Finding people to merge

Question

Today again, I done some merging and come to find out that it was already on the list. The reason that I couldn't find them it is because the Frenchs love to place accent on their names. ex:  Bossé"  I tried not to add them because it creates a big mess.

What can you do for us to make it easier for us?

Just remember that everyone of us will merge into a French family...

oh la la

Comments

I don't follow your logic?!?! Do you tell us to misspell names?

Please use correct spelling it's rude and ignorant not doing it...

I am not from France but from Sweden and my surname is Sälgö writing it as Salgo is totally insane it's like writing your surname without vowels Lise Rodrigue ==> Ls Rdrg just because my keyboard has problems with vowels....

FYI: Once I spent 15 minutes trying to check in at a Sheraton hotel in San Francisco because the system didn't support åäö and someone invented that my name should be spelled Saelgoe not Sälgö.... as we have system supporting Unicode use the correct characters. If you not find them on your keyboard is not an excuse.... and if people from France start using Wikitree they will be more than confused....

Summary: Please use correct spelling not doing that is a great mess..... 

What can be done? 
As with locations inside Wikitree I think we should have more fields for adding names some people have one name in e.g. Cyrillic alphabet and one in Latin alphabet 

EDIT: think add what you find in the churchbooks etc.. its a better practice if Wikitree has problem searching on Bossé and Bosse (which I dont think it have) BUT if Wikitree has problems its better if we try to solve it in a magic tool like the database error pproject

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But her question still stands.  Our search engine should match Bossé with Bosse.

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Sure but my understanding is that Wikitree needs to upgrade to have better language support see earlier discussion where using Google was the best work around
Use Google and site:www.wikitree.com

But from a genealogy point of view a bad search engine doesn't motivate to misspell names....

This doesn't look good Bossé-62. The odd thing is that the only source added (is a family tree without sources) write the name Bosse - maybe they also had a bad search engine ;-) or...

Feels like a blind leading a blind... ;-)

 

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Because WikiTree's search utilities do not look for alternative spellings, we should use a work-around to help the search engine find duplicates.

For last names, the work-around is to list the alternative spellings (including any misspellings that show up in people's genealogies) in the Other Last Names field. See http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Du_Bois-1 for an example.

For first names, you can use the Nicknames field as a place to list alternative spellings.

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This is for Michael Stills

I am a little upset by your comment on asking you to misspell names.

I quote you

"I don't follow your logic?!?! Do you tell us to misspell names?"

"Please use correct spelling it's rude and ignorant not doing it"

I think that you are under the weather or yourself being rude to me. I am offended by your comment.

What I am saying if Wikitree wants to be a whole family and to avoid duplicates, The search engine should be recognize the similar spelling with our without the accent.

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Then ask for changing the search engine..... or use Google search.... or do a batch solution...

If we start creating fiction names with no sources how should one understand what is correct....

What is most important to have the correct name of people or some A-Z version of all names?  

I think everyone will start to realize that doing a world wide family tree the last 500 years is complex.... and my opinion starting inventing new names that never have been used is the wrong direction..... if we then don't source the profiles.... who should understand why it's spelled like it is....

Even if you use a-z names and someone uploads a family tree with correct spelling you will have a problem..... I assume...

My humble opinion is that you don't solve a problem you create one... but I feel we don't need to agree as we don't update the same parts of the tree...

I think lesson learned is

1. We need a better search engine in Wikitree
2. We need to be able to add more forms of a name e.g.
   1. a-z character when we have problems with searching i.e. somekind of normalization that has nothng with the name used by the living person
   2. Different version of a name in different alphabet like Cyrillic  Latin alphabet etc... list of writing systems

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Sir,
We are not asking to misspell names, we are asking to add a widget that would recognized the name with or without the accent. You really making a mountain out of a hill...We do not know how the prior person spelled the name. By the way, Google will give both spelling....This is my last answer on this subject....thank you all for listening

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Mr anonymous it's easier if you explain how you think a name like Bossé should be entered in Wikitree

If it's like Bosse I would say it's misspelled....

When I worked 1988 at a software company Digital Equipment and we bug reported that a software couldn't handle åäö I got an email asking me do you use those characters a lot. My answer was it's just 40% of my surname ;-( 

What is misspelled or not can be difficult to understand....

Workaround: As we have got a database error project that looks promising it is maybe not a big deal to create duplicate clean up function that supports searching on all flavours of diacritics for duplicates candidates ;-)  
 

Éé

Èè

Ĕĕ

Êê

Ếế

Ềề

Ễễ

Ểể

Ěě

Ëë

Ẽẽ

Ėė

Ȩȩ

Ḝḝ

Ęę

Ēē

Ḗḗ

Ḕḕ

Ẻẻ

Ȅȅ

Ȇȇ

Ẹẹ

Ệệ

Ḙḙ

Ḛḛ

Ɇɇ

Template:Latin_alphabet

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I added a question to Aleš Trtnik if he had a better solution....

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 Perhaps I've missed the  point and  apologise if that is the case but if you look at the surname list for  Bosse, http://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Special:Surname&s=BOSSE&order=name   there are profiles both with and without the accent and if you order them by name or by date then you are likely to find any duplicates.

 On  this list for Belanger/ Bélanger  http://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Special:Surname&s=BELANGER&order=dobup, I can quickly see that there are possible duplicate Marie Madeleines , one with an accent and one without.

As someone who has been living in France, I  agree with Magnus on the importance of accents if we are to be correct.  (ironically, often have to correct the opposite way as my name is Helen not Hélène )

Answer 1

This is the reason we created the Arborists Project.   http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:Arborists

Arborists spend the time to look at the Surname list http://www.wikitree.com/indexes/person/A/index.html  and find all the alternate spellings.   I was just working on VanSwearigen, Van Swearingen, Swearingen and all the alternates, yesterday.  

Spaces, apostrophes, accents, tildes, etc, are all things that make finding duplicates a challenge.

Comments

Feels like the Arborists people should join the party at the database error project see link