Should we recover lower number for surname?

Question

The Hughes-3608 was merged into an Unknown and then later back to Hughes-7597.  Should we edit 3608 and redirect 7597 to it?  If so then is there a straightforward way to do this?  Note he is now down to Hughes-8320.

Comments

3608 is gone. No way to bring back number

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I think it is [[#redirect Unknown-xxxx]] so I think it can be recovered.

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It may be technically possible to recover it, but there is no policy or procedure in place to do so. It would require the team to directly edit the database, which appears unlikely and would cause damage to the change logs.

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William, what potential benefit do you see from making such a change?

Answer 1

The reason we use the lowest number is to avoid redirects. So to redirect it to the lowest number would be a mistake. Someone with more tech knowledge could explain it better but google can only handle so many redirects. Plus Eddie is right, that profile has been merged so you cannot go back to the original lowest number.

Comments

well, technically, the reason we use the lowest number is to give credit to the one who was here first. there's no avoiding redirects. any merge or rename will redirect.

and google doesn't care about the number of redirects, its our own server. each url request has to be looked up, then if it redirects, then that one has to be looked up, etc... the more lookups (redirects), the more strain it  puts on our own server. so we want to minimize duplicates, in order to minimize the number of redirects.

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We all share credit on WikiTree. As a leader, it has been drilled into me about the redirects problems. Here is a quote from the protecting and merging help page:

"Google won't follow more than three or four redirects in a chain."

Here is the link. It's under Background: Redirects Problem:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Project_Protecting_and_Merging

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that's true for external search indexing, but secondary to the strain it puts on our own server.

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I have created an analysis of the problem: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:WikiTree_redirection_efficiency