FamilySearch - Please take care when working on standardization of place names
This matter has been raised previously (on the GetSat forum) but continues to give me work that should be quite unnecessary. It appears a (fairly) recent exercise to improve the database of standard place names backfired quite badly. The negative result was that many perfectly acceptable, existing place name lost their standard status, resulting in users having to "re-standardize" them to exactly the same format.
I have previously provided "proof" that FamilySearch programming has caused this - rather than it being my carelessness in not standardizing the name properly at the time. I just came across another example, where I had already corrected a place name (to make it a standard one), so have amended my reason statement from "Standardized place" to "Standardized place - again".
I would politely request the engineers / programmers / developers to take great care when undertaking future exercises in relation to this subject, so that the valuable time of users is not wasted still further.
Comments
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Paul
I, totally agree; and, wholeheartedly support your request.
Such an ABSOLUTE, Waste of Valuable, TIME ...
It was obviously an Update/Release that went HORRIBLY "Wrong".
In fact, an Update/Release that should have been / should be REVERTED.
So that, ALL the RECORDS that were affected are RETURNED to there ORIGINAL state.
Including that of the ORIGINAL, 'Date'; and, 'User/Patron'.
It will NEVER happen ...
But, we can live in hope ...
Brett
Forever the Pessimistic Optimist
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Yea, you think that you have everything documented correctly and then FS comes in and breaks it. I've been having to fix these silly errors as well. Totally nuisance and waste of time!
I haven't checked though. When FS changes anything associated with standard values, it should show up in the "recent changes to following list" as well as the change history logs for those persons. It should also show up in the "last edited by" as FamilySearch and include a reason why they destroyed a perfectly good standard place assignment.
I assume that is broken as well and there is no historic record of when FS changed the standard name assignments on those records. Can you verify that?
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Jeff
This is an interesting extract from the change log. FamilySearch has been accredited for comments I made about the 1871 census and "Volunteer Project" is also listed as a contributor. However, the "key" item is the change made by "FamilySearch" on May 5, 2020. Again, this could have been me making the change (as I had originally added this event March 22, 2014). I was looking at some incorrect changes another user made yesterday and found this needed to be standardized again.
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So the change history MIGHT have caught it, but you can't really tell because the Change history doesn't really show you exactly what changed.
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