Quality Feedback Hint lists Place not identified in Source Consistency
for Adolph Aron Johanson Simpson US ID LWLK-XN6 Source Consistency "This person has a birth place of Göteborg, Västra Götaland, Sweden, which does not match the place Sweden, Sweden, Oxford, Massachusetts, United States." I cannot see where the Sweden Oxford MA is coming from in the source citation so I wonder if the index or this source consistency has an error. None of Adolph's information, that I know of, refer to Oxford Massachusetts.
Answers
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This is, I would imagine, another symptom of the widespread placename mapping problem that is discussed in many FS Community threads. @SerraNola one for you?
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Yup, that's the autostandardizer making a hash of things. The culprit is the third source tagged to his birth, which is a 1900 marriage in Massachusetts (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:N4Z9-WD6). Given the location of the event, perhaps the bot can be forgiven for trying to squash the country of his birth into someplace within that state, but this illustrates why the whole autostandardization thing's never going to work. No algorithm is ever going to be written that can cope reliably with text fields that can hold anything from the name of a farm to the name of a continent.
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Actually, the culprit is the fourth source which does show birthplace as Massachusetts:
At least we can say the PQS algorithm is using old errors and not creating new ones. It does, however, underscore the far reaching effect of place name errors.
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He never lived in Oxford, Massachusetts. I don't know where that's coming from.
Can a human fix it if a Bot cannot? Otherwise the Quality score will never be right.
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The DQS (Data Quality Score) it not what needs to be right. First, the entire database needs to be purged of all the nonsense place names. Then, the DQS will follow.
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@DeniseSimpson60 Yes, of course he was not born in Oxford. One of the place name bugs we have identified occurred when there was one word in the place name field—usually a county, state, or country. The attempt to change the name to a standardized place doesn't recognize the level of jurisdiction and changes it to a town or township. Thus, Sweden became Sweden, Sweden, Oxford, Massachusetts. In this case, though it's not that easy because there is no such town in Oxford, Massachusetts. In fact Oxford is not a county, but a town in Worcester County, MA. I cannot explain why some places have morphed into extremely wonky names, but I was able to edit this one back to just Sweden.
At the risk of adding to your confusion, you may notice that your source now shows Sweden as place of birth, but if you compare it to the other index page (Source #3), the event place is now Franklin, Massachusetts. So you got hit twice with place name defects on this one record. With the original of Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts being in the drop down list (click on the down arrow) and also on Source #3, hopefully it will not affect the data quality score.
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As has been pointed out repeatedly in the Data Quality Score Feedback group, the score doesn't say anything about which one's right or wrong, the profile or the index. It just points out the mismatches. If it's the index that's wrong, as here, then there are broadly two choices: fix the index (if possible), or dismiss the problem. Either way, the score will improve.
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@SerraNola Thank you for fixing to Sweden. Franklin MA is also an error; I did see that and cannot fix it. Posting the question was to improve records but disappointing that there is this high a level of errors.
Thank you all for responses.0 -
@DeniseSimpson60 I should have mentioned that the Franklin MA error cannot be edited because it is already correct in the index.
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