New duplicate IDs in Whiskerbook

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1

In which Wildbook did the issue occur? Whiskerbook

What operating system were you using? Windows 11

What web browser were you using? Latest Chrome

What is your role on the site? Researcher

What happened?
A user has reported that she has some duplicate IDs in her dataset. Digging into how this might have happened, it turns out that she was trying to add encounters to existing ID manually (in the Identity section of the encounters) and when she didn’t get a dropdown showing those existing IDs, she assumed it meant she couldn’t add to them that way and instead put the existing ID into the “Set New Individual ID” field.

I believe this is what caused the duplication. I’ve explained to the user that she should continue to enter the existing ID into the “Add to existing individual ID” even if the dropdown list isn’t appearing for her. I assume that her limited internet connection may be the reason for the slowness of the dropdown list appearing in that field. However, I’ve also noticed that it can be quite slow some days when I’m doing demos, even on my fast internet connection.

Is there anything that can be done to speed this up?

In the meantime, could these duplicates be merged please so that there’s only one instance of each individual ID?

The IDs that are duplicated are as follows:
TM_LP_53
TM_LP_65
TM_LP_69
TM_LP_81
TM_LP_85
TM_LP_103
TM_LP_106
TM_LP_111
TM_LP_118
TM_LP_122
TM_LP_126
TM_LP_137
TM_LP_141

The user and I thank you in advance.

cheers
Maureen

2

Have you or the user already attempted your own cleanup since this was posted? I couldn’t find any individual pages for these IDs in Whiskerbook.

You can refer them to our help docs on merging individuals. Since these duplicate pages weren’t a result of a bug, they should be able to manually unassign the encounters from the newly-created individual and reassign them to the correct one with the greater number of encounters following the steps on that page.

3

Thanks. I’ve notified the user and sent instructions.

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