More warnings before changes are made or profiles merged?

redheadkelly

I love that some of the things that have been discussed here have been added to the new person page. I like the ability to write a note & pin it above the profile. I like the idea that the notes are visible on the 'Details' page. I like the ability to write a life history and have it appear on the 'About' page. Anything that can be done to inform people before they make changes is great.

But I'm still seeing some of the same issues I was seeing before these upgrades.

Just as an example, I have two David Rosses. One was born 14 Sep 1644 and died 17 Apr 1711, exact dates known. He has a distant cousin David Ross who was born about 1646 and died in 1610, exact dates not known.

People will come to the profile of the second David and change his birth & death dates to those of the first David. Next thing you know, the first David has been merged with the second David. And the reason given is "All vital information and relationships match. ID numbers: G4L8-YNX and L6P1-8KM." Or sometimes, just "Same person". Which they do appear to be once someone changes the second to have the first's birth & death date.

Even when there are warnings at the top of both of these people that say, "Important research has been done on this person. Please read these alert notes before merging." And the first line of the note is something like "This profile is David Ross 13th of Balnagown. His birth & death years are very close to those of his distant cousin David Ross of Balblair. These men are not the same person." I have still seen people edited to be someone they're not and then merged with the person they were turned into.

The trick seems to be the prevention of changing the birth & death dates in the first place. Is there a way to put a warning in the actual 'edit' box and then repeat these warnings very clearly right next to the birth & death dates when people attempt to merge?

It could just say... Birth date not 14 Sep 1644. Or something like that?

What I would really like to have is the ability to lock something. Like, if I have adequate evidence attached, or a consensus of several other people, I could lock these dates so that they can't be changed. Or they can only be changed if someone provides enough evidence. It seems like that could get complicated and it's a lot more policing than this site is set up for, but I'm just so tired of correcting the same mistakes over & over again.

What I think we're battling is just people who are new to genealogy and/or new to working with these kinds of online trees. The mistakes I'm correcting are the same ones over & over again. They're the same ones I can find on thousands of trees on Ancestry. When you're new, it's easy to just believe what's there without knowing you have to double-check it. Then those trees are imported here.

How do we prevent those errors from being entered here and having to be corrected over & over & over again? How do we say to someone... we already know that this person's birthday is such & such. Sources are attached. Please don't change it unless you have other sources that actually support your change.

Gail Swihart Watson

I think allowing users to lock records could cause a lot of trouble. One lady sent me a very snippy message that I had "hijacked" her grandmother. She did not look at my sources but, but relied on the logic that she "knew" who her grandmother was, and she wasn't my ancestor. Luckily she backed off when I sent her 2 death certificates of women with the same name in the same town and 2 pages in the same census for different family groups with girls of the same name. I believe if she had the option to merge and THEN lock before contacting me, she would have.

If people are allowed to lock something they will do it for the dumbest of reasons. Sourcing my ancestors ad nauseum has really gone a long way to mitigate issues before they happen. I highly recommend you do that. Add all census records, birth records, death records and marriage records you can find, for not only the person, but their parents and their children. Link those generations and my experience is it will help.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

There is a way to add a note to a particular conclusion. It's labeled "Reason This Information Is Correct".

The problem, of course, is that People Don't Read. They've trained themselves to ignore not only reason boxes, but also red text yelling at them at the tops of pages (both Details and Merge).

I wonder if there could be a way to "tag" Alert Notes to particular conclusions? This could not only cause the alert to appear when someone went to edit that conclusion, but could add an extra hoop to jump through before being allowed to save the changes -- some sort of checkbox that would only activate if the entire note box had been scrolled through? I think this would be better than any sort of lock mechanism -- as Gail says, people would use a lock on everything, if they could, no matter how wrong -- and would perhaps add the right level of impedance to halt at least some of the error propagators.

redheadkelly

@Gail Swihart Watson I agree that locking is problematic. I have definitely run into people who are convinced of something & don’t pay attention to the sources attached. I’m just so frustrated with the same erroneous information that’s being propagated on other trees being posted here over & over again. I went a little extreme in my suggestion. It’s my fantasy, though, that I can just say, once & for all… stop changing this to the nonsense that is on Ancestry! Haha.

And, as far as sources go, I have gone through the generations where census & birth records are available & attached them. Where I see the most problems are the earlier generations where those are not available & you actually have to go to land records & probate records & things that aren’t as easily searchable and can’t be attached using the source linker.

I know where I can expect to find these changes being made so I have those profiles on my watch list & I’ve added notes & comments everywhere I can.

But things are still being added & edited.

I love your idea @Julia Szent-Györgyi of not allowing edits to be saved until someone has acknowledged reading the notes. Like accepting Terms and Conditions.

I did make a suggestion when development was still happening that notes could be pinned, or tagged, to particular events and then they would be seen during editing or merging. It seems we need that level of warning.

But also agree that no one reads these. Adding this next level of having to acknowledge that you read the tagged note and were actually paying attention before you can save edits makes a lot of sense. I really like it.

I also wonder how much of this is happening during GEDCOM imports or Legacy Family Tree syncing. I feel like new people are getting added to the tree during import & they get linked to families. And then the family gets confused with another family. And people make changes to the parents to make them match the child, when, really, the child was attached to the wrong parents to begin with.

And Legacy allows you to merge people from their FamilySearch interface without having to do any reading of warnings. So, I wonder how much of this is happening outside of the standard FamilySearch person page.