Confusion with the Suggestions Report

Question

I'm seeing a lot of confusion around the Suggestions report lately. People are "making changes", but the suggestions are not going away. (see this Facebook post )

Here's how the Suggestions Report works...

Every week, all WikiTree profiles are scanned, looking for various types of "errors", mistakes, discrepancies or other inconsistencies to be corrected.

If you make a change, and mark it as Corrected, then the next time the report runs, it will look again and see if the change really corrected the error or not. If it was not the expected change, then the suggestion will still appear on the report the next week as well.

Just because you make some change, doesn't mean you've actually corrected the actual suggestion. You need to understand what exactly is being suggested and make that change. (click on the green question mark for the specific suggestion for the help page with more specifics about what is expected)

If you didn't make any change (because one is not needed), and only mark it as a Comment, then again the report will continue to report it. "Comments" are only for us humans, and are ignored by the reporting tool.

If no change is warranted (because the unusual spelling is correct, or the date mismatch is correct, or whatever other issue it might be), then you need to mark it as a False suggestion to remove it from the report. Then this specific error will never be checked again on this profile.

Do not mark is as False, if you made no corrections, and there should be a correction to make.

The other options (including Comment), Not corrected or Proposed merge, are meant to leave it on the report as a reminder, each week that there is still work to do here on this profile. It serves as a reminder to anyone else looking at the same report that someone else is also working on the problem (based on whatever comment is left)

The Suggestions Report is a growing and evolving tool. Almost every week, new types of errors are added to the scan. So, just because you've cleared all your suggestions this week, next week there might be a new type of error suggestion to correct. Not all of these suggestions are warranted, but the only way to know for sure, is to have a human look at each one (and mark it appropriately).

Hope this helps (I'm sure I've left something out by mistake).

Comments

Nice explanation - Thanks Dennis.

A question for clarification:  Are all profiles checked for all suggestions every week?  

I ask because I often come across suggestions that someone else has already corrected (can be verified in change log), but they didn't update the status.  In such a case, will it still be on the report after the next check?  Or does the status still need to be updated?

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I can't be for certain how Aleš manages the report run. All profiles would be an awfully lot of profiles to check, and the amount or compute time may actually take longer than a week.

If the change was made, then technically, the Suggestions status doesn't need to be updated. Assuming the change was correct (what the report expected), then it should naturally fall of the report in the next week's run.

But it sure would be nice, though, if people would update the status, so we don't have to check it again.

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Occasionally, when I go to fix one, I miss that someone has already marked it as corrected and open it anyway and correct it. When I go back to mark it as corrected, I see the mark. This means that they marked it as corrected without actually correcting the problem. Sometimes it's recent and other times it's old.  Thankfully it isn't that common anymore.

Answer 1

Dennis, great post. You got it all correctly.

The computation of Suggestions is done each week on all profiles. The week "officially" starts on Sunday morning, when the Database dump of WikiTree starts. After a few hours, I download all data that was dumped and start the import into my database. After that I recheck every profile for all suggestions, that I produce. This process usually takes a little over 1 day. After all this is done, I have a list of all suggestions and report creation starts. I prepare the Totals reports, Challenge report and prepare the data for WikiTree+ online reports in another 10 hours.

That makes me able to have new reports out on Monday. Of course if nothing goes wrong. If it does, I may need another day or two to fix the problem and redo the reports.

After the publish, It takes me another day or two to prepare all custom reports by Location,... and Unconnected and Unsourced reports. This is usually done by Wednesday.

All profiles are checked for all suggestions, if they can be according to privacy settings. If a profile has private Bio, I can't check the bio content, and so on.

As for the status, If there is a suggestion, that is marked as false, It will always exist, but will be hidden from all the reports except the one, that shows hidden suggestions.

Answer 2

There is a status box on the right of each correction suggestion and if you check it after you correct the problem, you can fill it in to say that it is OK now and make a comment to say what you did. It is a way to check your work to make sure the correction was actually correct.

Answer 3

When people make a change to a profile for any reason, ie add a census to one person, so then you go to the others and add the same census or anything else, you don't go look at the suggestions for each person whose profile you are updating.  People may see an issue and fix it while they are updating a profile, but don't look at the suggestions, so the suggestions could be fixed, but the status wasn't changed.

Comments

But if it is fixed, it will no longer be reported next week, since there is no error to report.