Need change in source drop down under Event Place when attached to person.
I’m discovering on many of the census records after you attach it as a source to someone that when you look at the Event Place that shows where changes have been made, sometimes the most recent correction shows up on the bottom of the drop down. Many times the Event Place is showing the incorrect place and unless you check the drop down it looks wrong. I can see where this would look very confusing to less experienced users. Please make it so the most recent change shows on top. The one on top is the only one that shows unless the drop down is hit. It took me a while to see the drop down and I’m a pretty experienced user. Thank you, Anita
Answers
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I'm not actually sure that your interpretation of the Event Place and the dropdown list is correct. As far as I know, the actual Event Place is the one that you see without the dropdown list showing.
I don't even know if we have had an explanation of what the other placenames in the dropdown list are. I've certainly seen speculation.
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@Anita1973 , could you please provide a screen shot of what you are talking about? It's not clear to me.
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Alan, I can't for the life of me come up with an example, but I'm pretty sure that Anita is referring to how the index detail page misinterprets/misrepresents corrections from the new index editor, putting the old indexed value at the top, so that it's the only thing showing unless you click the "v" -- and if it's a placename field, sometimes, clicking that "v" results in a miles-long list of places, with the actually-correct one at the very bottom.
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I did try to find the previous thread on this topic in my list of bookmarked threads, but failed. If I've got that interpretation of the drop-down list wrong (and I'll trust Julia's comments more than my memory) then my apologies to @Julia Szent-Györgyi and @Anita1973
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So to make up for it...
Is this the screen that we're talking about? Index entry is on https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MK1D-4QR and this is the index with the alleged Edit History dropdown expanded:
At the risk of digging myself deeper into a hole, I still don't understand how those 3 values of Event Place can be the result of 3 edits (or one original and 2 edits, I guess) given that the Change History for this Index Record only shows the one value - and isn't Event Place supposed to be automatically derived from Event Place (Original) anyway?
If I'm getting this all wrong then I apologise. Again.
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That's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of, Adrian, and I'm pretty sure it's what the OP was talking about, too.
I have no idea where the contents of that list/drop-down come from; the two candidates I can think of are autostandardization-corrections or index corrections. (I suppose it's possible that the answer to that "or" question is "yes".) Whatever the source process, however, the presentation is wrong: it indicates that an incorrect location is the correct one, instead of the item at the bottom of the list which is actually the best choice of standard to go with the indexed text. That last item is the only thing that the index-correction screen shows for that field.
The "Show Change History" screen is, as usual, completely unconnected to reality and utterly useless. It claims that a place field was created in 2022, and that's it. It gives zero information about the field's contents or changes to said contents.
The only other occurrence of the word "place" in that change log is for the parents' birthplace fields.
@N Tychonievich, do you have any idea whether such drop-downs of placenames are a result of autostandardization-corrections, or are they at the door of the new index editor? (We know the latter is incapable of communicating correctly with the index detail page, in both directions, which makes it hard to track down the source of this error.)
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi et al
I've been seeing this a lot--evidence of multiple place name edits and one that is wrong showing as the default. I have submitted a request that the place that matches what is on the source document show by default. To make matters worse, one place typically shows in the search results (and that one is also often inaccurate) and a different one shows on the record details page. This just confuses most users. Hopefully the folks who can make improvements will recognize that this needs some attention.
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Herewith an example I found this morning, with the many wrong placenames listed for a cemetery in the Archdiocese of Chicago, Illinois, USA: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q2HF-X78B
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Just as an incidental that may or may not mean anything, that Index Record as found by @Áine Ní Donnghaile looks infinitely better on the Beta site:
Again, possibly irrelevant but the dropdown arrows aren't on the Beta view. I think someone said recently that the Source Records on Beta are just a subset of those in Production so that might have a bearing on whether the result is Zimbabwe or Illinois, USA.
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