locations
Hello,
Recently, FamilySearch has invested its resources in "updating" locations on its indexed records to facilitate searches for some. It has led to unintended consequences as now these indices are extremely inaccurate. I have found people who were born in Lithuania to have been indexed as being born in Thailand. Others came from Galicia, Austria and are indexed as Galicia, Spain. This is a major flaw that should not be ignored.
Please consider returning all indexed records to their original entries. If the original source has a spelling error, it should still be indexed the way it was written. What should change is the algorithm that allows for a broader Soundex search.
Thank you
Comments
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FamilySearch is well aware of this problem. It has been reported and complained about many times. There is an extensive discussion here: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/125985/auto-standardization/p1 that goes over why this happened and why it cannot simply be reversed.
We've been asked to report specific problems using a specific examples, each as a separate post in the Search section here in Communities so they can fix each class of error. Something like these I have posted:
Apparently, although there are hundreds of thousands of records that ended up with the wrong place name, there are billions of records where it went well. Also, there are a couple of different varieties of this problem. Some records were truly assigned incorrect place names. These always show in the actual index as having both "Event Place" and "Event Place (Original)." Other records will display with the incorrect place name in search result lists and the Source Linker, but that incorrect place name is no where to b found on in the actual index. This second version seems to be more of a programming bug in displaying the place information rather than a true update of the records.
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