Information and Citation tabs going, going, gone?
Of late, when I open any U. S. Census doc, the tabs marked "Information" and "Citation" are.... gone. Perhaps they're only hidden. Last month this happened to me once, or twice. I noticed that there was a change brewing, but many of the census docs I opened still had these tabs appear. Today there were none.
Is this a change in FS? Something in my browser? Something else?
These two tabs were critical, especially in citing the source. Now it appears that the only source citation FS will give me is a tertiary citation, yet another step removed from NARA. I hope this is something on me and not on FS.
Likewise, I noticed today that my editor is different, and appears in a side box. I don't see where it gives me the same options as it once did. This is messed up.
Answers
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The new viewer has the tabs on the sidebar instead of the bottom, and it labels the one with the film info and citation as "Group Data".
But if you truncate the URL by deleting the question mark and everything after it (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9RZF-H3M?i=4), you get the viewer you're accustomed to, with the tabs on the bottom and the citation where you expect it.
(Note, however, that this will not work with newly-published material, such as the 1950 U.S. census: the process that generates the contents of the old viewer's Information tab was never run on these collections, so the tab is essentially empty.)
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You wrote: "I noticed today that my editor is different, and appears in a side box. I don't see where it gives me the same options as it once did."
No, the new editor doesn't give you the same options as the old one: it gives you many, many more. You can edit nearly every indexed field, including things like relationships and household groupings, and you can add or delete fields or even entire entries. The interface is correspondingly a bit more complex than the old one, and for some reason they've neglected to supply a tooltip or label for the edit buttons (the pencils), so it's mystery-meat navigation, but I've found it not too difficult to figure out.
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Regarding the auto-generated citations and their ever-decreasing usefulness: every now and then, I use the Feedback tab-thingy (if available) to point out the nonsense in them, but I've never relied on them. In fact, I don't think I've ever actually used an auto-citation from any website, but especially not from FS. It's easy enough to write your own, especially if you don't worry about consistency in formatting. (As long as the necessary information is there, it doesn't matter what comes first or last, or what punctuation you use.)
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