Is there anyway to communicate with an indexer of a record?
Is there anyway to communicate with an indexer of a record? I started reviewing a City Directory and ended up sending it back for a redo. The indexer did an excellent job, but too good. They extended abbreviation, indexed the wid of person, and extracted all people from business listings. They do an very accurate job, but need to review the instructions. It would be great to save them the time of doing too good of a job, while creating more work for the redo indexer & reviewer. They will probably never know unless someone is kind enough to make them aware of the issue, in a kind friendly way. This is not the first time I have come across this issue. Years ago we actually got a percentage of correct entries after our work was reviewed, I'm not suggesting that at all. But at least you knew if you were off track with your indexing. When I index, I sure would hope someone would help me understand the right way to do something if I was off track and didn't know it.
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As a very interested observer, not an indexer, I find it extraordinary a) that there is nothing (online test etc.) to confirm that people have the knowledge to index a new-to-them collection according to the instructions, and b) that reviewers and indexers have no ability to collaborate. Surely both of these waste enormous amounts of time and reduce the quality of the end result?
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I think all of us who review indexing have seen this multiple times. In a project I've worked on the past few years I've seen this same thing, knowing it's the same person because it's all done wrong in the same exact way, over and over again, but Family Search doesn't contact these people anymore. It is sad that they go to all the work they do just to have it all rejected because they won't read the instructions.
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I think the reason FS did away with the feedback to indexers is the still-persistent notion that it was some sort of "correctness score". It wasn't ever that, and wasn't meant to be that. It was simply a measure of agreement with other indexers. However, between the way it was presented and the general human reaction to anything even vaguely resembling a grade or score, it was universally interpreted as being "marked wrong", which led to all sorts of bad feelings, especially when everyone else was ignoring the instructions, but you didn't get that memo.
Even when the feedback/scoring still existed, indexers and arbitrators begged FS for some sort of messaging system. We've needed one even more desperately since the feedback was eliminated — but FS apparently disagrees.
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I think the closest we came was way back when desktop indexing was used. We'd get feedback from a team; I think they were arbitrators; users didn't generally have the option to review like we do today, that said things like "First name is Albert" or "Height is 6 2." Indexers (like me and you) have never been allowed to contact each other.
Being off track all boils down to reading and rereading the Instructions. People either don't read the Instructions or just don't care and do their own thing. When we had an abundance of Nat projects, you would not believe the number of images marked No Extractable Data or an Oath of Allegiance was skipped.1 -
Having the ability to collaborate ('contact indexer' button or whatever) doesn't in my view imply any sort of scoring or value judgement or even 'you got that wrong', just the ability to ask why a particular value was chosen, or to provide general guidance that may be useful next time, e.g. we don't expand given name abbreviations, see section x.y of the Project Instructions, or indeed to say 'fantastic work, well done'. Feeling you will get constructive peer feedback can only help, especially if you are new to indexing, surely? And they wouldn't have to respond if they didn't want to.
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@MandyShaw1, I agree that messaging would not be seen as a score/grade, but we've never had it, so I can't offer any actual experience or data.
Back in the offline/stand-alone indexing program days, what we had was a percentage attached to our submitted batches, indicating our degree of agreement with the other indexer who got that same batch. I never did figure out how that percentage was calculated — did a single letter in a twelve-character name count the same as a single letter in a three-character name? — and I no longer remember what it was called, but whatever the labeling, it was universally seen (and talked about on the forums of the time) as a correctness score/rating.
Even before FS stopped reporting that percentage to us (and before they closed those forums), people asked for some way to communicate with indexers and arbitrators. I remember many suggestions for a simple note field, either on each entry or just on the image or batch, where indexers could explain things like "make sure to check the remarks column, it corrects the father's name". When in-browser indexing was first announced, I remember having hopes that it would include some form of communication, but this wish has not yet been fulfilled.
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