AGC losing information from biography

Question

The AGC button appears on James Joseph Neylon's profile, which I thought might benefit from GEDCOM cleanup.  The biography includes the names of all three of his wives, one of whom does not yet have a WikiTree profile. Running AGC appears to lose the names of the wives. Hence I exited without saving the proposed changes.

Should the AGC button be appearing at all on this profile, which has been edited once since the original GEDCOM import?

Or should AGC be retaining the detail which it is losing?

Answer 1

No computer program / app is perfect.  The app was written 'assuming' certain things.  Information coming from a gedcom 'normally' has single colon before the 'heading' like Birth, Death, Marriage, Event, etc, double colon followed by date, place, person, etc.  That profile has a single colon in front of everything.  That is not what normal gedcom format is like.

FYI - To undo what AGC did, you can click the AGC button again, and it puts it back to what it was, as long as you made no changes since the AGC was run.

Comments

I can see from profiles which I imported from my own GEDCOM that the change log does not record whether the biography was manually edited at the time of GEDCOM import.

By "normal", do you mean "edited" in this sense? And by "abnormal", do you mean "unedited"?

Otherwise, the differences which you describe would have to result from some difference in the original GEDCOM and in the way that GEDCOMpare is programmed to treat that difference.

I've never understood why AGC is not run automatically on all newly imported profiles as part of the GEDCOMpare import process, before the user is invited to edit the biography.  With a little co-operation between the WikiTree team and the volunteer programmers behind the various apps and extensions, this should be achievable.

I hoped that AGC would draw the user's attention to any data in the biography which it could not parse or interpret, whether that data was created at the time of import or added in simultaneous or subsequent edits, but in this case it appears to be discarding important data.

Would it help if the change log was changed in the future to include separate entries for the "raw" GEDCOM import and for the results of the initial edit by the user?

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Changes log will show when profiles are saved. If a Bio cleanup is done as part of the initial merge you cannot see what was brought in, so it is might be the same with gedcom, if someone edits the gedcom format in a profile before profile is actually created.

I have cleaned up a lot of gedcom created profiles. 'Most' of them have a single colon with type of info, like birth, marriage, etc, then double colon before the Date, place, etc.

This profile when initially 'saved' at creation does not use this format, so it is not the 'normal' gedcom format that AGC expects. The app was written probably expecting certain things. It is not perfect but it is a lot better than manually doing everything the app does.

The app gives errors for certain things if it realizes edits have been done. Maybe it could be revised to error if something other than expected words are after a single colon.

You have to remember AGC is part of an extension. Everyone does not use extensions for many reasons.