How many skipped matches are too many?

Question

I uploaded a gedcom with 881 people, and 489 of them have potential matches. Having inspected 280 so far, I've already skipped 36 matched people because I have significantly more information that doesn't exist in the current profiles.

My main concern:  many of the people I'm skipping are revolutionary war soldiers, Jamestown residents, and Ancient Planters.  Collecting data on these ancestors has comprised the majority of my work over the last five years.  It seems to me that the easiest way to add so much information is to import them as new people and then go back to merge them, clean them up, and then add the correct project tags.

But the instructions clearly state that I should only import "a couple" of people like this.  If I'm absolutely confident that my profiles are more thorough than the existing ones, is it okay to continue?  Of COURSE, I fully intend to actually put forth the work to merge them, lol.  

I don't want to make waves, but I really want to contribute this information to wikiTree.  I don't know what to do.

Answer 1

Hi A,

I appreciate you asking this question.   One thing to note, the system only allows you to "skip" 10 matches during one import, so from a techincal standpoint doing more than that isn't possible.

If you really feel strongly that you have more information to offer than what is in the profiles, my suggestion would to split your GEDCOM into really small parts of around 10 people.  Upload one, import it, merge, clean up the profiles, add the tags and then upload the next one.

Comments

Well that solves my problem right there!  

The irony here is that I only chose one tiny branch to upload in the first place, haha.  

Here's what I'm going to do.  I will go ahead and skip everyone who has a potential match, upload the others in my existing gedcom (because I have lots of info on them too!).  THEN I will go back and add the missing people separately via tiny gedcoms, per your suggestion.  Is that okay?

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Yep! A couple things:

1.  Be sure you wait until one GEDCOM file is completely imported into WikiTree before uploading another.  GEDmatches only compares with what is already in WikiTree and not with what is in pending GEDCOMs waiting for review.

2. Be sure to skip any individuals who don't have either a birth or a death date.  As long as they have one or the other you're good to go.

Thanks!

Answer 2

Another option would be to forget the GEDCOM upload and enter the information manually, editing existing profiles where they exist and adding new ones where they don't.

When I first joined, I uploaded a very small (20 or so) part of my tree to see how it would upload. Personally, I found editing the uploaded information more of a pain than creating the profiles manually. It actually goes pretty fast once you get going.

Just a thought.