Changes in last edit date

Question

I, like many other WIkiTreers, want to be able to use the last edit date on our Watchlist profiles to help determine what work needs to be done. A profile that has not been edited for quite a while may need some work. Or the most recent edit dates might indicate profiles I was doing work on that needs to be continued.

Why is the last edit date not accurate? I know this has been asked before but I have never seen a satisfactory answer.

The specific profiles I am asking about are husband and wife. They were uploaded via gedcom and edited on 21 August 2014. The Changes tab indicates no changes since then. Neither profile was the subject of a proposed merge or unmerged match. Neither bears a category or project template which might have been changed. Yet the latest edit date is 3 March 2016.

These two profiles are just examples. There are quite a few others on my watchlist which have dates that bear no relationship to their actual last edit. Why?

Can this be changed so the last edit date is just that?

Comments

Hi Shirley - last I recall reading on this annoying problem, was that the system had been changed  so the edit date on the profile would match the edit date on our  Watchlist Edit column, thereby giving a fake but more recent edit date on Google searches, giving WikiTree a higher ranking priority or some-such reasoning, but the edit date in Google search results is still the REAL last edit date of changes to data ON the profile, sooo the only result of changing edit dates via messing with project templates is to change the edit dates on our watch list, making that column useless to us :(   

The thousands of ignored profiles, that they likely hope to get a more recent edit date on, most likely don't have project templates - so don't get the Google boost. And the profiles that would be getting real updates by folks monitoring their Watchlist, aren't because that column is now broken.  Doesn't make sense to me

Answer 1

Well now it shows April 5 as I tested a theory I had.  Lots of times if I want to see the code behind a profile, I'll click the edit tab (or the button near the bottom of the biography) and after seeing what I want or copying somethings, I'll back our of the edit.  But apparently this changes the date of edit but doesn't register as a change.  I'm not sure that this is the best way for things to be set up, but apparently this is how it works now.  So if I were you, I'd either ask here to have things changed or I'd just go with the date of last change. though it might not help you know if you need to do editing.

Comments

If you abandon a page without saving changes, it should not change the edit date.

Answer 2

Ok, explain this one. I just checked my Watchlist  again. Among the profiles with incorrect Edit dates I now find my grandson with an Edit date of 4 April 2016. His profile is Red private. I have made no changes to it; no categories; no project templates; no merge proposals.

Please can the powers that be put those Edit dates back to the actual dates? This is really frustrating.