Interesting Side Effects of Deletion

[zhwj]

I went to add POS, English, and Pinyin for 瑄 and found that there were three entries for the character. Two of them were completely blank, and the third had only a source "ADSO" filled in. Since only one entry is needed right now, I went to delete the other two.

Pressing delete on one zapped them both - not a problem right now, but I can imagine a situation where someone alters the database, realizes that the alteration collides with another entry, and goes to delete the duplicate, unintentionally removing both.

[trevelyan]

Aware of this... and there is actually a reason!

The editing interfaces searches through a simplified database when finding existing entries, but changes take effect on the more complex (character-sorted) database as well. Since words can have multiple entries, the problem is deciding which entry to edit in the complex database given the information stored in the simplified one (they don't have the same unique database-identifier since they have different structures).

The working solution is to edit/remove all entries that share the same CHINESE, ENGLISH and FLAG. In practice, these fields are distinct enough not to cause a problem 99.9% of the time.

I seem to remember adding 瑄 manually after finding that it wasn't actually in the database. Maybe what accounts for the multiple entries were people adding it manually after using the QuickAdd form. So its probably my fault for not reannotating the relevant script right away. Multiple additions would also be caught in the monthly review, so probably not a major cause for concern.