Profiles with No Information

Question

When I click on the Find Menu item Wikitree Matches I get a lot of results that show a matching name but no other information. The person has a profile with no birth date or place, parents, spouse, children, or death date or place. How does such a profile exist? What should I do when I come across one? Should I propose a merge into the person with the same name on my Watchlist?

Comments

In WikiTree's early days (say pre 2016 or so), WikiTree allowed the creation of largely empty profiles as well as creation of profiles through unrestricted uploads of very large GEDCOMs. It no longer does either.  But the detritus is still out there.

Wikitree has many projects and challenges to clean all this mess up, but it will probably take years. One of my favorite groups is "Friday Date Night". 

Answer 1

Here is the help page that can answer your question.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Recycling_WikiTree_IDs

Comments

I am not talking about Unknowns. I am talking about profiles with names but no other information to connect them with any other profile.

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. But what if there is no duplicate? What if it's just a junky profile with little or no information about the person it's meant to represent?

Even if the profile has very little information, we don't recycle the WikiTree ID.

The Unknowns Project was created to work with profiles with the last name "Unknown" and equivalent aliases. They deal with profiles that meet these very strict criteria, unusual as they may be:

To call a profile to the attention of the Unknowns Project, add [[Category:Unknowns]]

1. There is no personally identifiable information at all. There are no names, dates, locations, and/or relationships on the profile that can be used to connect it to a real person.
2. There is no personally identifiable information in the change history. That is, the profile never had any personally identifiable information. Often a member will clear out the information on a profile but it's still in the history.

If you add this category the Unknowns Project will look at it.