To Merge or Not to Merge...

Communal genealogy is not a good idea. I joined wikitree which is a free genealogical website. Unfortunately, just like wikipedia, anybody and I do mean anybody, can pretty much edit anything they want. You can add perfectly good information with sources and some idiot is going to mess it up. Recently, a woman was fishing for family and asked to "collaborate" I never heard of her ancestor and after checking all my files, I told her that I found nothing on him.

The next thing I know, literally a few days later, I am getting messages that a profile of mine needs to be merged with a profile she just created. This really ticked me off because I knew exactly what she was trying to do. She was trying to merge my ancestor, William Rhodes, that I spent a lot of time working on with someone else's profile for a person with the same name that was totally wrong. I had tried working with the profile editors of that page in order to get them to choose which William Rhodes it was about, but, they were having none of it. So that William Rhodes was definitely NOT mine since mine didn't emigrate to South Carolina and die, I created my own page. I already had forestalled one of these Merger people some weeks before and I knew that's what this new one wanted to do.

Oh, she claimed her creating a "new" profile of one of mine was just an accident, but, then how did she find out that her person's profile matched mine, if she had no idea mine existed? And how did she find my William Rhodes if little 'ol her didn't see the profile for one of his daughters?

I removed all the profiles she wanted to merge, so no merging had to take place. I didn't want to share a profile with some guy who merged three William Rhodes' together and then acted like a real jerk when I tried working with him.

This woman then wrote that three different people were all globbed together in the William Rhodes and then she wanted to "glob" mine into it too. Then she said that it now represents the same William Rhodes as mine! How so? Why wasn't that William Rhodes turned into the William Rhodes who died in SC? Or the William Rhodes that died in Mecklenburg Co., VA? Why was that William Rhodes turned into my William?

So even though my Rhodes ancestor goes through William Rhodes, that connection is now removed because there is another profile of a guy with the same name as my ancestor who is attached to the new and improved William Rhodes. Yay! And this one died in GA. Mine, the correct one, died in North Carolina. Soon some fool will suggest a merge between my ancestor and the one who died in Georgia.

Me thinks wikitree has a merging problem. So, yeah, wikitree is really starting to suck. Beware people fishing through your lines looking for a connection to their own!