Standardized places.
When clicking on Edit in vital records, is not a date or place standardized if there is a green check mark below the date or place as well as Standardized date or place written next to the green check mark? I thought that when we saw that information that things were standardized and nothing further was necessary. However, I have been told that the date and place must be accompanied with either the calendar or the map pinpoint. Which is the correct procedure. I will appreciate any input.
Best Answers
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Rayleen,
When a date is standardized a little calendar icon does appear in front of the date and a little map pinpoint icon does appear in front of the place. The icons and the green check are just there to indicate that the information is standardized. There is nothing more you need to do.
This article tells you everything you need to know about how to enter standardized dates and places in Family Tree. There are also links to additional articles at the bottom.
We hope this answers your question.
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That Help Center article needs a rewrite. Note that the instructions actually do describe getting those little icons in the date and place text entry fields. See under mobile app, Step 2:
As you enter the name or date, the system displays the available standards.
(The interface here does not allow quoting and bullet list.) The instructions continue:
- Tap the correct standard. You may need to scroll through a list of place standards to find the right one.
- If no applicable standard is available, go to the bottom of the standards list, and tap None of the above.
- To keep what you entered and have the system select an applicable standard, tap away from the standards list.
I find it best to check the details of the available standards. I have been unpleasantly surprised too often. Also, hints and maps work much better when I select the correct standard. So, if I am going to check I may as well tap the correct standard or None of the above.
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@Dale Linda Hein, you're mistaken: absense of a map pin or calendar icon does NOT indicate lack of standardization.
If there's no red exclamation mark, then the date or place has been standardized.
The pin/calendar icons simply indicate that the displayed value for that field exactly matches the standardized value.
It is not necessary for the display and standard to match! The display can be much more detailed, for example giving a district name or number (useful in large cities like Budapest and Vienna), or a farm name, or even a street address (although I would argue for entering that level of detail a different way).
Another situation where display and standard may not match is when something was entered using a different interface language setting. For example, if someone has the interface set to Hungarian and types "Szarvas, Békés, Magyarország" as an event place, it will be marked with a map pin, since that's exactly the standard name of the place in that language. However, when I look at it with the interface set to English, I do not see a map pin: the standardized name in English is "Szarvas, Békés, Hungary", which does not exactly match the displayed value. The data is still standardized, to exactly the same entity in the database, but it does not show the map pin.
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There is a huge amount of confusion among Family Tree users regarding the meaning of Standardization in Family Tree. It has a somewhat unique meaning. @Julia Szent-Györgyi is completely correct. If the green check mark is there, the date or place is standardized and you do not need to do any thing more than to make sure that the correct standard is applied. However, you may want to do more to improve how a place name displays.
Both of theses place names are standardized:
Only the first is standardized correctly, of course, and we do have to be on the look out for those types of errors. One quick way to double check all places on a person quickly, as Julia stated, is to look at the Time Line map and see if any dots are way out of line. I think a geography error check would be a great idea as long as it was dismissable.
The search, find, hint, and all other routine in Family Tree that make use of the place name strictly use the place name with the map pin and completely ignores the displayed place name so everything works just fine as long as the correct standard is there. This allows you to have the displayed name with be whatever you need it to be for completeness and accuracy in describing events in your families' lives.
A couple of years ago I put together a presentation about standardization because of this ongoing confusion and misunderstanding of standardization. If you would like, you can view it here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jl6M8efrGj6Xe3MP6oyYdfFMXPSPCoJuyrS5xXj7KN8/edit?usp=sharing
Fortunately, for the places I many research, I find that the systems pick of the appropriate standard is just what it should be. I think that people sometimes run into trouble when attaching indexed records because there are some collections where the event place in the entire index had the wrong standard name applied. Recently a whole batch of records for Åkre parish in Skånevik, Hordaland, Norway got the standard of Åkre cemetery in Kvinnherad parish, in Kvinnherad, Hordaland, Norway applied to them so when attached, the place name comes over incorrectly.
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Answers
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Thank you, I appreciate your quick feedback. I assumed that if there is a green check mark, as well as the words Standardized Date or place, I would not have to do more. Which I am reading that this is the case, however, I do appreciate the fact if I am checking, I may as well find the closest place name that may conjure up Record Hints. I was led to believe that I have to go through all of my ancestors and make to make the calendar and Pin Point appear even when many sources have already been added. This would make for too much trivial work when there were more important things to do. I do believe that if I receive data Problem warning, that I do need to Standardize. Thanks again for all of your comments. Happy Researching!
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This week I worked on some persons born in "Ind" meaning Indiana, United States. Green check mark, okay, but the "Ind" was standardized to India.
If I "have the system select an applicable standard", and the menu of standards gets longer and longer over time, what applicable standard will it select in future? If I leave "Ind" on these PIDs, won't the incorrect selection propagate?
Already I find search results on Family Tree barely usable unless dates and places have been actively selected on the PIDs. Sometimes my search results are so off-target that I spend hours "clearing the decks" by editing PIDs that met my search criteria only because dates and places were not explicitly standardized.
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@dontiknowyou, it's not that those entries were "not explicitly standardized". They were: a label for a specific location/date in the database was chosen and associated with the displayed value. Once it has been made, the system will not change this association. Neither will the presence or absence of an icon (which, as I pointed out above, can change with user interface choices).
Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair: the person entering the data was not paying sufficient attention, or did not understand what he/she was seeing, or some combination. The reason for the PEBKAC error may be some combination of bad interface design, lack of education, or lack of adequate documentation.
I'm not sure what you mean by "won't the incorrect selection propagate". The string-matching algorithm that pulls up the suggested standardized values is not a machine-learning process; people's choices make no difference to it. (It puts the same multilingual monstrosity at the top no matter how many times I choose the good version from lower down the list.)
Maybe what we need is some sort of geography/date checker that flags large discrepancies, such as India in a family that's otherwise in the U.S., or the 9th century on a 19th century profile. These errors stand out on the Timeline tab, but I think people don't check that very often (if they even realize it's there). It could be presented as a research suggestion: "This person has locations on two or more continents or dates in non-consecutive centuries. Consider looking at the person's Time Line to verify the data."
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The acronym I am more familiar with is PICNIC: problem in chair, not in computer.
First, to @Julia Szent-Györgyi : You continue to insinuate / imply / state I am mistaken in what I report observing. Are you watching over my shoulder? No? Then please stay in your lane and mind your own PICNIC.
Returning to the topic of discussion.
I think most contributors deal with place names more during tree construction than after the fact, so examination of the timeline on a PID isn't all that useful.
To attach a record we must first find it. Finding records for, say, Indiana that the system assigns to India is a challenge and may not be feasible except when the person's name is rare. I am struck by how often the system selects a standard that is not appropriate. "Ind" to India not Indiana is just one case among many. Inappropriate standards selected by the system are so frequent that I very often resort to searching globally.
Here we enter the zone of suggestions to escalate to engineers:
- Make the standard place name guessing system more stringent, using a red flag ! more often.
- Make more use of contextual information given by the collection. When a record is in a collection of Indiana, USA state records then "Ind" most likely is Indiana, United States not India.
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@dontiknowyou, please try not to find offense where none was intended.
Once again, I think we're talking at cross purposes, about different things.
I think you're talking about index entries and the dates and places associated with them by various automated processes.
The rest of us are talking about Family Tree and the user-input dates and places in it.
Both systems use the same databases of dates and places, but there all similarity ends. When an indexing post-processing step puts "Kenya" in where the indexers clearly meant "Kentucky", that's a metadata error that should be reported to FS somewhere somehow (but I don't know where or how). It cannot be fixed by interface tweaks or education.
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Thank you all, I have learned so much. I believe that for the most part, I need to look for the Red Data Problem marks, as well as peruse through the information to see if a better standardized place, especially, could be chosen instead. All of the comments have answered my questions and helped me so much, as well as the power point presentation was great. Thank you again.
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