Merge Feature Request Noobie..

Question

Thank you for this wonderful tool and community.

Spelling, I dream of a spell checker for this text box...

Cant copy or paste...

My dream would be..

For the proposer of the merge to fill out the Merge direction and finial result.. 

with Highlight colors that change if the details are identical, Similar, different

ie Profile 1    Profile 2      Final Profile

 Smith-53    Smyth-6        Smith-53

Billy           Billie                   Billie

1922          1922                   1922

Sometimes it can be confusing and require research .. Fathers name is VanDoren, childs name is Vandoran... What to choose?  If the proposer or Family ID managers gave suggestions?

Thank you for your great progress.

Stay Safe

Comments

If using a computer, you can copy and paste using ctrl+c and ctrl+v

Merge directions are usually proposed in the direction they should go.  Usually.  (Exceptions would be if it is a newbie who knows profiles should be merged, but is unsure of how to correctly propose them direction-wise.)

Mostly it is the higher number goes into the lower number -  Smith-456 --> Smith-87

If there is a spelling difference, you need to determine by documents which would be the more correct.  If it is not clear by documents, but the family consistently used a particular spelling, you would choose that - Smyth-37 or Smythe-64 or Smith-5693?  If it is Smith consistently, you would merge --> Smith-5693 even though it is the higher number.  For this situation you would include the alternate spellings of Smyth and Smythe under Other Last Names.

Spelling of forenames can be discussed in the biography text.

Answer 1

I believe that Richard is looking for an enhancement to the comparison screen that appears when we review a merge proposal or prepare to complete a merge.

The system arrays the contents of the data fields in the two profiles side-by-side and asks us to make visual comparisons between the pairs of entries. That does not seem like it should be very hard to do, but our eyes can play tricks on us, and I believe that everyone who has done more than a few merges has made mistakes in these comparisons. For example, name pairs like like Thom and Thorn are inherently hard to distinguish visually; I know I have confused name pairs like Johan and Jacob; I have seen that member unfamiliar with Dutch names can have a hard time perceiving that Aeltje and Anetje are not the same name; and most of us sometimes fail to see that date pairs like 1686 and 1668 are not the same. And if these kinds of comparisons can flummox people with "normal" visual perception, it stands to reason that they are a great challenge for those among us who have dyslexia or poor vision.

If WikiTree could implement an automated process to compare the entries in paired data fields and add color to highlight pairs that do not match, it could prevent much eyestrain and many errors, as well as the embarrassment that members inevitably feel when they are told that they made this kind of error. Would this be technically feasible??