Help Fix Place Names - Additional Option to Apply the Same Process to an Individuals Own Tree
LegacyUser
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Daniel Marc Esslinger said: The "help fix place names" is a really good idea. But I wonder if an additional option could be given to apply the same process centred around my very own tree.
I have always wanted to standardise all my own places names, but it's very time consuming and clunky moving in and out of records for this purpose. They are also hard to find.
It's just nice to hit up 10 at a time where the next one to review is already lined up.
It's much faster.
I really do think it's good to keep it as an option, as I personally enjoyed doing the international place name standardisation.
I have always wanted to standardise all my own places names, but it's very time consuming and clunky moving in and out of records for this purpose. They are also hard to find.
It's just nice to hit up 10 at a time where the next one to review is already lined up.
It's much faster.
I really do think it's good to keep it as an option, as I personally enjoyed doing the international place name standardisation.
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Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community support forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We patrons (the users of this site) have various levels of knowledge and experience do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and questions.
Unless I miss my guess, your first comment about wanting to fix your "very own tree" suggests that you are not fully aware of the nature of FamilySearch FamilyTree. The following may help.Introducing FamilySearch Family Tree
FamilySearch FamilyTree is a single tree that is a collaborative effort, built around an open-edit model, allowing any person, including yourself to add to and make changes on any person who lived throughout history, including all of our deceased relatives.
There is no "my tree" in FamilySearch FamilyTree — it is a tree for all mankind. If you have found errors, you need to know why those errors are there. It could be that someone incorrectly combined another person's record with your relative. It could be that someone found a source that they thought applied to your relative, but it did not. It could be that someone just knew that their information was correct and entered that.
There are sites that support independent trees and building them. FamilySearch is not one of those sites.
If you are unfamiliar with how to work with the massive tree (now containing over 1.2 Billion persons), The Family History Guide (http://thefhguide.com/) is an approved training resource. It not only contains procedures for working with the site and the massive tree, but also exercises for you to use.
As to the incorrect information -- Those who make changes usually believe they are related to the person for which they are making changes. Their changes may be valid, invalid, or contain errors and may lack support from primary and secondary source material. Or the changes may be based on misinformation, or information that was copied from an unreliable source.
The desire to belong to an elite group of people, such as Mayflower Descendants, the Daughters of the American Revolution, or the Sons of the American Revolution has likewise produced some inventive genealogies.
Not all participants who add to and make changes to existing material have the same level of knowledge and experience. Novices or Newbies often try their best to be useful, but they can and will make mistakes (even us old-timers can make mistakes), some of which are going to cause concern. Others are convinced that their information is factual, despite not having primary or secondary sources that validate their information.
While this can be frustrating, remember that everyone has been at one time or another in their lives, or is now, a novice or newbie. I remember what it was like for me, now over fifty years ago.
To minimize the changes others make to the tree, there are several things that I have found to be largely effective, given the nature that many inappropriate changes are being made by people who are new to FamilySearch FamilyTree, or do not work with the tree on any kind of regular basis.
1. I make sure every deceased person I work with in the tree is fully sourced with citations that can be used to locate original records, not only with sources from FamilySearch Historical Records, but also from other sites as well as material that may not be available online. I also add whatever stories exist about that person and provide sources for those stories. The more information I can include, the less likely someone will come along and make changes.
I make sure that every conclusion (fact) that is in a person's record actually applies to that person and I … [truncated]0 -
Juli said: "Too long, didn't read" summary of the pertinent part of Tom's boilerplate:
There is no "my tree" and "your tree" on FamilySearch. It's all one collaborative family tree, with the goal of having one -- and only one -- profile for every deceased person who has ever lived.
It follows from this basic concept that defining the scope is a non-trivial task for such a "fix my placenames" feature: who counts as your relative? How many generations up, how many generations down, how many steps sideways? The numbers can get huge very, very quickly.0 -
Adrian Bruce said: Conversely, if you wonder if the same sort of exercise could be done on PIDs centred around you - e.g. "walking the tree" looking at people so many links away from you, then so-many-plus-one, etc, I think that the idea was suggested but the walking the tree business, while also doing the detection of the missing standards, was way too expensive in time to be done online, while you were looking at bits of the tree.
I think this "help fix place names" is based round a dump of events / profiles with missing standards and there's no real connection between bits in the dump, so no need to do any navigation online, so much quicker.0 -
Adrian Bruce said: As a complete aside Juli, in the "help fix place names" task, I've been given several Bohemian names so far. I might have fixed one but the rest were so far away from the suggestions that I skipped them, saying "Juli can fix that!" Not sure if the computer heard me...0
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JimGreene said: Thanks all for using "Improve Place Names" and for your ideas and concerns. Let me explain how this came to be.
There are place names that not standardized because no one entered data into the standardized name field, or clicked on the suggested standard.The field is blank.
There are also, from prior data imported into the tree, place names that have something in the standardized name field, but it is not a standardized name.
We are not planning on doing anything with the first group, that is up to the community and the family and extended family to correct. It would be nice if there was a program like "Improve Place Names" that could identify those and put them into a nice batch program for you to work on. I will suggest that, but it can't happen soon, as it would be a new project and we have quite the list of projects to do still. The second group we worked on to automate turning the non-standard name into a standard. Our automated sweep of the tree took care of the vast majority of those that fell into the second problem. However, after all of our mass efforts to fix things, there were still a large number that will either take human knowledge to fix, or will have to wait until we have better artificial intelligence built into the program:). Rather than wait we came up with this "Improve Place Names" app. Thank you all for participating with it, and I hope that we can get your idea onto a list and out the door before AI takes over.0 -
W David Samuelsen said: Plenty of problems with Improve Place Names.
Germany, France, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Norway, other non-English places.
50 percent WRONG suggestions, and refuse to recognize correct place names. I had to skip to kill those ones where not possible.
Bratsberg, Strinda, Sør-Trøndelag, Norge
(it is correct)
Strinda Prestegjeld, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway
(utterly wrong!)
it does exist!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bratsbe...
and secondly, cease and desist being English Centric! I am tired of having to wipe out the English spellings and replace with local spellings in line with the Catalog and the local researchers.
Swedish researchers are very very irritable when it come to how their places are spelled. Ditto for the Germans.0 -
JimGreene said: What language do you have as your browser or mobile device default. Set it to the correct language and then look at the names. Please let me know if that fixes the issue. Also, the purpose of Improve Place Names is to get something better than gibberish, which is what is in there now. If all you can select accurately is the country name, that is completely acceptable and better than what is there. That is all we are asking for with Improve Place names, an improvement. A start.0
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W David Samuelsen said: Loros, Iii-Region, Chile
Atacama, Chile is only suggestion - wrong!
Los Loros, Tierra Amarilla, Atacama, Chile is correct, and the program won't accept it.0 -
JimGreene said: David, please understand this Improve Place Names app is there to improve what exists, we are not asking you to provide the complete place name. Once we have the high level name we can hint on it and provide other ways for eventually getting it right. For now Atacama, Chile would be a great improvement and it is all we want. it is only a partial name, but it is improved over what is there.0
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W David Samuelsen said: failed! still wrong place names. Why? it meant constant changing language settings because 10 names, not all are one country, might as well look at Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Poland, USA, France, USA, Mexico and Chile then next 10 will be different countries all over again in no particular order.0
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W David Samuelsen said: NO!, worse, you are degrading the local villages! Reduced to "county" or "district" level is NOT acceptable.0
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Juli said: David: ???
Enter the country in the same language your page is set to. (I suggest English.) If a user looks at it with his page set to a different language, he will see the country name in that language.
The idea is to associate the computer-unparsable text in the placename field with a correct location in the places database. How that location is labeled exactly is not actually relevant, as long as it's pointing at the right point on the globe.
Sometimes, there's no way to figure out what exactly the placename text is trying to say. "Washington township, PA": there are 22 of those. The best you can do with it is to set the standard to "Pennsylvania, USA".0 -
David Newton said: What you are complaining about is deficiencies in the standard place database. That has nothing to do with this process except that you may not be able to complete the process due to lack of data. Given the sheer size of the task they have the standard places database has come a long way.0
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Tom Huber said: Nothing has been degraded.
The system still works as it did before. If no standard was available, then the closest geographical standard is avaiable.
I ran into this with the birth for Pieter Claesen 9312-XFX
He born, as close as the circumstantial evidence provides at Wykhof, Nordingen, Aurich, Holy Roman Empire. The only standard is Holy Roman Empire.
While the location is in what is not Northern Germany, it was the site of the 30 years war between the Roman Catholics and Protestants. At the time of Pieter's birth, the war was ongoing, so it was still part of the empire, though not recognized as such by the Protestants of the time.
The only problem is that the map timeline is not exactly relevant to the exact location. I've run into that with County Names being the best the system could come up with, but not having an exact address can create that problem in rural locations.0 -
Gordon Collett said: I haven't seen anyone comment yet on the changes in the Improve Place Names Task. You can can now specify the country you want to work in:
And they have made it obvious that if the place name is so off that the none of the computer suggested standards are correct, you can type in a standard to set it properly:
See, they do listen to us!0
This discussion has been closed.