Marked Individual re: matched unknowns - confusion

Support
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1

Last week we ran matches for a particular encounter. The system displayed a match with another encounter that was confirmed as accurate by the researcher, gabriele. either image could be or was associated with a marked individual.
(This was what led us to request a new feature of being able to retain a match between unknown animals (see feature request posted today.)

Now I see a record for a Marked Individual that includes those same encounters. The marked Individual has an alpha-numeric string as its “name” that appears to be a unique ID string.

https://africancarnivore.wildbook.org/individuals.jsp?number=9a66ca8b-2d2c-4c92-b5ff-4196cfb30702

  1. How was this Marked Ind. record created? I don’t remember having the ability to create this kind of a record from a match between 2 un-named animals . And there’s no info on the matching process in the Field Guide.
  2. Is the alph-num. string the ID or the nickname?
  3. If these encounters are found to be a match for a known individual who is already in the system, how do I merge this individual record with the correct Marked Individual record?
2

Hey there!
Did some digging, have some answers, but not all:

  1. This individual was created using the bulk import. I verified using the log reference on the encounter, which is found at the bottom of the Metadata section on an encounter page:
    image
    image572×738 25.4 KB

    And the individual reference was provided as that string.
  2. That string is the Individual’s default name. You can rename this individual to be something more understandable under the Individual overview section.
  3. If these encounters do not belong to this individual, it is best to unassociate. Since you’ve said that Gabriele has confirmed they are a match, our current best practice is to name the individual and treat it as a recognized individual. (I’ll answer more in-depth as to why, how, and what’s coming on the feature request you posted)