Place name correction

LegacyUser

Brita Beatty said: It would be helpful in the new place names corrections to be able to sort by areas. I am quite familiar with place names in England, United States and Sweden but areas such as Mexico and Argentina are foreign to me.

LegacyUser

Juli said: I'm too lazy to try to get GetSat to cough it up, but there was another thread about this exact topic recently.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem: the whole point of this corrections project is that the computer hasn't been able to identify a location to go with the text in the placename field. Sometimes there's enough to make a guess at a country at least, but sometimes, there isn't even enough for that. (I got one that just said "Bo.", as I recall.)

I agree that as currently presented, the project is very good at making one feel utterly useless. I went through something like thirty batches (three hundred places) and only found two places that I felt comfortable fixing.

My suggestion on the other thread was for the computer to check other conclusions on the profile and its immediate relatives to come up with a likely area of the world, and then sort by that, so that the volunteer could at least choose a region to work in ("Scandinavia" and "Latin America" and so on). I haven't a clue whether this is a workable idea or not.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Another point that needs to be made is that places are tied to geophysical coordinates. As such, it should be possible to take a given location with its coordinates and produce a listing within so many degrees (or minutes) of the center point.

That may not align with a "region" consisting of political jurisdictions, but at least it gets into the ball park.

This involves the Authorities and Standards FamilySearch teams. They welcome our feedback and help to improve FamilySearch Places, but do not always spot all requests and concerns in the Get Satisfaction feedback message threads. As such, they have asked us to send requests or concerns involving adding or improving entries in FamilySearch places to PlaceFeedback@familysearch.org.

Questions and requests about places are assigned to the team member best qualified to respond. Once the request is in their queue, the team member will respond in the order received and as time permits.

Hopefully someone will send them a message about this thread and one of the team members will respond...

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: The problem, Tom, as Juli points out, is that these places that are not linked to standardized values, are not "tied to geophysical coordinates." And we are not correcting anything, Brita.

What we are doing, is taking a place name and adding to that place name the proper geophysical coordinates AKA a geocode AKA latitude and longitude via a text representation of those coordinates otherwise known as, in FamilySearch's rather nonstandard use of the term, the standardized place name.

A place name without a geocode is just a string of random text as far as the FamilyTree program is concerned. Adding the geocode, tells the program what that string of text means and lets it do all sorts of fun things for us.

The other posts that talk about this new feature are at:

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

LegacyUser

Juli said: Tom, you've missed a critical detail: there is no location associated with these placename fields. That's the whole point.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: From above

This involves the Authorities and Standards FamilySearch teams. They welcome our feedback and help to improve FamilySearch Places, but do not always spot all requests and concerns in the Get Satisfaction feedback message threads. As such, they have asked us to send requests or concerns involving adding or improving entries in FamilySearch places to PlaceFeedback@familysearch.org.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Tom, have you tried the function we're talking about? The system pulls up conclusions from Tree with no standard associated with the placename field. This lack of association is almost never due to any deficiency in the placenames database. It's due to extra or missing information in the placename field which renders the computer unable to automatically assign something. The "Authorities and Standards teams" have almost nothing to do with it, and contacting them is NOT what the project is about. At all. In any way, shape, or form.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: This has everything to do with the Standards teams. They are the ones that set up the program (I was approached by them, but declined). They do not do a lot of monitoring of the Get Sat threads, so send them an email and ask that they review the three discussion threads and work toward some means to set up world regions where possible. They may have to set up a "world" region to deal with the World Misc problem expressed in one of the discussion threads.

LegacyUser

JimGreene said: Tom and all:
Among other things, I am the Product Marketing Manager for "Improving Place names" so I would like to take a stab at an explanation.
First, some of you are reading too much into this exercise. All we want is some sort of standard in the place name field, even a high level standard to replace the data that is currently not a standard. If someone has placed "Fulton and Haight, San Francisco, California" in for the place name, it is obviously not a standard. All we want is something that can be recognized so that the automation, and community can take it from there. It does not need to be perfect, just right. Look at the other place names for the person, determine if what else is there is enough for you to enter "San Francisco, California, United States," or maybe just "California, United States" Either is a standard, though neither is 100% complete. Still, it is all we are looking for. Don't stress over this, if things still do not look right, then click that you can't do this one and move on. If you want to research this out that is your choice, we won't argue. But again, we just want good enough to get the ball rolling, not perfection. And while it would undoubtedly be better if you could select batches from places with which you are familiar, the cost of doing that, for a program that is very temporary and will only last until the finite identified group of names is done, it just is not cost effective. If this causes frustration, then don't do it. We appreciate everyone's help, and the more that help the sooner it will be done. Thanks!!
Jim