No warnings showing when merging
When the website was initially redesigned, there was an extensive conversation about how to prevent profiles from being merged that should not be merged.
https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/150846/more-warnings-before-changes-are-made-or-profiles-merged
I can think of several people I follow in my tree that are very often confused with other people and people will just merge them together. Or someone will come by and make edits to one of them so that they have the same birth/death date as the other one and then the next person will merge them.
As a group we collaborated on several ideas to help prevent this from happening. One was to add a warning at the top of the page. This has been removed from this new merge experience.
Things have actually improved with this change. It seems to happen less.
But I still feel like we could go a step further. I would like to see more visible warnings. I would like to be able to add warnings to names, birth and death dates on people who I know are often confused with other people with similar details.
We are trying to combat the issue that there are no such safeguards on Ancestry.com and people's trees get very convoluted there. And people don't realize that two similar people have been confused with people. They don't even know they have the wrong person in their tree. And then they come here and upload a GEDCOM. Or just make edits to the tree to convert the correct person into the wrong people.
I see in this new experience absolutely no safeguards. Just the old warnings when dates don't exactly match up. But this doesn't help if someone has been edited to be someone they weren't initially intended to be.
Merging is a dangerous game. Especially now that we can't go back and unmerge. It seems like there need to be more precautions added. This is a place that does not need a more simplified, streamlined interface.
Comments
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Have you tried to merge to very different people? There is a warning at the top of the merge page if the two profiles have discrepancies. There are also a ton of new warnings such as the two people having different grandparents.
I do see what you mean, however, that the Alert Note is no longer shown at the top of the merge page if there is one. That would be good to have back.
Old Merge displays Alert Note:
New Merge does not display Alert Note:
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Thank you both for the feedback! :)
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