Continuing frustration with inconsistency
My previous post on this topic has been closed, and our ability to add screenshots still hasn't been fixed, so I will do my best with just words.
I (or the hinting system) found a death record for someone. For whatever reason, the index contains a death date, but not the death place, even though the place is clearly there on the document. This leads to inconsistent and annoying behavior in Source Linker.
If the profile does not have a death event entered, that is, if it just says "deceased", then Source Linker offers to transfer the death date from the index — but strictly and only the date. The place field is not accessible in the linking process. Such offers of half the event are incredibly frustrating to me. It's as if I couldn't enter the surname if only the given name was indexed. (It doesn't actually do that, right? I hope?)
On the other hand, if the profile does have a death event, but it's different from what's in the index entry — such as "about 1860" instead of "7 Feb 1861" — then there's no offer to transfer, but there is an edit pencil. This has the disadvantage of Yet Another Popup, in which one has to either type the indexed information anew, or laboriously copy-and-paste it, but this is offset by the advantage that it has the full conclusion available for editing, not the truncated half that you get in the other scenario.
A third scenario is if the index's and profile's conclusions match exactly, in which case Source Linker doesn't allow any editing at all — even if it's a legacy-data profile that's repeating the index's nonsense verbatim.
Three completely-different behaviors for the same conclusion, depending on minor differences in the profile and index. I'd actually rather not be able to edit any conclusion from Source Linker than to have this sometimes-yes-sometimes-half-sometimes-no situation. Please, can it be made consistent?
Comments
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi
I have added your comments to the Known Issues and will bring them to the attention of the engineers. Thank you for your very clear writeup.
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