I am not wanting to call anybody out right now, but I feel like I am wasting my time when I build a tree here, because increasingly, new members join, and then they immediately start shifting old profiles around to new parents, with little care, no discussion, and no relevant sources.
To make it worse, there is no easy tracking of such changes. I really have to search the massive amounts of new change alerts resulting from all the error prompts that people are intent on making better on every profile they do not manage, hunt down the Changes tab where I occasionally see in all of that list that a parent was added, and then dig deep to find the unclickable old original parents, who may or may not have been merged into the new parents at some much earlier time.
It's immensely time-consuming, and if I orphan any profiles, of course such damage will not even cross my radar for those orphans.
WikiTree has thrived on obscurity, with long time quality members. But if it is just going to become as random as every other shared genealogy site, then why are we bothering?
Maybe there is no fix for this. But I notice that a welcome change within recent months or years was to avoid this problem by locking parent relationships with PPP status.
In the particular case that triggered this rant today, the new parents also got immediately marked "confident," just because, I guess.
So somebody please tell me this is not all just a huge waste of time. I can either spend hours politely calling out the offenders, and either being ignored by them, or waiting for a half fix by them, or fixing it myself. Or waste my time trying to train new members in the rules of conduct, and all that. I just want to build a good tree, with proper tools in place to prevent the mess caused by many exuberant new people.
I am probably out of line with this rude rant. But, well, I will go back to working on DNA off site now. I really don't spend much time actually building in WikiTree anymore lately, sorry to say, because of issues like this.