How many unmerged matches are there?

+12 votes
243 views
As a Greeter/Messenger, I get a great deal of good questions that I do not have the answers for and this is one of those.  Do we have a total number of the unmerged matches at this time?  Even better would be a total of pending merges and rejected matches, pretty please?

Thanks, Cindy
in The Tree House by Cindy Lesure G2G6 Pilot (126k points)
retagged by Dorothy Barry
The total number should be very easily available, but as far as I know, it's just not available to us.

You can click Find on the menu at top right of any WikiTree page other than in G2G, select Pending Merges on the dropdown list, then click the Unmerged Matches on the link near the top of the page.  That will display the list of all current unmerged matches, however it lists 20 of them per page and does not show either the total number of unmerged matches or the number of pages that there are.  It would be a nothing to display those numbers, though.
I think that would be a great solution Gaile!  Perhaps that is something that Ales can do for us?  Anyway, I believe having that information at the top of the page to tell us each how vast the list is would be an impetus to 'get on with it!'  I do not have time in my life <chortle> to scroll through all those pages to count them, though!  :-)
Cindy, it's something that anyone with access to the software could do.  All it takes is one small line of code to print the total number of records returned by the database search that was performed to produce the page - hardly rocket science - and it carries absolutely no resource overhead, either.

1 Answer

+9 votes
I come up with between 610,000 and 620,000 unmerged matches.

Reasoning: 20 are displayed per page; I went to the second page and updated the URL to start with different pages. Page 30500 has August 2017 unmerged matches; page 310000 is empty.
by Sharon Casteel G2G6 Pilot (162k points)
Holy crow batman!  That is way worse than I thought!!  Thanks Sharon!
You're welcome!
So, if 10 dedicated arborists were all to research and dispose of 10 a day each, 6 days a week, they could clear the whole backlog in only 20 years.

Assuming nobody adds any more.
Ouch!  Thanks for putting it into perspective Sharon and RJ.  We arborists had better get busy!!  I have been proposing merges all day and sadly most of them have been sitting here for over five years waiting to be discovered :-(
Last week I opened, starting at the oldest unmerged match, over 1600 unmerged matches so far. I commented to Cindy that it is like entering an underworld of indecisiveness. The only obvious link to a lot of them is the name. Obvious rejects abound. Hover over the usually sparse details you find a child 200 years different from the parents in the matched profile etc.etc etc. Many are so far different even in name it is quicker and more sensible to remove the unmerged match and put them back in the wild. Many matches are obvious they just need a little bit of work. If it looked even slightly contentious or like hard work I moved on rapidly. Reproposed merges so far about 250. Over 50 have been merged. Only two have been "reparked" so far. The only bug bear is I now have a huge pending merges list. Some will never get removed as they are full privacy. Obviously a duplicated gedcom entry.

What is noticeable is that some people seem to have matched their entire watchlist with any vaguely similar name and then "parked" them as an unmerged match and never looked at them again..

This is important a number of people who I have communicated with have commented on the "inertia' and not being able to move on. They have usual returned to a non collaborative site. The unmerged matches are a monument to that.

Should an unmerged match time out? By my numbers that would mean a large number of lost merges I guess.
Wow this is ridulous!
Oh one last comment. I have just read the other posts on this subject. Rejecting an unmerged match does not seem to remove the unmerged match. I though maybe someone was working on the same profiles as me as a number of times I decided to reject one it was already rejected. Maybe not. I will now try to un unmerge before rejecting.
If you're starting at the beginning, it's likely that you are going to have other folks working on the same matches at the same time. What I do is go to the second page, then go up to the URL and change "start=2" to "start=15" (or "start=409" or "start=28105" or whatever random number I feel like plugging in). That gets me a page that other people probably aren't working on.
Sorry - it's about 30,000 (I thought it was 30,000 pages of 20).

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