How about a maintenance category for "Orphan Profiles"?

Question

When I'm looking for matches; I often run across orphaned profiles. I think it would be a good idea to place these profiles in a cateogory. The orphaned profiles should eventually become owned by someone. This would at least give a "home" for them.

Answer 1

I really appreciate the idea, Terri, but I'd recommend against this.

We want it to be something done automatically. We're working on a tool that will enable you to browse all orphaned profiles. This will save everyone the trouble of adding and removing an Orphaned Profiles category tag.

Unfortunately, I can't promise when it will be ready.

Comments

Okay . Understood ! I will not add Orphaned Profiles category tags . Just maybe adopt a few more and merge/edit them . They actually are not hard to find .

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when you work on it, could you set it up with a "by name" feature like the browse pending merges has?  (I have no clue whether that would be easy or hard - technically - but if it's easy.... :)  Thanks!

Answer 2

Heck yeah. It should be a job in and of itself. An orphaned profile is, a lot of times, a duplicate too, I noticed!

Answer 3

That's a good idea, Terri! I'll add it.

By the way, something we've been working on is showing which profiles are orphaned on the surname pages, so that people interested in that name will be able to see all the profiles with that name than can be adopted. :)

Comments

Sounds like a big category job . Tell me how to do it and I will help right now .

Maggie

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All you have to do to add a profile to that category is put [[Category:Orphaned Profiles]] in the bio. Currently there isn't a way to systematically find them all, so I'm just going to add profiles to the category as I come across them.

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I'd recommend against putting too much effort into this. Like Lianne says, we should be able to list the profiles with a certain surname that need to be adopted fairly soon. If that's not enough, we'll work on other ways to browse them.

I hate to see WikiTreers putting a lot of work into something that could be done automatically.