe...
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I think access to the FSFT needs an entrance exam. It's not just bad merges that need supervision.
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For an "undo merge" button, I think it would need to be an undo process -- kinda like how merging is three steps, where you need to decide what to move over and what to discard, but in reverse. The pre-merge states of the two profiles could be in two columns on either side, with the post-merge additions/changes in a middle column, and you'd need to tell it which side each one went with. I can see this becoming an unfeasibly long process, if the merge was a while ago, so it would possibly need to be limited to actions within a certain "depth" of the change log.
While I agree with Áine that some sort of entrance exam for the entire Tree would be good, I think what's actually needed is some sort of entrance tutorial. The Community continues to see near-daily posts from people who clearly haven't understood some aspect of the shared tree, be that private spaces, the separate Genealogies section, or even the difference between the Tree and historical records. (Heck, the big private-tree websites don't seem to understand that last difference, based on the wording used on their matches/hints.) I know there are knowledge articles and videos and whatnot available, but they're hard to find -- and people don't look for them, since they don't realize that their understanding is faulty.
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It can take more than one person several hours apiece to correct problems from a bad merge. Especially if the name on one of the profiles was changed first. Name changes seem retroactive in the changelog.
On the other hand, there are a massive number of duplicates created after people upload a gedcom file and then enter individuals from the gedcom into the shared tree. Especially for profiles representing people from the 1600's. If any kind of a restriction slowed the merging of those new profiles, the shared tree could lose coherence.
Restoring a profile that was merged several years ago is already too easy. The system will then only allow a (re) merge so that the old ID becomes the new profile. This is causing repeating problems for some Mayflower passengers, George Soule 9V4Z-GD1, for example. (9V4Z-GD1 was the ID for many years.)
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