Place name changes made incorrectly
I added a lot of our eastern European (Poland, Ukraine) ancestors to the tree middle of last year. I was about to add new information today only to find that my entries for Zimna Woda, Lviv, Lviv, Ukraine (where the event took place) were changed to Zimna Woda, Bezirk Jasło, Galicia, Austria. While the borders were fluid in this part of the world, nothing will change the fact that these places are about 200 km apart. As a result the tree is now incorrect and multiple individuals were updated. I emailed the person who made the change and asked why. Is there anything else I can do? I hate to have go and change everything back.
Note: There are numerous like named places in Poland/Ukraine. The original Polish records I am working from are for parafia "Zimna Woda, Ukraina" from 1700s and 1800s. Present name of the place is Zymna Voda Зимна Вода Lviv Oblast Ukraine 81110 which is totally different from Zimna Woda is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Jasło, within Jasło County, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, in south-eastern Poland which appears to be postal code 38-203. Source: google maps
Answers
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@Yolanda Lewis and @SerraNola I think these Place Names are being incorrectly changed all over the world because of the way Verify Places is set up to "standardize" place names and many users then make changes to what I call Person Cards ( XXXX-1xxx) without any verifiable sources ie birth certs, censuses, etc. For example, I am very familiar with US geography since high school in the 1960's (yep I'm old!) so I know for certain there is a London, England and from AI 3 official cities named London in the United States: London, Ohio; London, Arkansas; and London, Kentucky. Additionally, there are numerous other unincorporated communities, census-designated places, and towns with the name London. My 2-part solution: 1) Quit inviting volunteers using the Opportunities to make changes for someone else's ancestors (dead people) they know nothing about and 2) Insist that FS employees/missionaries use verifiable sources whenever changing names, dates, and places. I know FS can do it! So please do 😊with thanks😊
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@maryellenstevensbarnes1 - while there does appear to be something awry, I'm not sure that Verify Places has anything to do with it. The VP Opportunity is surely only for cases where a person's profile has a display placename but an empty standardised placename. That doesn't sound like Yolanda's situation.
Having said that, I am suspicious about how there appears to be a continuing flood of profiles with empty standardised placenames. A couple of years ago, we had virtually eliminated such profiles for the UK - because nothing was coming up in the list. Incidentally, before anyone asks, these empty standardised placenames surely can't be anything to do with AI indexing because they are profiles, not record indexes.
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@Adrian Bruce1 Its not always an indexing issue like spelling or reading cursive. VP Opportunity shows up for any place names that have non-standard or incomplete - example: I do US Places exclusively so I have one that says London so looking at the standardized choices it gives me the Londons found in the US but not the standard London in England which, like US small neighborhoods, has lots of differing divisions. Because I don't see anything I "like" I click on the Person Page for more vitals that might lead me to the right choice of standardized names and bingo I see from other details that the correct choice would be London England , often in a particular street or group of homes/flats/boroughs during the lifetime of the subject person. So my point is, Opportunities in general can be improved thru engineering/programming to help eliminate wrong guesses (not sure if I said this right whoops correctly) 😊have a great day
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@maryellenstevensbarnes1 - I agree with what you say, but my point is that what you're describing doesn't seem to match what Yolande was describing because she did have standardised place-names to start with, and that "Opportunity" you are describing (and which I use myself) only works on events without standardised place-names. So it does look like the Opportunity is innocent in this case.
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Thank you.😊
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