Help:Recycling WikiTree IDs
Categories: Styles and Standards
Recycling a WikiTree ID means using it for a person other than the person for whom it was created. This is almost never appropriate.
Sometimes members want to do it because they want a lower-numbered ID for their own profile.
Sometimes members want to do it to help clean up WikiTree. A lot of junk profiles have been created over the years, but we have rules against deleting them.
On WikiTree, we merge duplicate profiles, we don't delete them. But what if there is no duplicate? What if it's just a junky profile with little or no information about the person it's meant to represent?
Even if the profile has very little information, we don't recycle the WikiTree ID.
The Unknowns Project was created to work with profiles with the last name "Unknown" and equivalent aliases. They deal with profiles that meet these very strict criteria, unusual as they may be:
- There is no personally identifiable information at all. There are no names, dates, locations, and/or relationships on the profile that can be used to connect it to a real person.
- There is no personally identifiable information in the change history. That is, the profile never had any personally identifiable information. Often a member will clear out the information on a profile but it's still in the history.
To call a profile to the attention of the Unknowns Project, add [[Category:Unknowns]]
Recycling IDs corrupts the change history of a profile. Being able to follow the history of changes to a page is critically important on a wiki.
Recycling IDs also corrupts URLs. It damages how Google indexes WikiTree, and will confuse any links to the profile that may exist elsewhere on WikiTree or on other websites.
This page was last modified 18:06, 30 September 2021. This page has been accessed 4,071 times.