Why were these merges rejected?

Question

AKA How do you use "Unmerged Match"?

I asked a couple of people to add me to some Trusted Lists. I guess they trusted me A LOT, because they added me to the Trusted List of their entire Watch Lists. Talk about a needle in a haystack! More than a thousand profiles, and you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of profiles I was actually planning to add something to.

So, that's what I've been doing lately, clearing out my Watch List. In the process, I came upon the Walker-645 profile, on which I left a comment two months ago.

I noticed two matching wives, and when I clicked on one found she had a duplicate husband and he had an open profile. So I did the edits there - adding a source and a Project tag for LDS Pioneers. Then, if I propose a merge, I'll eventually succeed in making these small additions to the profile plus one less duplicate on WikiTree.

Much to my surprise, I found the merge had already been proposed and rejected. There was no mismatching info, although one profile had many blank fields (which I have since filled.) The merge of the duplicate wives had also been rejected. I removed both rejections and re-proposed the merges.

I'm curious what others have to say. Here's the two rejected matches:

Walker-16789 into Walker-645

Shadden-18 into Shadden-4

I'd be curious to hear what reasons others might see to reject the match. Even if you want more matching fields, unmerged match would make more sense than rejecting outright.

I mostly use Unmerged Match for unresolved parent issues. And sometimes you'll find a name and birth year, one profile with parents and siblings, the other with spouse and children. I don't like to let those slip away if there's nothing to rule out a match. More info needed, so it's a possible maybe merge. I know others are fussier, like the Unmerged Match for one letter different in the spelling of the middle name (no kidding!) I encountered lately.

All of which is to say: I could see, perhaps, marking these as unmerged matches, though I wouldn't do it that way myself. But I totally don't get them being rejected.

What criteria do you use?

Comments

I have only set one merge request to unmerged match and that was because the parents were completely different.

Answer 1

Well it looks like you've removed the rejected match and reprocessed merges on both sets.

Normally you can look at the changes tab to see who rejected the merge then you could contact that person and ask why they rejected it.  But it looks like the rejections happened before the introduction of merge tracking.

Unmerged match should be used when it looks like the two profiles are the same but additional work needs to be done to resolve discrepancies.

In all cases, comments should be left explaining reasons.

Comments

I did look at the changes, and found no indication of why it was rejected. (Thus, this query.) Thanks for explaining how now there is a history of such actions which wasn't always so.

Meanwhile, I've still got 700+ profiles to go on the last one who added me to their entire Watch List. Perhaps I'll accidentally remove myself from the one profile I was interested in. I have sent the person a note, less to complain, more to make sure this doesn't happen again. I've been working on this all week, dagnabbit!

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I feel your pain. A cousin I invited did something similar to me, basically doubling the size of my watchlist. I used the bulk tool, but still had to click on each one I needed to be removed from.

Answer 2

It appears to me that these Rejected Matches may have been created when the higher-numbered profile was created. For some reason (possibly just due to being confused), when the contributor was presented with an apparent duplicate for the profile they about to create, they selected the "reject match" option. As a result a new duplicate profile was created with the "rejected match" property.

When a Rejected Match is created at the same time a new profile is created, the creation of the Rejected Match isn't logged.

Comments

ah.... well that's a pity...

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That makes sense. There's sometimes an odd array of rejected merges on a profile. I bet that's how many of those were generated.