How do you flag almost duplicates?

Question

A lot of times in my research when I am adding a new person, I will notice a pair of suggested matches that match one another, but not the person I am adding.

If enough of the details (such as name, birth, death) all match and the sources for the profiles are not great, I will "Match" the two profiles as an unmerged match so they can be investigated. I see it as a way of flagging the profiles for further research and a way to give a hint as to what the problems might be.

However, it seems, there are a group of very active wikitreers who then go through and look at unmerged matches to clear them with their focus not being to investigate why the were set into a match but simply deciding if they are the same -- and then just proceed to delete the unmerged match.  The comment most often posted is -- not ready to be merged because .... Which of course is why I dont try and merge them to begin with.

How do you flag such profiles or do you just ignore and move on?

Comments

Lance, I suggest you tag arborists on this question.  We do have a team that works on unmerged matches, so Robin and/or Gillian should see this.

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Currently, there are 25,253 unmerged matches.  It's going to take a bigger team to get this number under control.

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No argument from me on that!

Answer 1

Any time I come across two profiles that I suspect are the same person, I initiate a merge and explain why.

Comments

What do you do when they are may not be the same person but the data they share is the same? ie different parents identical birth and death dates?

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I would research it and figure it out OR just ignore it and move on. Maybe put it on a list to maybe come back to it one day.

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Yes, I have a couple of ancestors in that "category."  They are different people, but there are some things conflated/confused between their profiles that make people want to merge them.  Which would only make things worse!  But there are few sources, and not enough info to really decide what goes where, so we wait until something more is learned or uncovered, and take care of it then!  Until then, there are "comments" on the profile and in the Research Notes that explain the problem, and encourage people not to merge them in spite of the common elements that make them want to!

Tommy said it well: "Explain why."  But remember the explanation notes for a merge only go into the comments of one profile - it might be wise to duplicate your comments on both profiles!  

(It might be a WikiTree programming improvement opportunity to have suggested merge comments reflected on both profiles.)

Answer 2

Lance, I have a related issue - I frequently find clear matches that are the same person who dropped in 5 years ago added their name and nothing else and then 3 years ago and did the same. Both profiles are locked. No response from PMs. If we propose a merge the profiles just sit since they are locked forever.

I wonder if a clever programmer could give us an app we could use to flag them, send a ʻform letterʻ email to the PM, and perhaps 30 days later automatically merge them if there is no response.