Four serious bugs: category content and counts; variant surname search; duplicate detection

Question

There seem to be four important ongoing bugs in WikiTree software at present.

1. Profiles are stuck in categories. First reported by Darren Kellett 18 December 2023. Recent example at this link.
2. Many category counts are stagnant. First reported by Clare Spring 2 February 2024.
3. Search results are omitting surname variants. First reported by Jaki Erdoes 30 January 2024. Summarised at this link.
4. Matches with surname variants are not warned about at profile creation. Probably related to bug 3. Reported 30 January 2024.

It is possible that all of these result from recent upgrades to the operating system and/or PHP, on different servers at different times.

It would be helpful if updates on progress towards eliminating these bugs and remedying their effects could please be provided.

Bugs 3 and 4 in particular are alarming, because of the potential for failure to detect duplicates with variant surnames, both during a preliminary search and at profile creation time. Personally I am reluctant to create new profiles at all at the moment because of this risk.

Comments

Jim, I made an updated edit on my report this morning.  It may shed some light on the unsourced profile problem you have linked to.

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For three cases of bug 4 possibly leading to failed match detection and consequent duplicate creation in actual practice, see Nancy Thomas's comment at this link.

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No change with #2 yet, as far as I can tell.

Answer 1

The search bug has been fixed, although the search index needs to do its daily run before variants will be found again.

I believe both category bugs should be fixed now too.

Let me know if there are still weird things happening.

Comments

Thank you Jamie. Bugs 1 and 2 do seem to be fixed. Re bug 1 see also a post by Aleš Trtnik.

At 1850 (pm) UTC Monday 24 12 February 2024 bugs 3 and 4 are still there. Presumably the search index has not updated yet.

If the search index is only updated daily, even in normal times apart from these bugs that leaves quite a window during which duplicates of recently added profiles might be created without detection.

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The search index does a full update once a day, so it will happen overnight. We also do partial updates during the day on profiles that were recently edited/created.

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Thanks Jamie. It allays my concern to know there are partial updates.

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Bugs 1 and 2 are now also fixed. The search update must have taken place. Good to have this repaired!

Answer 2

For 1, are the profiles not being removed upon further edits, or is the issue just that we haven't created a script to remove the ones that cannot be edited (because they were merged away)?

2. Is currently going through final testing on dev today.

3 and 4 are still being looked at -- hopefully, it will be fixed by the end of the week.

Comments

Thank you for the update, Jamie. Good to hear things are moving.

For 1, so far I haven't seen any examples of profiles stuck in categories where the profile was edited recently—only ones last edited back in December. For instance Beulah Cramer's example Fountain-1093 had the Unsourced template removed on 6 or 7 February. It is no longer in the Unsourced category, as is shown by

https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Category:Unsourced_Profiles&from=Fountain-1093&limit=1#Persons

which displays Fountain-1134 instead.

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Thank you Jamie, really appreciate the intel