Duplicates and merges

Question

A week ago I created two profiles. I checked for duplicates and during the process of creating the profiles I rejected 6 possible matches.

This morning I received two merge requests which I completed because all the details the identical.

Why does this happen? I always search for duplicates before I create and always look at the list of possible matches during creation of the profiles.

Comments

Hi Kristina. Sorry, I don't know why your search didn't work. It does seem to do so now in at least one of the cases: a search for Florence Rasmussen born 1892 returns the now-merged profile. Do you remember what search parameters you tried?

At the time I'm writing this, the same search also shows the merged away profile, but I think that will go away on the next update of some cached search index, probably within 24 hours.

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For Florence Rasmussen I am sure I put in the name, birthdate and location, since I had that information (grandmother of a first cousin).  But it was more than the search, she did not show up in the possible matches but 6 others did.  Puzzle.

For her husband, I searched for the name and approximate birth date, based on my cousinʻs information and using the documents for Florence. He was already here, but did not show up.

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The search I tried above didn't have location entered, but I tried several variants of the location just now and they all still returned the expected result. Something strange does seem to have happened. Unfortunately I don't see a way of documenting a possible bug going forward. One could keep screenshots of all searches and matches that didn't show anything, but that would be very laborious.

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Well, I am thrilled with the merge because there are several long lines back in history.

My project now is to find more on her husband who seems to have no past at all.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I find this happens all the time and I had several examples last weekend during the connect-a-thon, but maybe a max of 5 out of 520 profiles, the worst example was inadvertently creating a duplicate of a profile I had just created, it didn't display as a match or show up on family members profiles.
 I often only find the duplicate when adding other family members, and routinely get merge requests from people who have duplicated profiles already on Wikitree that I manage.
 It's just a fact of life on Wikitree that this happens.
 Wikitree's profile matching and searching software is rather capricious it lists profiles that are wildly different, and misses profiles that have slightly different details.
 It's still significantly better than Ancestry or MyHeritage that don't provide any warning that you could be adding a duplicate.
 From memory there are previous G2G threads on this topic, and the need for system improvement has been recognised and is one of the future improvements planned.

Comments

For one case Gary mentions, if you have only just created a profile and then accidentally try to create it again, it may not be picked up as a duplicate because the first one is not yet in the search index cache (or whatever it's called). The other cases are harder to explain.