Experimenting with the merge duplicate citation utility in RM11, I conclude the following:
1-Citation objects with blank Citation Name fields are exempt from the duplicate citation merge utility.
2-Removing a “citation” (link) from a fact does not delete the underlying Citation Object.
3-Multiple links between the same fact and the same citation object appear multiple times in the “citation” list for that fact. Deleting one of these duplicate entries from the fact, removes them ALL from the fact.
Does this behavior comport with other user’s experience?
This is not merely an academic discussion. TreeShare and Ancestry are creating an explosion of duplicate, identical citations, many with empty Citation Name fields, some with no links to any facts in the database, some linked multiple times to the same fact.
Due to the limitations above, the citation merge utility does not help with many of these duplicate citations. I observe that an export of my DB to Gedcom and import back to RM cleans up most of these citation issues. I believe the merge utility needs tweaking to deal with these issues.
At the very least, identical citations with empty Citation Name fields should be merged.
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There is some history here. Originally, the merge citation utility did merge citations with blank citation names. But doing so created a major problem. Namely, citations that actually were different we being merged.
The problem is that there are some collections at Ancestry where the indexing is not complete. I’m not sure that “not complete” is really the best description, but what happens is that citations for such collections come down to RM via TreeShare in such a way that they differ only in their media file or in a Web tag being different. And those differences did not prevent them from being merged even though they were really different.
The workaround implemented in RM was not to merge citations with blank Citation names. The Citation names were blank because the main body of the citation data was blank and the information about the media files and/or Web tags did not go into the Citation name.
That’s still the current status. Citations with blank citation names are not merged.
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Thank you for the background. So instead of providing a way to detect the difference in media attached to the citation, they chose to simply not merge citations that do not contain a name?
Have you heard if perhaps a real fix might be in the works?
I guess if I have two identically named citations that only differ in media, a merge WILL take place? When that happens, do you end up with a single citation object that contains both media?
I honestly do not know what happens in that case. Somebody will need to do a test in a test database.