Rejection of non-existent matches

Question

I was recently advised that a match between Bowyer-1158 and Boyer-6474 had been rejected.  Bowyer-1158 lived in the 18th century.  I created her profile.  Boyer-6474 is a current WikiTree member and very much alive.  It did not appear that anyone had ever created a match between the two profiles.  I was confused.  I looked at the contribution list of Boyer-6474, and it appears that in the last few days Boyer-6474 has rejected large numbers of non-existent matches between unrelated people.

Is this desirable?

Comments

See: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1737796/newt-boyer-6474-introducing-myself

---

It appears to me that Boyer-6474 rejected several hundred matches on 4/28/2024 without creating any profile.

Boyer-6474 is said to be Mary Boyer.  How is "Newt Boyer-6474 introducing myself" related to this matter?

---

Hello Neal,

I have had the same happen but from different members.

I use the GEDCOMpare process and it often has potential matches which are not expected such as matching someone in England with someone in Australia.

In order to complete the GEDCOMpare process you have to discard these rather dubious matches, often you get 10 or more matches for a single person.

So at the end of a typical GEDCOM you may have as many as 200 possible matches that you have discarded.

Quite often about a week or so afterwards i get messages saying that a 'potential' discarded match has been agreed by another wikitree member.

When this first happened about 10 months ago i wrote to the member saying that i had never put forward the 'potential match' pointing out that it was quite obvious that the two people were not the same.

I think i only got a reply once, but not explaining the reason for their message.

I am assuming that somewhere in a 'help' page or maybe a youtube video this course of action has been put forward 'as something to do'.

Answer 1

When creating new profiles I find Wikitree often suggests matches which are obviously wrong, I normally only mark the suggested matches that are close enough in detail to be considered a possible duplicate as a rejected match.
 Someone new to Wikitree presented with such a list of potential matches could well mark all the incorrect matches as rejects and technically is doing the right thing.

 The problem is the matching software suggesting impossible matches, this is a known issue and I think I've read that it's on the list of future improvements.