Please allow transcription corrections in indexed placenames!
There are doubtless even better examples out there, but here's the first one I came up with: the residence was indexed as "Muidszent", but it is clearly Mindszent ("all saints") (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:JF3J-86T). The problem is, there were 16 of those, in 11 different counties, and there's no way to tell from the manifest which one was meant.
If I try to just correct the transcription without standardizing, it yells at me in red: "!You must select a standardized place." But I can't! There are over a dozen candidates!
If this were a Family Tree profile, I could just leave it as "Mindszent" and set the standardized place as "Hungary", but the index-correction system doesn't have that capability: the only way to get the bare country as a selectable standard is to lose the corrected transcription entirely.
This halfway-there implementation of the placename-standardization concept leaves us between a rock and a hard place: we cannot make needed corrections to the index, because we cannot associate a correct standard with the available information.
FamilySearch, please either fully implement standardization on index corrections, with separate "index/display" and "standard" fields, or do away with this attempted link between indexes and standards.
Comments
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Found an example where someone has made a guess at a place in an index correction, but there's no telling if it's right. The "Residence Place" was originally misindexed as "N. Kisfalosd, Hungary", while the manifest clearly says "B. Kisfalud" -- but there are four candidates for that: Baranyakisfalud, Barskisfalud, Beregkisfalud, and Bodrogkisfalud. There is nothing on the manifest to indicate which of those is correct, so I think the person who made the correction picked the last one basically at random.
This "standardize or else!" setup in index corrections leaves us with no good choices: either we leave bad transcriptions uncorrected, even if we can tell exactly what was written, or we make random selections of standardized places.
Please, FamilySearch, change this setup. It leads to yet more errors in your database.
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This is a great example of why I argue the Places gazetteer should include special "disambiguation needed" place names.
...And the index Edit tool needs additional menu choices "None of the above" and/or "Ambiguous".
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