Perhaps FS can provide someone to contact for the "new discovery pages"

seekfam14

I can no longer find anywhere the exchanges I had with an FS person/staffer about the new discovery page of one of my ancestors. My exchanges (and those of other folk) were in a "comments" section at the end of an article about new discovery pages on the FS blog . Today I found the January 2021 articles, but the comments section was no longer there.

In my initial exchanges I managed to get a mistake in the place of residence half-corrected on the new discovery page in question. On 17 October, after taking a long time to locate my earlier exchanges (then still at the end of the above-mentioned article), I made a further comment, correcting the marriage date and asking for the place of residence to be corrected fully. Today I see that the date has been corrected but not the place of residence.

It seems to me that the new discovery pages only have an interest if they contained correct data about the persons they are describing. To increase the chances of achieving that objective, there needs to be an FS channel which users can easily access to correct mistakes in those pages, including by providing records or other data to corroborate the requested correction.

As you can imagine, having half-succeeded in obtaining a correction, it is very frustrating to find that one has no way of reaching an FS person who can complete the task.

Hence my proposal that FS provide a person or a message address that a user can contact when s/he wishes to correct specific data on new discovery pages.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Apparently, in the exchanges of comments on that blog, people forgot to convey to you the basic setup of those fluff ::ahem, sorry:: Discovery pages: they're based off of the person's profile in Family Tree, which anyone can edit, after logging in. (Once a change is made to a profile, it'll take a few weeks to show up on the Discovery page, since they're only updated occasionally.)

So to fix your relative's Discovery page, log in to FamilySearch, go to Family Tree, find your relative, and edit the profile. Then wait a few weeks.

Note that for dates and places, the profile page will show a "display value", which may or may not be the same as the "standardized value" that has been associated with it. The Discovery page only shows the standardized date or place. This is the root of many complaints about "I changed it but it's still wrong": it is possible to change the display value while accidentally not changing the associated standard.

seekfam14

Julia:

Thanks for your comment. I agree with your f**ff assessment but think (for the moment!) that it's worth trying to encourage FS to improve these pages.

I am aware of most of the points you make, notably that the data on the discovery page is drawn (by a robot?) from the data on the person's profile page. What bugged me in my case was that I provided corroboration for fully correcting the place of residence, but it still wasn't corrected. I hate the feeling, especially on a project like FS, that one is dealing with faceless bureaucrats, hiding anonymously behind the absence of a contact-address.