Could some euroaristo group members please take a look at the oldest proposed merges?

Question

In case you haven't heard, the new BrowseMatches tool is awesome. I've been working on completing some of the oldest merges, that were proposed way back in early 2011! Yikes!

What I'm finding is there are a lot of euro aristo profiles in there, and these merge proposals are from before a lot of the LNAB standards were developed. So, I don't want to just complete the merges, because the last names might be wrong.

So if members of the euro aristo group could take a few minutes to check out a few of the oldest merges, and get those profiles merged into the final profiles, that would be amazing! In the meantime, I'll keep working on the ones I understand. :)

Comments

I've been working the old Pending Merges.  If the profile manager who hasn't approved is an active user (past 2 months), I've been leaving them alone, even if the proposed merge is clearly appropriate.  If the profile manager is not active, I will use my super powers to approve.  But it strikes me that an active user should now know about the Pending Merge list, so I should just go ahead and approve appropriate merges that are more that a few months old.  I could also suggest to the active user to check the Pending Merge list and then wait.  Any thoughts?

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I would just complete the merges. If you're looking at the oldest ones, we're talking about merges that were proposed almost 3 years ago! So I doubt the profile managers are going to get around to them. :)

Telling people about the pending merges list is a great idea, too. I bet some people that have merges on that list actually have a bunch of them, so it would really help with the work load if more people were handling their own.

Answer 1

I would be happy to contribute if allowed to.

Comments

Hi Jacques! If you're interested in European aristocratic families (which, looking at your contributions, it looks like you are), I recommend joining the euroaristo group! Once you're familiar with the group standards, you could take management of a family line.

For more info, see http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:European_Aristocratic_Ancestors_User_Group

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I joined the group a week ago and hope to follow the standards (if not, let me now).

In the unassigned families, I could take care of the Blois and Lusignan families.

Other families that are not mentioned: Vermandois, Beaugency, Coucy.

Later, I could also look at the Anjou family if the person in charge has other priorities. Other French families could also be of interest for me.

Answer 2

Seems to be unwritten rules in this community.

If not, one should think of making the present ones clearer.

Comments

Hi Jacques. What unwritten rules do you think there are? And what rules are not clear enough? I'd be happy to improve the user group page if you have suggestions! Feedback like that would be really helpful. Most of the members of the euroaristo group have been around for a long time, so we're not always aware when things are not readily apparent to new members.

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Following the previous exchange (see above), I joined the group 3 weeks ago.

Since then, nothing happened.

I can imagine that the people involved have many things to do, but is it a sound strategy to turn down newcomers willing to help ?

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Well, the group activity pretty much consists of discussions about whatever issues come up. Beyond that, there's nothing that's really supposed to happen.

A good way to start would be to pick a profile or group of profiles that you think should have the same last name at birth, whether that be a house name, or whatever. Then, post a question on G2G with the euroaristo tag, to start the discussion on what the last name at birth should be. See this page for the basics: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Name_Fields_for_European_Aristocrats but really a lot of it is discussed as a group.

An example of such a discussion (though it hasn't got a huge response so far) is here: http://www.wikitree.com/g2g/17421/what-surname-should-be-used-for-robert-the-bruces-ancestors

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My bad. Based on what you wrote before, I really thought that one of the tasks of the group was to clean the mess. If the main task is to discuss family names, I can hardly see how and when the cleansing will occur.

I continue to think that the merging process is over-cautious for the <1500 period. Selected individuals should be allowed to complete this on their own, under the control of the group.

There should also be a rule like the following: a half-finished merge older than a year (e.g.) is automatically accepted. It would prevent no more active users to block the process.

Having said that, a backlog of two years isn't that bad, is it ?

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The group is doing the cleaning up. As a group, we decide what family names should be. Then, individually, we clean up a family. For example, in the very early days of the group, the family name Plantaganet was decided on. Then, Lindsay single-handedly cleaned up the huge pile of duplicates of that family. Recently, I've done the same for the House of Windsor.

Selected individuals already can complete merges of older people (200+ years old) on their own. They're called Supervisors.

Half-finished merges older than a year sometimes don't make sense anymore, so automatically completing them would actually mess up a lot of profiles. The Arborists are going through these old merges every day.

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TL;DR Everything is fine. Pleased to hear that.

Your Op was slightly misleading as it sounded as a call for help.

Keep up the good work.

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Yes, my question was a call for help. I was seeing a lot of old merges for euro aristos, but they were all in families I wasn't familiar with. I was looking for people who knew about those families (and in particular knew what the last names should be) to complete those merges.

I'm sorry if that came across as misleading. It's been a bit of an adjustment switching to G2G from the Google Group. In the old group, only group members saw the posts, so less background info was needed, compared to G2G, where posts are seen by everyone.