Web hints is very good. But is there any thing i can do, about stopping hints coming up, that have already been incorporated into my data.
Can I somehow tag them as ‘already extracted’. Or maybe highlighting that a webhint has been modified.
I do not like having to go through the process of checking webhints out time and time again (approx +6000 record links).
Or maybe somehow for the ‘hints’ to automatically check through my family database.
I know its probably my fault, but sometimes ‘hints’ is not too clever, as it shows the same data, for a number of people with the same name and same birth year. I have even added the same data twice to different people, before realizing it. So it would be handy to have known that that webhint data had already been used.
You can mark hints as Confirmed. If so, you can see that they are confirmed and choose not to look at them again. Is that what you mean?
Do be aware that the status of being Confirmed or Rejected is not maintained by RM. Rather, it is maintained at the site that provides the hints. This approach has some interesting consequences.
For FamilySearch, the tree is a tree of everybody in the world maintained by all the FamilySearch users. Therefore, all users are confirming or rejecting the same hints. For example, you can discover that a hint is already Accepted even though you personally have not yet accepted it. What you are actually seeing in RM as WebHints are FamilySearch’s Record Hints.
For Ancestry, you have to have a personal tree at ancestry in order to receive hints. The hints you see on RM are the same hints you would see as shaky leaves if you were logged on directly to Ancestry. For example, you can approve a hint while you are logged on at Ancestry and it will then show up as Approved on RM even though you never did an approval on RM. Also, if you delete your Ancestry tree and reload it from RM, all your previous approvals and rejects will be gone and you will have to start over again with the approval process.
For MyHeritage, there is not really an interface provided my MyHeritage where you can transfer data back and forth between RM and MyHeritage. However, MyHeritage does provide an interface for hints. The hints are specific to you and are not shared with other MyHeritage users. So the hints work more like Ancestry’s hints than like FamilySearch’s hints in that regard. On the other hand, the hints provided by MyHeritage are not tied to a tree that you might store at MyHeritage. I don’t have a tree stored at MyHeritage but I get my hints just fine through RM.
I don’t use FindMyPast hints, but I believe they work pretty much just like the hints from MyHeritage. I played with them for a while, but I didn’t want to pay for a FindMyPast account on top of paying for an Ancestry account and a MyHeritage account.
I think that most RM users who want to use RM’s hints start with the notion that they will go through all the hints for everybody in their RM database. They will either approve each hint while incorporating the data from the hint in to their RM database, or else they would reject the hint if it was incorrect in some sense. That way, they will eventually process all the hints.
I started out trying to use RM’s WebHints that way myself. I don’t think that way of doing hints is even remotely practical. The biggest issue is that the hints are not stored in RM’s database. So you can’t search for them. You can’t make groups based on them. You can’t color code based on them. You just have to get some people up on your screen in either the Family View or the Pedigree View and see what hints come up that day for those people. Some days, more hints will come up than other days, or they will come up faster some days than others. It all depends on how busy the Internet is that day and how busy the site is that day and how well the site is responding that day. So I think of the hints as a great research tool but not as a rigorous search tool that lets me find the hints for all the people in my database in an organized fashion.
In the case of FamilySearch and Ancestry, I have almost quit using the hints through RM. Instead, I use a new tool in RM9 where you can right click a person and Jump To Ancestry or Jump To FamilySearch which jumps straight to that person at the site. I’ll then look at the hints directly in Ancestry or look at the hints directly in FamilySearch. I will do any approvals or rejections of the hints while I’m at the site. I’m probably going to want to download the images for the hints anyway. For me, that’s the best way to download the images.
The above is of course true but one must also bear in mind that the websites are being continually updated with the addition of new datasets so one is never in the situation where you have either confirmed or rejected all hints. There may be more tomorrow from a newly added dataset.