Incorrect Relationship in WikiTree Browser Extension's Distance and Relationship Tool for Relative with Unknown Gender

Question

I have the distance and relationship tool (which displays your relationship with the person at the top of their profile) in WikiTree's browser extension turned on, but I noticed an incorrect relationship on one of my profiles, Bradley-19397. This person is a deceased sibling of unknown gender of my grandfather who was found on the "number of children born to this woman" section on a sister's birth certificate. The relationship box at the top of the profile says this:

Your grandniece

• Your great-grandmother, Gracie Cleo (Rhoades) Bradley (1892-1981), is their mother.
• Your great-grandfather, Mark Bradley (1886-1960), is their father.

However, this person is actually my grandaunt/uncle, and I am their grandniece. When I use the regular relationship finder tool, it says "Tessa is the grandniece of Unknown," which is the correct relationship.

I suspect that this error probably has to do with the person's gender being unknown. I do not have have this issue with this person's sisters. On their profiles, it says (correctly) that they are my grandaunts.

Edit: Fixed link.

Comments

The fix has been deployed to production. You will have to refresh the relationship box (by clicking somewhere in it) to refresh the wording.

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It's working now! Thank you!

Answer 1

The relationship and degree of separation shown at the top can sometimes be out of date. This is because relationships are stored locally by WBE in order to reduce the amount of work the WikiTree servers need to do (should we repeatedly ask it what the relationship is). However, if subsequent changes are then made to the tree that in turn changes the relationship with the current profile (e.g. shorten the path), then what the WBE would show, is outdated. So, just to make sure this scenario is not the case here, refresh the profile page (this in itself will not change the relationship, but might be necessary due to some other "feature" of WBE/WikiTree/your browser which I will explain in a moment) and then click in the circle that displays the degree of separation.  Doing the latter lets WBE issue new API calls to query the relationship server again in order to determine the most recent relationship information.  Is the wrong information still being displayed after doing this?

[Technical detail:] Refreshing the profile page before requesting the latest relationship info is not always necessary, but only if the profile page has been open in your browser for some time. I have not been able to figure out why yet, nor who the culprit is, but on my laptop, with my browser (I use Chrome), after a while, certain functions on some WT pages become unresponsive and this "refresh the degree of separation" function is one of them. One will click it and nothing happens. However, if the page was recently opened or refreshed, then it works (i.e. new requests are made - obviously the degree of separation does not always change).

Comments

I tried that, and it didn't fix it. I doubt that the issue was due to the relationship being outdated since neither I nor anyone else have modified that person or their relationships since July, and even if I had, I would never have made that person my grandniece. Also, I did not have the page open for a long time. I just randomly decided to open it earlier today and noticed that the relationship was messed up, and I closed it after posting in G2G.

(Just to clarify in case there was any confusion, the degree of separation is not the issue. It was always at the correct number (3). The problem is that the browser extension is saying the person is my grandniece instead of my grandaunt/uncle.)

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I understand, I just wanted to make sure that we have ruled out any other issues there might be. Thank you for your feedback.

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Not relevant to the core question, but related to something Riël said: for discussion of when clicking the circle has no effect, see

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1652451/cc7-display-weirdness?show=1652646#c1652646

Answer 2

I have checked the WBE code and recreated your scenario with a bit of slight-of-hand (aka hacking) and yes, the result you see is because of the unknown gender.  In the latter case the WBE just displays the relationship it received from the relationship server (i.e. "grandnice" ) and does not flip the relationship around.  It looks like it might be easy to fix, so hold thumbs.

Comments

The fix has been made and should show up in due course in a WBE near you.