Why does the ~~~~ change to the name of the last person who edited the profile?

Question

I've been in the habit of adding ~~~~ to some of my research notes and was astounded to check a recently edited profile  that my notes were now shown as edited by that person and the date of the more recent change, which made some of the context of the note nonsense.

The person had just changed the death place name and certainty, so would have no reason to change the note, and appeared not to have done so.

Profile link attached - yes looking at this again the comment would fit better in a research note, separated from the birth :) but one thing at a time.

Answer 1

The changes tab shows that when the profile was created it showed  ~~~~  and not your name and when the profile was next edited the name of that editor was added.

This would have been automatic as it seems from this question in 2013 https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/26117/can-the-use-of-four-tildes-for-signing-be-made-consistent that the name doesn't show when a profile is created, only when it is edited.

Comments

Samantha has the correct answer. When a profile is created, if the four-tilde signature is added to the initial biography box or comment field, it's simply stored as plain text, i.e., just as ~~~~. But when the profile (individual or FreeSpace) is edited, any instances of four-tildes are converted and saved.

In other words, at initial profile creation, no convert/replace happens; at each subsequent edit, it does. It's a WikiText (as in MediaWiki) thing, not exclusively a WikiTree thing. So if ~~~~ is entered at profile creation and not later deleted in an edit, the next edit-and-save will cause the four-tildes to be changed to the current date/time signature. Once the edit-and-save has happened, the signature is saved as its full WikiText string, for example: [[Williams-49144|Williams-49144]] 21:12, 11 July 2021 (UTC). Any following use of the edit function will show that in the biography box, not the four tildes.

If a profile editor didn't know what the four tildes were and just left them there, then they would be converted and stored as the editor's profile link and date/time stamp.

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Once the four tides are saved and a timestamp signature is there it does not change unless you remove it and add the four tides again. Once they are saved they are no longer tides even in edit mode. If the tides stayed and did not convert it was a glitch.

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I just did a test and "~~~~" on profile creation correctly converted to my information. It's possible that when we re-wrote the profile creation/editing code a few months ago that this bug was fixed. Are there any recent examples of "~~~~" staying as plain text?

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Yes, I know they stay on this unlisted page.

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I misunderstood, I thought you were asking if the conversion stayed as plain text.

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Thanks, Jamie! I don't think--at least within the last year--that I've created a profile and used a signature stamp and didn't then go immediately back in to edit the profile (Typos R Us; standard keyboards are about 10% too small  :-/ ), so I have zero examples about tilde "stickiness" at creation.

Just a general FWIW for everyone, should there ever be a reason to do it, WikiText also supports three tildes for only a link to the editor's profile (no timestamp), and five tildes inserts the date/time only without the username/profile link.

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OK, I see that this one I do indeed appear not to have done my now much more usual add notes with tildes, save, check, re-edit, tweak several times, etc

Wonder if I've any other examples outstanding from back then - 4 years ago!

I would have expected the simple act of saving to have done the substitution.

Thanks for the responses folks

Answer 2

Hi, Lorna, the death location was corrected. The system will pick up that something is not correct if there is a symbol in the location field. There was a ? at the beginning of the location. If the location is uncertain there are small status circles under the location fields that you can click to show that it is uncertain. Then note it in the biography.

You may want to ask the member why they deleted your signature on the notes and then signed them with their own. It is possible they did not understand that they should not do that.

Answer 3

I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you saying that you "signed" a comment using the ~~~~ symbols and then someone came along and changed the death location and status indicators and that caused the note to now be signed by the person who changed the status indicators?

Comments

yes that's how it looked

Back when I added them, yes I believe the ~~~~ showed my name against the notes once saved.

When i went in to check the edit that had correctly taken out the ? to fix the place originally uploaded, i noticed that it had also substituted her ID for mine in the comments that were othewise unchanged