The importance of information from a newbie to this site

Question

After starting my branch of family trees and the resulting mess of merge suggestions I can now see why it is ULTRA important to put as much info as you know into the file. I am coming across people with the same name. The problem arises where these sggested merges have no dates or places with them. I unfortunately am not a rocket science or a mind reader. I must reject your effort. Sad really as they could well be a match BUT if you can't put even a country of origin then why bother putting the name alone on here?

Answer 1

Before you, or many of us, understood the essence of WikiTree, there were MANY GEDCOMs imported without necessary information.

We've all had to struggle through these "potential matches" and we've (mostly) survived.

If it doesn't look like Uncle Bert, don't match it.  Yes, you've gotta check, but soon  you will learn what needs checked and what can be ignored.

Comments

Hopefully once I plough my way through this intial avalanche I will be good to add more people, oh wait hang on that will reload possible matches. LOL. Never ending I see. Lucky I love family trees and research. :)

Answer 2

When I joined in 2013 all you needed to add a profile was a name, now you need at least a birth or death date so that will help. Unfortunatly there has been about 4 years of profiles added that did not require anything other than a name so it will be a mess for some time to come but we are improving. I will no longer even think about adding anything from a GEDCOM because it is really more work than adding them in manually. Will the long list of possible merges ever go away, no so don't spend all of your time there it is better to improve the existing profiles when you can to reduce the number of possible merges.