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Why can’t members resolve data conflicts?

Erica Howton

October 27, 2025 23:12

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Why this workflow that does not accommodate for unresponsive managers? It takes a diligent member to take the trouble to follow up and ultimately trouble a curator to resolve. Why can’t they fix it themselves? Example: https://www.geni.com/discussions/185827?msg=1792627 Geni is sending my corrections new information to the profile managers for approval who are not responding. I do the conflict resolution a couple of times and them I go to the profile and message all the profile managers asking for assistance in resolving the data conflict but I mostly do not get a response back from the managers. —— Can’t we do better?

5 comments

• 1
  
  Ethan David Whitted October 27, 2025 23:52

  I agree, this would be a useful feature and would mitigate the issue of managers who no longer frequent the site or check those emails.

• 1
  
  Erica Howton October 27, 2025 23:56

  To be clear, the request is to allow any member to resolve data conflicts.

  Or if there are restrictions, identify them; perhaps “PRO members only” perhaps.

• 0
  
  Job Waterreus October 28, 2025 12:27

  Probably you should differentiatie between private and public profiles and between profile and relationship related data conflicts (as basic users are not allowed to edit relationship data if they do not manage the profile or collaborate with the manager). 

  What about tree conflicts? It seems there may be similar problems with inactive or unresponsive managers there as well.

  Edited by Job Waterreus October 28, 2025 12:28
• 3
  
  Ashley Odell October 28, 2025 13:53

  I'm good with this as a Pro feature, because I want a higher level of care involved in making these decisions. I wouldn't want to see anyone -- including a brand-new user with no experience, or a vandal -- running through the tree wiping out conflicts just to do so and making bad decisions with them in the process.

  Also, from a business perspective, I really do think this would incentivize Pro subscriptions for a lot of users. But that's much less of a consideration for me.

• 0
  
  Jacques Ghijsen November 09, 2025 17:25

  When I request to remove a connection between two profiles A and B, Geni often denies the request by asserting that this would split the tree. In many cases it doesn't.

  Perhaps Geni could react to such request by a more truthful statement like "We couldn't ascertain that removing this connection between A and B would not split the tree. Please supply a list of profiles X1, X2,... Xn showing that the path from A to X1 ... to Xn to B subsists after severing the connection between A and B."

  From the point of view of Geni (a) this shifts the workload to the person who makes the request and (b) avoids Geni emitting idiotic untruthful statements.