How do rejected matches work?

Question

I'm working on finding matches for Richard Wright of early Rehoboth (lowest number found so far: Wright-798). Because of the commonality of his name, all sorts of "bad" matches come up in the search results (when using the magnifying glass icon from the profile page). For those that are OBVIOUSLY not matches-- 19th and 20th century Richard Wrights, for example, I selected "reject". My logical brain would tell me that in future magnifying-glass searches from Wright-798 that these rejected matches would no longer appear on the list, allowing me to see more merge possibilities than the limited number allowed first go-around. But is that what happens? And if so, WHEN does it happen? I've refreshed the page; I've left and come back to Wright-798 and selected the magnifying glass again, but those "rejected merges" are still on the list. When (if at all) do I get a new list? Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi Jillaine,

In the basic search results, with that magnifying glass, you should see "rejected match" in bold next to most of the names.

Rejecting a match also keeps the matches out of MatchBot and FindMatches, unless you opt to have them included.

Currently, FindMatches is a much better search tool. The default one-click search for a person just has defaults set, and doesn't let you adjust them. It's on the to-do list to fix that. When we do, we'll certainly have ignoring rejected matches as an option and/or the default.

Chris

Comments

By "FindMatches" you mean what you select from the "Find" menu in the upper right corner of any given profile page?

So that's a different function than the magnifying glass? Oh dear, I'm experiencing deja vu. You've told me this before (or someone has) and I'm not retaining it. So I should stop using the magnifying glass and use FindMatch instead. (why are they different? I think I asked that before too...)

Thanks, Chris! I'll TRY to remember this time. Sorry.

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Hi Jillaine,

As you know, we're constantly working on refining and improving WikiTree. Maybe tracing out the development of these search features will help:

We started with a very basic text search engine. You enter keywords you get results. The current state of it is at http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:SearchPerson

We later developed a feature we called "FindMatches." Instead of entering a name and browsing results, it will automatically do searches for *all* the names in your Watchlist. You can browse the results one at a time. If there are no matches for a name none are shown. It's a handy tool.

We added a feature to FindMatches where you could just search for one name. In many ways this is what you would get at Special:SearchPerson but it has the FindMatches options.

To make things convenient, we added a one-click no-options FindMatches search that has a single name filled in. That's what you get when you click the magnifying glass.

Since a lot of people use that one-click search, I know we need to now go back and add options to it.

However, we were working on MatchBot and now we're working on pre-matching for gedcoms, prior to import. When these are done (and other priorities) are worked through, we'll go back to improving the one-name search.

Chris

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Thanks for the context, Chris. Matchbot and pre-matching for gedcoms are DEFINITELY more important. I'll try to remember to use FindMatch. I've started using it, and it's great. Thanks.