I got two notifications today that were 100% incorrect
I added notes, but I am willing to do a bit more. Various sources supported both incorrect entries, but the names and relationship to my aunts and uncles were flat out wrong. I 'll do a bit, but not a lot. How can I best help? PS I just led a Genealogy class yesterday and pointed out this weakness in FamilySearch.
Answers
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When you say you received "notifications" are you taking about record hints or something else? From some of the details you provided, it sounds like you were notified of record hints where a record was suggested as a possible match for one of your ancestors, but you have concluded that the hint does not match your ancestor.
If that is correct, then the way you can help is to mark those records hints as "not a match." That does two important things: it dismisses the record hint for that person, so that other relatives will no longer see that incorrect record hint; it also provides feedback for the hinting algorithm, which has the potential to improve the hinting in the future.
The hinting algorithm has to be carefully calibrated. If it is too aggressive in finding matches, then it will provide a lot of incorrect suggestions, which some people will blithely attach without proper analysis. That's bad. But if it is too conservative, then it will miss many hints that could be helpful. That's also bad. Clearly there are other aspects to the hinting algorithm besides the matching threshold, but that's certainly a big one. Simply increasing the matching threshold would decrease the chance of false positives, but would certainly increase the false negatives (valid record hints that would be missed).
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