User:Janiejac/Wiki Help

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How to find others with same name

I created a person page Mollie Jackson. Program gave it an index number of (3) so I thought I'd check the other two just to be sure I wasn't duplicating her. The search results gave me NO Mollie Jacksons but did give me 4 Mollie Johnsons and one Mollie Partin born in Jackson, MO. I tried Admin/Browse and found no Mollie Jacksons. If they have been removed, I guess the program doesn't reuse the number. --Janiejac 17:39, 24 June 2008 (EDT)

Janiejac,

To solve this problem I create a simple table like this.

From this you can see that cards for Mollie Jackson have been created for index numbers 1,2 and 3. Card 1 and 2 appear on the table as red links because after creation, they were deleted.

(There are other reasons they might appear in red, including in particular the fact that no data was ever entered on the card---in which case the person is probably a spouse, child, or parent of someone else, appears on that persons card, but other than the name there's no other data for the person---so their own card is not created. The system still reserves a spot for them.)

Cards 4 and 5 have never been created, and are simply empty. In fact, there's no such cards in the system, and so will not show up in a search. Cards 1 and 2 also will not show up in a search because they've been deleted. The system, however, keeps track of the fact that such a card was created at one time, and reserves the index number for this name as "used". I imagine if you really wanted to you could reuse these cards for your own purpose. The person who originally created them chose to delete them, so shouldn't complain if someone else really wants to have Person:Mollie Jackson (1). The only problem if you go this route might be that the earlier deletion history of the card will still exist, and will remain attached to your "Mollie Jackson"---even though there's no real connection between them.

While you can use the browse function to pick out things like this, I find that its hard to keep track of all of the other cards that match a certain name---especially if there are many of them. I've seen names that have had over a hundred cards created for them. (this was signed by Q)

Merging pages

1. Cut and paste all information from the duplicate page(s) to the page to be kept. Include any different names or event dates and places as alternate information in the appropriate edit boxes. If there is reason not to copy data (e.g. the date is obviously wrong because it would put a death before birth, or information has been disproven elsewhere), it's appropriate to note the omission in the Edit Summary or the notes of the page being kept.

2. Edit each duplicate page. Erase everything in the "Personal History" or "Family History" text box at the bottom of the page and replace it with the line #redirect [[Person:title of family page to keep]] (for person pages), or #redirect [[Family:title of family page to keep]] (for family pages). Make sure this line appears in the first line of the text box, without a preceding line or spaces. This causes the duplicate page to redirect to the page being kept.

For example, if merging "Person:John Doe (2)" into "Person:John Doe (1)", first edit "Person:John Doe (1)" and copy over the names, events, and personal history information from "Person:John Doe (2)" that should be kept. Then edit "Person:John Doe (2)" and replace the text in the Personal History edit box with the single line

#redirect [[Person:John Doe (1)]]

Misc Code

{{cite|S1}}
<show_sources_images_notes/>
[[{{TALKPAGENAME}}]] or [[{{SUBJECTPAGENAME}}]]