Why is the rejection of the merge proposal not visible in the changes tab?

Question

See the changes tab for this profile: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Rossouw-1217 - the rejection seems to be invisible ...

The merge proposal came in via Gmail (15 Feb 18.05 Dutch Time): [...] One of these two profiles is an unconnected branch, the other is part of the main tree, but they look to be the same person. 

Data	Rossouw-1217	Rossouw-291
Birth Date	1787-02-02	1787-04-22
Birth Place		Stellenbosch, de Caep de Goede Hoop, Dutch Cape Colony
Death Date	0000-00-00	1834-00-00
Father	Gabriel Rossouw (Rossouw-1220) b. 1757-07-22 d. 1812-02-02	Gabriel Rossouw (Rossouw-13) b. 1757-06-22 d. 1812-02-02
Compare, merge, match or reject these conflicting fathers.
Mother	Maria Rossouw (Van As-210) b. 1763-04-13 d. 0000-00-00	Maria Rossouw (Van As-61) b. 1763-07-31 d. 1842-05-26
Compare, merge, match or reject these conflicting mothers.

Answer 1

When a match is rejected in the process of creating a profile it does not show in the change log.

On the profile page it looks exactly the same as if a merge had been proposed and then rejected.

Comments

"When a match is rejected in the process of creating a profile it does not show in the change log." - would this qualify as a 'bug' to be fixed? Certainly the rejection (it was a rejection when I removed it and re-proposed the merge) should not show up on the changes tab as a 'match removal' - and also the proposal to merge was after the creation (see the time and date of the merge proposal as it came through on Gmail).

---

The problem is that when someone creates a profile for say, William Davis (or Joe Brown, John Williams,...), he is given a looooong list of potential matches. (In such a case I use Ctrl-F to find out if there's one that matches the general birth location of what I'm trying to create). Some users will dutifully tick all the rejected matches, even the most unlikely ones. I suppose that would be a problem if it was reflected in the Changes log.

Take it this way: if two profiles are showing up as rejected but there is nothing in the Changes log, it probably means they were rejected at creation. (Unless one of the profiles is a merged profile, in which case you also have to check the changes of merged-away profiles).

Answer 2

When did you reject it?

Comments

I did not reject it. As I state, someone rejected it after the merge proposal (but it does not show on the changes tab (click to view). I had to remove the rejection in order to re-propose the merge (I know that the changes tab says that I "removed a match of Rossouw-1217 and Rossouw-291.") Even if this was the case that the proposal had been matched - there should be a 'match' visible in the changes tab or not?

Answer 3

The merge by Celia was probably proposed as an Unmerged Match. For the merge to actually be completed, it has to be removed and re-proposed.

The changes log shows that 'you' removed the proposal and then re proposed it. When a removal is done, it is not added to the Changes Log.

Comments

If it was rejected when you removed it, was it possibly in the unmerged area and also in rejected area? I have seen merges in both places, as well as duplicate merges in one area, so removing one will remove both.

---

Have you reached out to the person that proposed the merge initially? Maybe they can explain how they proposed it and if they did anything further.

---

Linda, despite what the changes tab says, I found it rejected and not matched. The explanation of Eva seems the most plausible, and it also raises a few questions.

---

Except that the profile wasn't created, it already existed.  On further review, if Celia had proposed an unmerged match, it would have said that with proposal, but it didn't.  I would contact that PM because they have proposed a lot of merges recently around this family.

---

I do not see that Linda. When I look at the contributions of the current manager, I do not see any merge proposals whatsoever.

---

I was the one doing the merge proposals of the duplicates created.

---

Feb 15, there was a merge proposal.

---

Indeed Linda, it is the exact same merge proposal by the same person as show above; the point still being that when I tried to merge it, it was an rejected proposal later showing up as a match removal. And this one merge proposal was not made by the profile manager.

---

I had a message from Jamie about another merge issue, so I sent her this G2G to see if she would look at it also. Rejects that are done when profiles are created shouldn't be added to change log, I don't think, because there wasn't an existing merge, but when there is a merge proposed, it should have it is changes log, so you could ask the person why it was rejected since there isn't a reason when rejecting it. I actually think that would be a better idea to make sure that rejects have a comment which is posted. That could be helpful.

---

I can see now why more explanation is needed, than what I wrote above - the merge proposal on 15 Feb does seem an anomaly.

The "normal" reason for a rejected merge that is not listed in the change log would be, as I said, that it was marked as rejected at the time of profile creation.

If a couple of profiles are shown as a rejected match, it should not be possible to propose a merge as was done Feb 15.

It is also strange that after that merge proposal there is no rejection on record - which one would think there should be in order to create the situation where Philip had to remove the match in order to be able to propose it again.

I have just tested removing a couple of matches I created myself by marking them as rejected when I created a new profile in the place I'm currently working on. The removal of a rejected match showed up in the change log for both profiles, in both cases.

I find the terminology for discussing this quite confusing - I hope I don't cause more confusion.

---

I'm not sure I'm being helpful here (but I hope so).  WikiTree apparently had a brief outage yesterday morning.  Could this particular problem be a one-time event caused by that system-wide problem?

---

I evidently took my time writing - I wasn't aware of Linda's latest comment when I hit Send.

I agree that matches rejected at the time of profile creation should not be in the change log (or cannot be).

When a proposed merge is rejected it does show in the change log, doesn't it? This is kind'a hard to experiment with... but there are old cases I can easily look up. And yes, a rejection does show up in the logs of both profiles.

Hope Jamie can figure it out.