I’m reaching out regarding some duplicates on sperm whales we’ve identified between the newly uploaded BMMRO catalog and the DSWP catalog.
These duplicates originate from the NAMSC catalog, which later served as the foundation for Flukebook. Because of this, we now have cases where the same individual exists twice in Flukebook, with the exact same photo attached to both profiles.
To clean this up, would it be possible to:
· merge the individuals so that both the BMMRO and DSWP IDs remain linked to the same whale,
· but ensure that each photo is stored only once (so we don’t end up with duplicate images for the same individual)?
We have a Merging FAQ page in our help docs that will walk you through how to merge two individual records. When records are merged, you’ll see both the old ID and the current ID on the marked individual page. The old ID should appear under “Other values”.
Are you also using Flukebook’s Data Integrity tools? (Administer > Data Integrity)?
There are a few tools here that will help you check to make sure a photo only appears once per individual:
Check for Annotations with Multiple Individual IDs: Checks for the same annotation assigned to different individual IDs
Find Annotations Duplicated in Two or More Encounters: Checks for the same annotation in multiple encounters
The potential blind spot with these is that these tools will only look for duplicates associated with a specific account. If duplicates exist between multiple users of your organization, those won’t appear in the data integrity checks.
I’ve just merged those individuals to keep both DSWP and BMMRO names for the same individual.
The only thing I am concerned about now is: when the merging would have worked, I will still have two same encounters linked to the same individual. Then, I thought that I could just maybe delete the duplicate encounter but I am afraid it would make one of the name disappeared (as for most of the individuals, there is this only picture/encounter for each individual). What do you think ?
Thanks for sharing the data integrity tools with me, I wasn’t aware of it. The thing is the data I am refering to are from two differents structures (two different accounts : DSWP and BMMRO) so we cannot use the “find annotations duplicated in two or more encounters” that would have been really useful to solve this issue.
Can you post the links to those encounters here so I can take a look? I can’t say for sure whether deleting one of them would impact anything since broadly since the answer will vary depending on the encounters and their identities.
All of the individual merge notifications are still pending so I am not sure you can solve this issue while it has not been approved (it says that it will within two weeks).
Tell me if you need anything else from me ! Have a good day !
I recommend merging these instead of deleting one of the encounters. A few reasons for this:
Some of the images are similar, though not exact
Not all of the pairs have the same encounter dates or locations
Some individual pages have past IDs recorded on them, which would disappear if the encounter associated with that individual is deleted. Merging the records will preserve this data.
I don’t actually have a way to force the merge requests through while they’re pending, but if for whatever reason they haven’t completed after two weeks, let me know.
Ok, perfect, that’s what I’ve done. Thank you for your input. For those specific sightings, sometimes, the locations or dates is not the same but it still refers to same sighting in the field. BMMRO informations for those sightings are the more precise and this shoud be the ones to keep if we want to deal with those duplicates of pictures in the future.
I completely agree with the fact that this way, even if not ideal, is the best to deal with this problem in order to keep both names associated with this individual.
