Automatic update birth location when there is only one option for that local of birth.

Sidney Cabianca

Somebody there in programming can save thousands of hours every year if they can run a program to accept that standard location of birth when there is only one option.

The time of volunteers must be respected.

This idea to improve FamilySearch.

Paul W

Perhaps you can provide examples to illustrate where this would work. Personally, I don't recall having encountered one option when standardizing a location. There always seems to be somewhere else in the world with the same placename, or (even if the location has a unique spelling) where its full description varies due to changing county / country boundaries, over periods of time.

For example, the "Romford, Essex, England" pre-1801 standard placename would be "Romford, Greater London, England, United Kingdom" for events that took place after 1965.)

Incidentally, FamilySearch did implement an auto-standardization program, with this general idea (saving human resources) in mind. Unfortunately, the computer didn't quite interpret placenames in the same way as a human, with the disastrous consequence of there now being countless thousands of errors in FamilySearch. Many of these have involved changing the perfectly correct original placename (indexed by a person) to a place the computer program read as being somewhere thousands of miles away.

Gordon Collett

The other problem is the incompleteness of the Places database. There may be only one option in the database, but there could be a dozen options that are not in the database yet. If all the entries for those dozen places were to be changed to that one place in the database, you'd have a bit of a disaster on your hands. As I stated in your other post, volunteers can just leave these modifications of the data on these people of the up to their relatives who care enough to take the time to make careful corrections.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Continuing Gordon's and Paul's thoughts, the most basic problem with this is: what if that single option on the drop-down is wrong?

The algorithm generating the drop-down has changed between the old person page and the new, and unfortunately, the change is not an improvement. I don't know which version the "improve place names" task/project uses, but both are prone to some of the same problems. Sometimes, a single extra character is enough to remove the correct option from the list.

As the auto-standardization mess overwhelmingly proves, there is no substitute for human eyeballs.