place name correction
I have just spent the last 20 mins trying to do place name correction in the volunteer section on the home page. I selected Australia as my country choice every time and every time it came up as America. I have to say .....what a waste of time. I will not try this again. I could have spent that time researching my own information.
Answers
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I feel your frustration.
I checked this feature as well and it seems there must be something wrong with this at the moment.
It may mean there are no other places to fix.
I will try and find an answer for you.
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There is a fundamental chicken-and-egg problem with the place name corrections setup: the whole point is that the computer cannot interpret the entered place, so how the heck is it supposed to figure out where it is? The corrections algorithm makes a guess, but it is very often completely wrong.
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Unfortunately, this routine is probably working, as Julia states, as well as it possibly can. I agree that if you find it frustrating and not worth your time, then certainly use your time elsewhere as you best see fit. None of us have enough time as it is.
I did take a look to see if there were any hints as to what is going on. Picking Australia as the place to focus on in the Improve Place Names section, here is one of the places that came up to fix:
With the place name being just Red Hill Cemetery, the routine has nothing else to go on and there is a Red Hill Cemetery in Australia. It is clear that the routine does not look at anything else since all the other life events listed, including this man's burial, are in the United States. But would you want a computer routine to make the type of rational judgement call that the person who entered this meant one of these cemeteries and none of the others? I would be concerned that would introduced all sorts of unwanted errors and confusion.
Going to this man's Family Tree page, it can be be seen that this Custom Event was generated when a user added information from a Find-A-Grave record but then never went back to clean up that information:
Going through all of the ten places to add a standard to, only one of them includes a country, which is Australia, by the way. None of the others have any indication what country they could be in but all of them have Australia as the first or second choice in the drop down menu of possible standards:
This place name improvement project is not as straight forward as it appears at first glance and I hope that people do not just haphazardly click off the first choice of standard without really evaluating what the actual standard should be. The correct Hammond Cemetery, based on the fact that the woman was buried in Harland, Smith, Kansas, is not to be found among any of the 15 choices in the drop down menu at all. The only way to correctly standardize it, is to ignore the menu, look at Burial under the other life events listed, and start typing in the box:
However, what this record really needs, is for one of the people working on it to add the cemetery name to the burial place name, properly standardizing it there, and then to delete this custom event altogether.
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Medford of Upper Evesham comes up for Medford, Burlington, New Jersey. As of 1850, Medford was no longer part of Evesham Township.
Entering Mount Holly, Burlington, New Jersey comes up with Mount Holly, Lumberton Township. That is not correct as Mount Holly is the county seat of Burlington and an independent city.
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