Shouldn't some orphan pages simply be deleted?

Question

Okay. I started working on de-duping some early Massachusetts settlers. Edmund Rice is a good place to start and a doozie because a) so many people are descended from him, and b) there's a LOT of dupes of him here.  In trying to dedupe the parents of his wife, Thomasine Frost, I came across what are clearly "orphaned" pages. A page for a husband (misnamed Edmond, not Edward, Frost) [[Frost-3028]] and his wife Tomasine Belgrave [[Belgrave-62]]. No parents for either of them; no children for them. This couple is just hanging out there, attached only to each other and to no one else. Wouldn't it be far simpler to just delete them than go through the merge process?

-- jillaine

Answer 1

Well, merging doesn't really take any longer than deleting. And if these profiles were deleted, the little history they have would be lost. Also, the person who created them would suddenly not have those people in his watchlist. We really like to merge instead of deleting whenever possible.

~Lianne

Answer 2

The profile you reference Frost 3028 - seems to have an active profile manager who is recently and currently editing. 

Maybe they aren't finished editing?  Maybe they got too many possible matches to do a check every single one - right off the bat - while making new entries (with slighly different details)?  Sometimes common names come up with so many initial matches it can be overwhelming to check them all - especially when dates and or locations are missing.

It might be far more useful for you to contact that profile manager and ask if this might be the same individual as Edmund Rice of similar dates and suggest to him/her where, how to look, compare etc. 

They might not know how to merge, request a merge etc as of yet.  Or maybe they have done that with possible match(s) and haven't heard back from another profile manager.

Deleting someone else's data doesn't seem to be a fair thing to do.