Better flagging of Duplicates

+10 votes
376 views
It's happened more than a few times that I get a request to approve a merger of a profile I created years ago with a profile created yesterday, when the data is absolutely identical. I understand new users might not realize that they need to check the suggested profiles, but it seems to be happening to experienced users as well.

Is there some way to make the software more robust?

1. Eliminate or reduce the obvious "non-matches" so that a user doesn't have to click boxes for "Arthur Davidson" when the new profile is " Elisha Davis". I've had that. Maybe  a "strong" possibility list followed by a "weak" possibility list, if that's possible.

2. Require a user to actually check off all the boxes, and also check "This is NOT a duplicate profile", before WikiTree allows the creation of a profile.

I'm not suggesting punishment. But as more people join WikiTree, a few more checks and balances will make the process smoother for all of us. Just a thought!
in Policy and Style by Norm Davis G2G6 (7.9k points)
retagged by Jamie Nelson
There are plenty of people that do check the boxes of the ones that do not match.  Those created Rejected matches for all of those records, most of which are totally useless because of the name mismatch or years that are not even close, so please don't encourage or require people to mark every one of the possible matches.

Jamie had said previously that they were working on something to help with the duplicate process.  If people would do a 'search' for a person, sort it by birth date, they could easily see if there is a duplicate profile that is 'close' to what they are looking for.  With it being thon weekend, expect this problem to cause lots of duplicates.

1 Answer

+18 votes
 
Best answer
We've just started planning a redesign of the add person page, and part of that is improving the search algorithm for duplicates and also improving the UI (lots of people get confused about the checkboxes!)
by Jamie Nelson G2G6 Pilot (613k points)
selected by Stu Ward
Thank you, Jamie, for this encouraging update.  Bravo to the team.
Yay!   Thank you!

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