Talk:Proposed Guidelines for Ambiguous Spouses resulting from a Merge

Comments [27 June 2009]

TMG handles this sort of thing by allowing for a "candidate" spouse or parent. You can have as many of those as you like, depending on what information you have. Candidature implies that you're awaiting, or searching for, additional evidence. Would it be useful to have a relationship box available on each page (or a drop-down, or whatever) where you could, when necessary, designate a candidate for a relationship? I think this would be more useful than simply deleting the page because you can't come to a good conclusion about something. I doubt that any flavor of GEDCOM would know what to do with it, but that's why so much info gets stuffed in "Notes" anyway. --Mike (mksmith) 15:42, 20 June 2009 (EDT)

Deleting a page is not my usual choice! Only when they are devoid of helpful content and were contributed via GEDCOM by a subsequently inactive user. My thinking of such pages is that they are trivial to re-create if someone comes along with something substantive. Put differently, such lame pages actually create confusion without adding info - so to delete them is to make an overall improvement.--Jrm03063 19:01, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

FWIW, if a family has multiple husbands or wives, the multiple individuals appear on the watchers' ShowDuplicates lists. So if you leave them alone they'll be a bit more conspicuous and may get cleaned up more quickly.--Dallan 19:36, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

I've had the same problem when working on merges. One writer may speculate that John's wife could possibly be Mary Jones. Instantly dozens of FTM files add Mary Jones as wife. The "possibly" instantly becomes "is". Then it is downloaded, copied, reuploaded dozens of times. To the innocent newbie, "Everybody says so, must be true". I think we have a responsibility to stop the chain. Like you, I have used different approaches at different times depending on the circumstances.

when it is clear that a person has done some work as come to a rational conclusion, I tend to let it be.

when it's clear that someone downloaded six gedcoms and then uploaded them here without ever reading them and has never been back, I am less hesitant and make the changes that seem needed to avoid misleading other people

in all cases my strong preference is not to link a specific person as a spouse if I feel it is wrong. Otherwise it will get downloaded and the merry-go-round starts all over again. Thus wife "Unknown" should be the only one linked. If there are real people who are candidates, I leave their pages so that more facts can be collected and use a link to the person in the text box as a possible candidate for the wife. That way the information on "possibles" will be there but it won't erroneously be downloaded as a wife.

on rare occasions, the muddle is so great that one must simply resort to slash and burn. It's way more work to try to fix the mess than to clean it out when there's nothing of value on the page. So sometimes I feel a delete is justified. But really hesitate to do it.

If you haven't tried working on merging some of these early gedcoms, you can't understand how much of a mess it is. I have had to spend three days on just one family (mom, pop, and kids). I could have gone to the library, looked up the sources and written a new, correct page much quicker.

so to answer the original question, your instincts seem good. There can't be a hard and fast rule that applies to all circumstances.--Judy (jlanoux) 16:34, 23 June 2009 (EDT)--jillaine 18:29, 25 June 2009 (EDT)

Ready to Roll? [29 June 2009]

Dallan asked me (?) to move this over to Help:Merge Pages when we're ready. What do you think? Is it ready to roll?

jillaine 16:50, 27 June 2009 (EDT)

I'm happy if others are happy...--Jrm03063 17:16, 27 June 2009 (EDT)

Sorry just looked at this for the first time.

For option 1, where there are multiple candidate spouses for one marriage/family, would the pattern be to have one family page, named as Family:John Doe and Unknown or Family:Unknown and Jane Doe, and then for whichever spousal role is unknown, show the multiple candidates? If you only know the given name or the surname and have multiple candidates, same pattern but include what is known for sure in the title of the family page. In other words, John Doe and Mary Unknown, first wife Mary White, alternate wife Mary Brown. Unknown Clark and Jane Doe, with first husband Samuel Clark, alternate husband William Clark.

The principle of this question is one marriage so only one Family page. Multiple candidates for the spouse, so link on the one Family page to multiple Person pages that could be that spouse. Whether a person searches (say during the matching phase of GEDCOM uploads) for John Doe and candidate 1, or John Doe and candidate 2, we want them to come to the same family page.

This is opposed to having multiple marriages, which, of course, is when multiple Family pages are needed.--Jrich 20:43, 27 June 2009 (EDT)

I think that's right, but what is important is whether that came across clearly in the document. If not, then please attempt to refine the document.--Jrm03063 23:31, 27 June 2009 (EDT)

I like what you have done with this. I suggest adding a link to speedy delete template. Our help often says "just do this" but the reader doesn't necessarily know how. I would vote to keep in the last section as guidance. --Judy (jlanoux) 12:50, 29 June 2009 (EDT)

A few more questions [29 June 2009]

I went ahead and moved the article to Help:Merging_pages#Handling_Ambiguous_Spouses_Resulting_from_a_Merge but I have a couple more questions.

The following is not clear to me:

What would a GEDCOM upload of the affected person/family pages look like?

What is it that you want the post-merge spousal-confusion cleanup person to be thinking about here?

Would the ambiguous situation be apt to be retained or lost in transition from WR to another application? (The other application might be WR, as a result of an upload of off-line work.)

Is this really a different question than the one above?

Anyway, I think both of these are confusing. I wouldn't know-- as a post-merging clean-up person-- what exactly to look for and what to fix.

-- jillaine 13:36, 29 June 2009 (EDT)