GPS coordinated Help?

LegacyUser

Peder Carlström said: Hello Lovely Familysearch!

I must say I am addicted to Genealogy because of your lovely program! Works fine to find records and archives. And I also love to help others, friends, family or even strangers to find their ancestors.

However,

I like to suggest one improvement so far: the other day I tried one new feature, I think it was called "how to help Familysearch to standardize a location" - so I didi.

But, the locations are from other parts of the world, and I cannot help very much really. It would be way better if this "standardize thing" would "feel what country I am sitting in", so I get Swedish locations as an option (I am Swedish, living in Sweden).

"Optional" would mean that not everyone living in Sweden needs to help out with Swedish locations, as we have, as many other countries, foreigners who rather have knowledge about other countries.

But still, an optional feature would be nice: I am today helping out "manually" by going in to family trees and standardize Swedish locations.

Such a suggested feature would be a super nice tool!

Greetings from Sweden,

Peder Carlström

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community-powered feedback forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

The tool you mentioned is a temporary feature to assist the teams over the standards list. As such, the Authorities and Standards FamilySearch teams welcome your feedback and desire to improve FamilySearch Places, but do not always spot all requests and concerns. 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.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Your suggestion is a good one and has been requested here by others recently. Hopefully it will be picked up by someone from FamilySearch and implemented in the tool.

LegacyUser

Juli said: It's a chicken-and-egg problem: the whole point of the "help fix placenames" task/project is that these are places with no standard attached. In other words, the computer doesn't know where they are.

That said, I do think the computer should be able to look at other conclusions on the profile or its immediate relatives to come up with at least a probable region. I hope someone from FS will eventually chime in and explain whether such a modification is at all possible or likely.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: But I sort of thought that that is what was the whole idea with this program. To get a human being to look at the unstandardized location and then after analyzing other vitals for the person (and perhaps other immediate relatives) find an appropriate pre-existing standard in the database and assign it.

And this all because defining such an algorithm for a computer to operate on would be significantly problematic.

The problem is that right now the computer can already make lots of suggestions, but it take a human being to understand enough to decide which of the suggestions is appropriate (if any)

LegacyUser

Juli said: I know that this volunteer opportunity exists exactly because automating these decisions is essentially impossible. But that's at the level of choosing a specific standard for a specific event. Automating a "probable region" based on adjacent conclusions that _are_ standardized (i.e., there's a lat/long attached) should be a whole lot easier, and would make the human input more useful, because people would be dealing with parts of the world that they know something about.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Well, the core problem as brought up by Peder, should certainly be addressed in some way. Having folks that have no familiarity with foreign (or ancient) place names are constructed wouldn't seem to help much. But programmatically, if the problem being solved is not deterministic in nature, assigning it to a computer program to solve have have myriad problems with it. Even if trying to apply artificial Intelligence to it.

Question: Do you know why Artificial Intelligence has become so important?

Answer: Because it is getting so hard to find the real thing!

LegacyUser

FamilySearch Moderator said: Let me hop in here folks. These opportunities in the "Improve Place Names" app are there for a quick fix. What was originally entered will remain in the non-standard field--nothing is lost. All we are looking for in the standard field is a high level standard, even if it is just the country name. The lower the better, but it was designed to just get a standard, not the full standard. No research, no in-depth country knowledge, just get us something so that we can use other programmatic means to improve it more.

LegacyUser

Todd Powell said: An update to select a country for places is in the works. Should be out this week or next. Thank you for helping.