Can this feature be improved?
I really enjoy Family Search and so many of its great features. The Events section and Add Event feature on each person's main page is a favorite option. I greatly enjoy adding Residence, Occupation, and Custom Events to each person's Event section. It can bring interesting and added flavor to a person's life portrait. Among the many smooth features here, I've noticed one thing that perhaps could be improved. When creating and tagging sources to a Residence Event, it works well except for the message, "This person has a residence that is not supported by any tagged indexed sources." If a residence tagged source is currently "indexed" with Family Search, no such message is generated. If the tagged residence source is not indexed with Family Search, the same message seems to always be generated. You can create scans of original vital records or detailed obituaries which provide dates and places of residence, but when tagging those golden genealogical sources to a Residence Event, the same generated message will result if that wonderful source is not indexed at Family Search.
Now there's an incredibly vast number of such wonderful record sources that can be attached to residence events. I wouldn't even mention it, but those particular generated messages seem to be undismissable within the Quality Details-Source Tagging section. Even if you type in a reason to sweep those messages away, the computer response is always the same… "Something went wrong. Please try again later." Well, I guess it's just a bit frustrating to tag such great sources to Residence Events (again such a nice feature) and not currently be able to dismiss those unsavory generated messages, "This person has a residence that is not supported by…" when Residence Events clearly are supported by the attached tagged sources, in my experience, hundreds of these examples have occurred. I know there are probably bigger fish to fry or things to perhaps improve yet a little more, but this one stands out to me every time I see it. Overall, Family Search is absolutely great. Thanks for your thoughts or ideas.
Answers
-
@Donald J Brady
The message you mention stems from the Data Quality Score project. I suggest that you join and post in the dedicated group: https://community.familysearch.org/en/group/323-data-quality-score-feedbackHope this helps.
1 -
This topic has been raised multiple times in the group mentioned above.
I recently proposed that the "No indexed sources" quality flag be reworded to say "Thank you for adding and tagging sources to this profile's information. If there is in addition a FamilySearch indexed source for this information, please attach that source and tag it as well. This will prevent the indexed source from being incorrectly attached to a different profile or being used to create a duplicate profile. If there are no indexed sources, then please try to dismiss this flag. A known bug currently sometimes prevents dismissal. We are hoping to have this fixed soon." (slightly edited)
For an extensive, and wandering, discussion about sources external to FamilySearch and the Data Quality Score, see:
3 -
For the avoidance of doubt it's probably worth mentioning that FS DQS can only check profiles against sources from FS Record Collections (which include many 'imported' collections such as Find a Grave Records), because it doesn't have access to the metadata of other sources. It is a pity about the bug mentioned above, it really muddies the waters.
2 -
The issue with the residence reported as not supported is already on the engineers' list -
1 -
Yes, not having the dismiss button work is really annoying. It affects a lot of other flags as well.
Now, I'm just going to probably display a bit of ignorance, but I really don't think "metadata access" is the problem here. As I understand the term, source metadata is not involved. (See: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/metadata ) Instead, I would simply view this as a source citaion content issue.
Here are two source citations on a person that point to the same source. I'll split the images to align their main sections:
All the Data Quality Checker routine is doing is pulling content from the Indexed Information section and comparing labeled event event information, in this case the christening date and place is all it has to work with, to the similarly labeled events on the profile. It's a simple math problem: Does A = B? Yes, no flag. No, a flag is posted.
Obviously the user created source has nothing to work with. To fix this, one option would be for the programmers to add to the user source creation pop up all the ability we have in the new Image editor routine to add user-indexed information content to the source.
These are the tools I mean:
Unless more information can be added by the user during source creation in a format that makes it available to the data quality routine, I don't think there will ever be a way for the routine to make use of user created sources. In my example, even if the routine could access the URL in my created source what on earth would it ever be able to make out of what is simply the image of a microfilm? There is no data, meta or otherwise, to access. It really is just an image.
2 -
Yes, to the last comment.
Currently the way to add one's own source is the generic Source Box option. It's not immediately obvious how to do that and perhaps different people will do this in different ways.
I imagine the DQS could be made to pull data from the self-created sources, since once posted it is inside this site's data sets, but since it is not ordered in a specific way, that would probably not work out well. unless (at a future date) some clever AI-controls were to be used.
However, as long as FamilySearch users do not have the relevant permissions (from the image provider) to post images, the question of accuracy of the data as transcribed by the user remains.
0
