Add Ireland to the list of countries to help review place names here

Agnes381

I would like to suggest that you consider adding the Republic of Ireland (also Northern Ireland if possible) to the list of countries or locations which can be selected for someone like me who likes to occasionally review place names to help improve the records. Many Irish place names are derived from or translated from Irish Gaelic and there can be a range of spelling options and local interpretation needed. I feel I could help improve some of these Irish place names but the only option I can select is UK, Ireland doesn't appear on the list of countries at all. I live in Northern Ireland which is part of the UK but so far I have only been offered place names in other areas of the UK, mostly in England and I have not had any Irish locations come up at all

Julia Szent-Györgyi

The country selection in the Improve Placenames activity is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: the whole point is that the computer doesn't know what place to associate with the user-entered text. In other words, the computer doesn't know where the place is. Sometimes, it can make a guess, and that's what it uses for the existing broad categories, but I don't think we should expect anything more granular out of those guesses.

Perhaps what we need is a higher-level "improve placenames" activity, asking users just to guess a country or language for placename entries. Then, once the computer had a human being's idea for the rough location, the entry could go into the regular activity, but with more granular categorization.