New volenteer reviewing of placenames.

LegacyUser

Willie Breet said: New volenteer reviewing of placenames. It will be better if one can chose the country to help with the reviewing.

Thanks
Willie

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the Get Satisfaction community-powered support forum for FamilySearch. We users all share an active interest in using FamilySearch and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues and/or questions.

Your message involves the Authorities and Standards FamilySearch teams. They welcome your feedback and help 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

Gordon Collett said: Wonderful idea!

It would be great if there was a setting to specify where in world one was comfortable adding missing place standards.

For example, I went ahead just now to see what I would get and of the ten place names presented, six of them I just had to skip because I have no idea what the standard value should be.

For example:



I don't know anything about Finnish geography and have no idea which of the top three choices is the best one to add.



Here I think I should probably add the third choice and hope that it plots properly on the map, assuming there is only one Franconia, Germany and it is the same Franconia that was in Bavaria, but I really don't know.

I'd be concerned that with this first iteration of this really great idea for getting rid of red exclamation points, either people will quickly get discouraged because they can only add a standard to only a couple of the ten places they are presented with or will get overenthusiastic and add the first choice in the list to everything they are presented with and end up adding a whole bunch of incorrect standard values to the Family Tree database.

If I could click that I only want to see place names from Norway, where I have done lots of research over the years, I would be more than willing to put in some time to actually go to the person's detail page, look at all the information about them, pull out my maps, figure out what is meant by the existing place name, and add the proper standard just for the fun of learning more about Norwegian geography and history. I'm just not going to do that for, for example, Finland (sorry, Heidi).

However, I'm sure the intent is for this to be something people pull out when they have an extra five minutes and just quickly scan through. So maybe there should be a message on the instruction screen such as "Please only add standards you are very confident are correct. You may only be able add one or two of the following place names. That is fine. Even that will improve the database."

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Over in the Familysearch Community (available via the Help menu in the top right hand area of these windows), there is a group named "FamilySearch Places" which is fairly active. Although you may get a response to your suggestion here, it might be worth it to also post this suggestion in the FamilySearch Places group

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: While I'd love to be able to work on standard place-names for the UK (I could fix my own requests!) I am very much afraid that, without proper instructions, I'd go off-piste and start entering names that did not comply with the previous spirit of the place-names for the UK.

For instance, I'd fix the fact that we have 4 different places called "Nantwich, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom" by adding the type in as part of the name - thus "Nantwich reg. district, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom", "Nantwich PLU, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom" and "Nantwich Hundred, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom", all of which would be clearly separate from "Nantwich, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom".

What effect would this have on data already in FSFT? I have absolutely no idea, which is why I regard my previous paragraph as the mad ramblings of a potentially power-crazed lunatic!

Forgive the flippancy but I'm trying to make a point. The idea has a lot of merit but would work well only if the instructions are well-documented - and either agreed by the place-name editors or enforced in software. I'd need to be convinced that the instructions are there...

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: This new feature of volunteer reviewing of place names has nothing to do with fixing place names. It is only attaching standards to to entries in Family Tree where the standard is missing. It doesn't change standards that are already attached and it doesn't change the displayed data.

Yesterday it also became available on the web version of Family Tree through one of the banner adds on the home page when signed in:



which takes you here:
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/imp...

On to the question you asked, I have noticed that when the place name standard database is updated or new standards happen, nothing happens to the standard value attached to the displayed data in Family Tree until a user in Family Tree goes in and tries to change the existing standard. Then only the new choices for standards appear in the drop down menu.

I think one improvement that really should be made, is that the type of place and time period a standard is should show when you open the editing box. Right now, the only place that appears is in the drop down menu when entering the place. I also wish it would appear on the timeline map just as it does on the Places map. (I'll show what I mean in a bit, don't have time right now.)

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Had a couple more minutes after all:

Family Tree timeline map:



Places database map:



Also, I think it would be wonderful if on the timeline map or even on the detail page itself that the place names would be links that would take you to the Places database. FamilySearch is trying to get a lot of information in that database but it is really hard to find and I don't think enough people even know about it.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Aaargh - sorry, Gordon,

I didn't know about that new facility so re-interpreted the suggestion in terms of what I knew about - improving the standard place-names "database". Or maybe I did know about that new facility and didn't see the point of it so concluded I was misreading it and re-interpreted it in terms of what I knew about.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: 1. I totally agree with your "one improvement that really should be made".

2. As for the usefulness of this new volunteer facility, I have a comment and a suggestion.

The comment is that I can imagine people making snide comments about "He only wants his name on things" if I did do an update (because my name would appear as making a change - wouldn't it?).

The suggestion is that the list of profiles to check be optionally driven from what's on my Watch List. They should be people and places I know about.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Gods, yes, this feature desperately needs a way to select a country or region. I went through something on the order of thirty batches (!) and got a grand total of TWO that I felt I knew enough about to do something. Count 'em, TWO out of THREE HUNDRED.

Now, granted, it's a chicken-and-egg problem: if it just says "Boh.", then the computer hasn't a clue what to make of that, and obviously there *isn't* a country or region that it can file it under. But there's gotta be a way to look at other conclusions on the same profile and/or conclusions around the same time on the profile's immediate relatives to determine at least a *likely* country/region.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Often there will be a list of "Other Life Events" that can help. Also, although it is not very obvious, you can right click on the person's name at the top of the page to open the person's detail page in Family Tree and learn more about them.

But I agree. I've only done this a few times, but have never been able to add more than half of the missing standards of the ten offered.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Adrian's comments got me thinking about how this looks from the Family Tree side.

Starting here:



I right click on the man's name to jump to him in Family Tree where I see this:



Opening the edit box I see:



Going back to the Improve the Place Name page, I add the standard:



I found that you do have to finish off the series of ten place names, whether by fixing or skipping and clicking Done before seeing anything in Family Tree. But then returning to Family Tree, I now see:



The only visible difference here is that the red exclamation point is gone.

Turning on Detail View reveals this:



Both on the detail page and in the Change Log, only Volunteer Project is shown as making the edit, not us as individuals.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Thanks for that Gordon - this is one of those times when a "team id" is more appropriate than a specific user-name, so I don't have a problem with "Volunteer Project".

LegacyUser

Bosch said: I was thinking exactly the same. I feel able to correct places in Spain or Andorra, but not places at the other side of the World. The problem, I suppose is that without standardization they can not know if the place is at that country or not, but most of the times they could have an idea with just the last words after the coma, that use to be the country.

It would also help if in the same way that we can track record hints that are close related to us in "Recommended tasks" (web) or "Tasks" (phone), we could track data problems and one of the problems was the non standardization of a place. It would be more efficient to correct this errors, I think.

LegacyUser

Heidi Kuosmanen said: It's ok Gordon. I totally agree with you.
About that Finnish places, none of those are correct standards, first one is closest, but still wrong, second and third are way off.
When I tried that new program, all 10 places where from USA and I did not have any clue of them, and did not do anything. I would really love to get place names from Finland because I know what to do and what is correct. (And then if there are no suitable standard place names, I can create the correct ones)

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Yes, this is a duplicate of my other post so people that have posted to this topic but not the other and who get e-mail notifications of new replies will see it.

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!