Removal of unsourced category not taking profile off New York State list of unsourced

Question

I am using the New York unsourced list of profiles (by the year)
to add sources.  This morning I ran into another profile on this list, about the fifth I have encountered in the last several weeks, so I thought it needs to be investigated.  The statistics refer to this specific profile.  ( McDonald-9819)
On December 20, 2023 Nancy Wilson added the 1870 USA census.  She sourced it as an inline item.  The change record proves she removed the unsourced designation.  The profile has the correct placement of ==Sources== and <references />.  It is still on the New York list.  The common
connection of all of the profiles is that it is an Ancestry sharing connection.  Something appears to be wrong.  I do
not use Ancestry and do not understand how to use the apps that do this so I can't guess what is wrong.  Would someone see what they can find?  It might remove more profiles on these lists.  The next two profiles on the list have the same problem Unknown-333321, Murphy-10713, and further down on the page are Unknown-358837 and Welch-6863.

Edit:  I can add 2 more profiles from the unsourced list for 1841 if necessary.  My original question was based on the 41 unsourced profiles listed on the morning of Tuesday Feb. 6.  This morning, Wednesday, Feb. 7, apparently an update was done over night and the total has dropped to 34 unsourced.  2 of the original sources I had run into still remain.  Hitchcock-46 and Fountain-1093.  Fountain is the
only one without an ancestry sharing connection.

Comments

Add ales as a tag since he creates the unsourced reports.  Maybe he can explain something.  What query or report are you using, so he knows what you are looking at? Possibly you are not using the most top to date report.

Unknown-33321 has no sources and doesn't appear to have a New York connection, so probably a number is missing in the post.

---

http://sdms.si/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=Dates%3Db1841+BirthLocation%3D"New+York"+Unsourced

I added the needed number in Unknown-333321.  You were correct.  I can't copy the url but it is one he recommended I use to do it yearly.  I hope he understands what I am using.

Answer 1

Hi Beulah. I think that the underlying problem is that although the Unsourced template was removed on 21 December 2023, the profile is still showing as present in the Unsourced category. See

https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Category:Unsourced_Profiles&from=McDonald-9819&limit=1#Persons

The likely reason for this is that, as first reported by Darren Kellett, when the major operating system and PHP upgrade was done in early December, a bug appeared whereby profiles are not removed from categories when the category is removed from the biography text.

Jamie Nelson wrote on 15 January

With non-merged away profiles, once they are edited again they will disappear off the lists, but we are going to have to create and run a script to clean up the merged-away profiles and ones that haven't been edited.

Apparently this script has not yet done its job in this case.

The profile in question has not subsequently been edited. It's possible that if you do edit it now, even with a trivial change, the problem will go away next week.

Comments

Jim, See my edit from this morning.

---

Thank you for this, Beulah. I used one of your new examples Fountain-1093 in replying to a query Jamie Nelson made on the other thread.

Answer 2

Often, you need to refresh the page (the NY Unsourced page) so that a newly-sourced profile disappears.  F5 usually does it.

Comments

These were all sourced in December 2023.  It is refreshed each time I log in because I have to change the year to have it start where I want.  I am currently doing 1841.

Answer 3

I've seen something like this when doing Saturday Sourcing.

I've noticed profiles that seem familiar on the week's Unsourced list, and when I look further, find that I edited them in the past to add sources and remove the Unsourced tags.

My "fix" is to edit the profile, add the Unsourced tag back, then save. After that, edit again, removed the tag I just added, and save.

Not elegant, but it seems to work. At this point, I'll see the profile disappear off the current Unsourced list when I refresh the screen. I've noticed this periodically since the update that happened some weeks ago.

Comments

When you edit are you reentering the same source over again and again?  It is very hard to find more than one source in some of the early 1800and 1900s.  It's just my problem.
Some improvement showed up yesterday.  I just logged on for Thursday with great anticipation for a cure.

---

No, in this case, I'm changing nothing except the tags. The sources are already there from prior weeks editing.

Somehow the system seems to have the profile "stuck" in an Unsourced mode, even though the tag was taken off. Putting it back, then removing it again seems to get it off the Unsourced list.

These have been profiles on the Indiana Unsourced list, updated weekly in preparation for the Saturday Sourcing challenge.

---

Thanks.  I don't think I will do that until they solve this problem because they are using my unsourced marked sourced profiles to work on the problem.  There is one source from back in Nov. on the list.  Most are from Dec.

---

Two things are required for a profile to leave the WikiTree Plus report after the {{Unsourced}} template is removed.

1. The profile must be removed from the Unsourced category. This was not happening in December because of the bug I mentioned. Apparently that has been fixed for new edits. However, many profiles that were left in the category because of the bug in December are still stuck there, because a script needed to remove them has not yet been run. (You can speed that up by editing the profile again now.)
2. Even if the profile is removed from the category, it will stay on the WikiTree Plus report until the report is updated. Such reports are only updated once a week. The line at the bottom of the report Beulah mentions shows that at present it is using data from 4 February.

https://plus.wikitree.com/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=Dates%3Db1841+BirthLocation%3D%22New+York%22+Unsourced&MaxProfiles=500&Format=

So even if everything is working correctly, you have to wait for up to a week after removing the {{Unsourced}} template before the profile will disappear from the report.

Answer 4

When I started this question I never envisioned it being carried on for over a month.  Waiting a week between updates has required that because I wanted to give it time to be updated.  Unfortunately, in my opinion, it has not been accomplished.  The following encompasses my revisions, as best as I can relate them to the involved profiles.  I make notes on old used envelopes and even dug some out of the waste basket. Starting with my original question on Feb. 6 about the unsourced New York  profiles and the discussion.  This is where I stand today, Mar. 11.    for 1841 births that included McDonald-9819, Unknown-333321, Murphy-10713, Unknown-358837, and Welch-6883.  I made no changes on them and left them as a control.
Moving on to the 1842 births included Guile-150, Pardee-214, Calkins-4064, Humphrey-3352, and Smalley-478.  I cleared them by adding the unsourced category and then deleting the same category as was suggested by Sally Kimble.    There have been several more scattered profiles that were more complicated but for now I will ignore their corrections and deletions.  These two year comparisons show me the profiles are not being found and deleted although they were designated as sourced in the Dec. thon.
The edit part seems to work but is not identifying those that were not edited but still need to be taken off the unsourced lists.
See also  https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1701433/serious-category-content-variant-surname-duplicate-detection

Comments

Hi Beulah. It may help if you place a copy of or link to this answer on Aleš Trtnik's post

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1704401/ghost-profiles-in-categories

---

Done.  Thank you.

---

As I mentioned in the other post, if the profile was last saved in mid December you can try resaving a profile and it should fix the problem. You don't need to add/remove category. Just change something in the bio and save the profile.

---

For no rhyme or reason I can explain, the 5 unsourced
profiles I left untouched were removed from the unsourced 1941 list this last update.  I have refreshed this page each of three other weeks and they remained on the list.  I absolutely did not make any edits to them, leaving them as a control to see if the Dec. updated list would find them.  It ignored 3 other profiles that fit the same situation as the first 5 and 1 other.  I just made edits to all 4 that should remove them from the list.  The Mar. 10 update cut the list of profiles from 5 pages to 1, after the other sources were combined with the ones that had been sourced in the Dec. thon.  McLacklen-13, Pemperton-1, and Broterton-1 were ok and I changed the categorization on Thurston-1142.  I'll leave it to the experts to wonder why.