imagine if one night AI cleaned up the entire FamilySearch Tree and enforced proper standards.
Imagine if one night AI cleaned up the entire FamilySearch Tree and enforced proper standards. No more duplicates, no more 900-year-old ancestors, no more full names in the ‘first name’ slot. Dates would be in the Gregorian calendar, places using today’s world map, everything correctly sourced. What would happen?
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Given the current abilities of AI, I suspect we would find more trouble than help if such a thing came to pass.
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True, AI isn’t perfect, but sometimes I think it couldn’t possibly do worse than what’s already in there. At least it would stop the 143-year-olds, children being born before their parents/after their parents died, and ‘? ? born in Europe.’ Even just enforcing names in the right fields would be a huge improvement.
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I just corrected an AI index where a father was created for a natural-born child out of the place where the child's mother was born.
No thanks to AI doing the clean-up.
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I hear you, and I definitely wouldn’t want AI to be inventing people either. My thought was more about AI as a gatekeeper, not as a creator, like enforcing that names go in the right fields, dates are at least possible, and places match the modern map. Basically, a quality filter, not a record-maker
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Unfortunately, automated routines have already wreaked havoc on FS record sets. A large percentage of burial records in Cook County, Illinois have been magically transported to places in Argentina and beyond.
I hope the Engineers can find a way to correct those existing problems before moving on to more ambitious projects.
You may want to investigate the Data Quality Score group where strides have been made in highlighting issues in the tree.3 -
Every time I know of when FamilySearch tried to do a large scale automatic clean up of records or Family Tree there have been some pretty unfortunate unintended consequences. There are just too many messy facts in history.
No more duplicates? Even now the possible duplicates routine will present as duplicates people who are not. Are Hans Hansson and Brita Olsdatter who are in Family Tree with just their names as the parents of Hans Hanson born 1840 at a particular farm the same Hans Hansson and Brita Olsdatter living at that farm with children born in 1842 and 1845? No way to know without thorough research. Pattern matching, which is all AI really does, won't tell you.
No more 900 year old ancestors? What is AI to do? just delete relationship or realize that the AI indexed source record has the birth date wrong?
No more full names in the first name slot? How will AI determine if first name "John Smith" with no last name is first name John, last name Smith or really is "John Smith" who was given his mother's maiden name for his middle name and no one has been able to discover his last name yet?
Dates in the Gregorian calendar? Why? I suspect you will find a huge range of opinions regarding whether there should be any date conversion at all. That is, whether Julian dates should be entered just as they are in the records with notes they are Julian dates. That is what I do. Otherwise the next person looking at the record has to convert the date back from Gregorian to Julian to find the proper date in the source record.
Places entered as they are on today's maps? That is really going against what is probably the majority opinion that places should be entered with their historically correct names. It's usually easier to find more records for a place that way. Also, the data quality checker flags it as a problem when places are entered with modern place names.
Everything correctly sourced? If Hans Hansson has a source for his marriage on 1 Nov 1850 that states he was married 1 Nov 1850 then that would be correctly sourced. Would AI ever be able to determine that that Hans Hansson was not the Hans Hansson married that day? That these were too different people living on the same farm? Again, pattern matching is not going to help, only a deep understanding of the time, the place, the people, and the traditions involved will.
But I won't be totally pessimistic. Maybe step by step this will be possible. First step will be getting AI to read records properly. Just check out the indexing group discussions here if you don't think that is a tremendous problem.
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I just want to get on FamilySearch without having to answer a bunch of infuriating Captchas.
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I wanted to get a little more information on the situation, just for clarification. Are you logging on via a phone, or a computer? And is it via a VPN?
Just for reference, I'm using a Windows 10 computer, using the Edge browser with no tools such as Ad-blocking, etc, no VPN, and I'm not seeing any Captchas.
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This is taking the thread away from its purpose but I am not sure that FS have much to do with the security routines - I suspect that it's contracted out. (Could be wrong. I was application support not security)
I am using a VPN for my own security and I don't see Captchas, by which I mean selecting parts of images. I do have to click a checkbox or two to prove I'm a human.
It's a bit more of a pain than I was expecting when I started to use a VPN but I think that it may be inevitable. For my purposes, a VPN is essential, particularly when using a public WiFi on my phone. (It also helps FS because it can be certain I'm a human updating FS, not a bot network).
But obscuring my origin also means that FS cannot easily apply any licencing rules that allow only certain countries to access certain data (I have seen such rules implied, though a while ago). (Whether this is the purpose of FS's attitude to VPN, I don't know, but it seems at least possible)
So a little messing about may be inevitable. FS , by the way, is not the only site suffering. Though it is the only site where I've had to prove my humanity when attempting to log out! That did seem a little counterproductive!
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