Maliciously indexed, reviewed and published collections

gary_noble

Does FS realise the extent of the problem of continuously allowing people who have no interest in research / ulterior motives to index and review? I know the process relies on free volunteers, I know we hear about people having their rights taken away, but its getting ridiculous. Here is some of their handiwork globally:

Silly dates https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&q.anyDate.from=32&q.anyDate.to=999&q.surname=%2A (note the millions of results figure)

Then these dates appear to be thanks to the malicious date/placename standardiser which does its magic pre publication - where only a day and month has been indexed with no year, it takes the day and turns it into the year https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&q.anyDate.from=1&q.anyDate.to=32&q.surname=%2A (again note the millions of results figure)

Malicious names https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&q.surname=aaa%2A (the extent of this can be seen by substituting the triple letters of the alphabet a through z eg: bbb ccc etc) also by swopping it from surnames to christian names https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&q.givenName=%2Awww%2A&q.surname=%2A or getting creative with the * wildcard

And yes, i do realise we are all human, some of these could be put down to slip of the finger, cat on the keyboard etc, some may well be genuine names on the images, there is no way to filter them out of the results, but I am referring to the so ridiculous ones, there is no way some people will be found through a conventional search

Paul W

@gary_noble

The "millions of results figures" appear to have been produced due to a lone wildcard being inputted to the Last Names field.

The silly / malicious dates appear to be the result of coding errors, not necessarily the carelessness of the indexer(s).

True, your third and fourth examples need some deeper investigation, but I do not see firm evidence that the main problem is really connected to any malicious intent in the original indexing, just something that went badly wrong in the process of getting these records online.