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! :) A ticket has been created for this issue.
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Yes @Gordon Collett . I was part of the conversation during the person page redesign when we added that Alert Note. I have been adding these notes to as many profiles as I can since then. I do actually think it has made a small difference in the amount of times I have to go back and make corrections. I would love it if it could part of the new merge.
There have always been alerts about dates not matching. I don't know if that's stopping people from merging or not. Maybe it is, because I think I find issues more when people are edited into someone they're not and then merged. But I love the idea of having an alert that grandparents don't match. Maybe that will help with that problem.
I agree with what you just said in another conversation… that people who aren't used to using this one-world-tree type of tree find their family line and then go in and edit people to make them into who they think they should be, not understanding that that person should stay who they were originally intended to be and maybe disconnected instead.
Is there a way, though, when someone is merged, to let the merger knew who the person was originally created to be?
Like I love that we have the date the profile was created at the top. It makes it very easy to see if one of them was just created last week or if they were both created on the original import in 2012.
I would love to see it say under the name, "Created 3 Mar 2019 as John Doe." Then under the other one, "Created 3 Dec 2012 as William Smith." Then you could know, for sure, if one of them has been morphed into another person. Same could go for birth and death dates?Although, I also love the idea of having the notes we enter show up next to birth and death dates. I have entered several that say something like… "This person was born in 1646, not 1644. 1644 was his cousin with the same name." It would be so helpful if people could see these notes when they're attempting to merge my guy who was born in 1646 with his cousin who was born in 1644.
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