Names of Previous Contributors Lost When Merging Records
Just trying to understand what I perceive as sort of an injustice to previous contributors of information when "merging" records. Instead of maintaining "who contributed what" I find it often changes the name to that of the person doing the merge (i.e. I just merged William Robert Coen G2L5-97L and now it shows my name for contributing all of his Vitals which were not contributed by me, and that doesn't seem right to me).
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Yes, I have seen that and don't like it either. If you just edit information, your name also replaces the contributor, which annoys me completely, especially if my edit is a comment about how the information is not quite correct. I believe contributors need to stay listed, and if edits, merges or other changes have occurred, both original contributor and most recent editor should be listed.
A merge can also remove memories that are clearly associated with both persons in the merge. I uploaded images of land records to an ancestor's memories that I took with my phone when visiting an archive. I then created memory sources out of each pic. This ancestor was later merged with another record and the original PID I worked with was deleted. While the sources were brought over during the merge, (I am still listed as contributor for them, by the way) the memories were not brought over. When I noticed this, it annoyed me. I had to find the pics in my gallery and re-tag them with the new PID.
Since I don't merge 2 well established person records too often, I'm not sure what the interface is on this. Was the person doing the merge just too lazy to examine the memories? Or was it something automatic?
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I don't see it as an injustice, but I agree that it's objectionable: it's misleading at best.
You can avoid some of the false blame/credit by judicious choice of which profile to keep: if you don't move the conclusion during the merge, then it keeps its actual contributor. Yes, this can leave you between a rock and a hard place, if both profiles have gaps -- which is often the case, especially when the duplicates were created by users coming at the person from opposite ends.
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Nothing is lost and there is no injustice here.
Look closer at the notation:
It does not say who contributed the information. It says who last touched the information in a way that made some sort of change. It is not always obvious what the change was because bringing information from the left side to the right side of the screen during a merge is a change even if the information is the same. Also, changing the language template from Other to English is a change even if that also does not result in the data for a name changing otherwise.
I find this Last Changed notation very valuable. If I am going back through my line and see my name, I don't need to check the data. If I see the name of someone I trust, I also don't need to check anything. If I see the name of someone who historically has done pretty poor work in Family Tree, I look at the change very closely. If this displayed only the first person to enter the data, and it was someone I trusted, and someone who makes a lot of mistakes made a change and the data still showed the name of the first person, that would be a problem.
Then there is another side to this when considering whose name should be listed. The first person who entered incorrect information? The fifth person who corrected the data? The tenth person who mangled the data? I think the programmers' choice to list the last person to touch the data who is basically confirming that the data is correct by keeping it in a merge or adding a reason statement or by setting the language template correctly is the one that should be shown.
Secondly, all contributors to a piece of data are displayed. Just click on the data to open the data view pop up:
Then click on See All Changes:
Here you have a list of every edit and every editor. Every contributor can be seen so they can get the credit, or blame, they deserve for their work.
A last note about merges: if you do not want your name to show as the last person to make a change to a piece of information after a merge then when merging, be sure to arrange the right and left side of the screen so that the right side has the information you want to keep and do not move information from the left side to the right. Use the link at the top to switch the position of the two profiles if you need to. If you move any information from the left to the right, you are making a change and will be listed as the person making that change.
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Regarding your example, G2L5-97L, I see that he was created 16 July 2023 by you and you added his birth and death dates on that day. No one else has touched that profile.
On 4 February 2024 you merged GPZP-H8Y into him, then unmerged the two profiles, then merged them again.
GPZP-H8Y was created by you on 3 February 2023. You added his birth date at that time. The next day you merged the two profiles. There are no other merges for either of these profiles.
There are no other contributors to either of these records other than you. Yours is the only name to be found the Change Log for these two profiles.
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I have to say that I can accept the current processing.
From a procedural viewpoint, if I merge two profiles, and I merge an event over into the resultant profile, then I am responsible for that data appearing on the resultant profile, even if I've never touched the actual data contents in my life. If I want to know who was the ultimate source of the information, I only need to look at Latest Changes - Show All.
If FS wanted to list all previous contributors to an item, how big would that list be? Yuk.
If FS wanted to list just the last person to enter that data item on any profile, well, that's not the full story either. Take this data from a Latest Changes:
Birth Added Birth
Abt 27 Feb 1861 Askan-in-Furness, Lancashire, England
2012 FamilySearch
followed by
Birth Changed Birth
Abt 27 Feb 1861 Crewe, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom
2024 AN Other
You might say that AN Other is the last contributor. But AN Other possibly knew nothing about the date, only about the place. So who should be recorded as the last contributor? The only safe option is all of them. But that's what Latest Changes - Show All does.
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