Place name is in the right form, however interface says it is "non-standardized"

JuanZuluaga3

I've been going thru a volume of Catholic baptism records, fixing names, interpersonal relationships and dates that the indexers missed.

The interface keeps showing that the assigned place is non-standardized.

"Place
Guacarí, Valle del Cauca, Colombia

⚠️ Non-standardized place"

However, the place name is in the right form; there is no difference that I can see between it and the right one. The í accent is right. Perhaps a tab or an end-of-line character?

Could the team in charge please take a look and see what is going with the "Guacarí, Valle del Cauca, Colombia" string in those records?

(Why am I reporting it? it seems that fixing the non-standardized place also fixes some other problems with dates, and the database backend seems to digest them better. Could I do it by hand? yes, but the volume is 595 pages, with 5-6 record each, so 595 x 5.5 = ~ 3300 records, and this can be happening to other volumes and collections.)

(San Juan Bautista Baptism Records Jul 1, 1828–Dec 30, 1853, in San Juan Bautista, Guacarí, Valle del Cauca, Colombia records," images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9VH-PLBS?view=explore : Sep 14, 2024), image 9 of 595; Archivo Diocesano de Buga (Colombia).

Thank you!

Gordon Collett

I went to the images you referenced and wandered through them and did find a few that when I clicked on the place name it showed that the name had not been linked to its standard version for some reason when the image set underwent post-indexing processing and installed so users could access it. Probably just a minor glitch in that process. I tried standardizing these and it worked just fine.

The reason some of these show "Non-standardized place" is that place names in most areas of FamilySearch come in two varieties: free-form text entry and standard Places Database selections. These may look identical but they are two different creatures. For a place name to be standardized the free-form text either has to be linked to or replaced by the Places Database version. Having both a free-form text and a standard allows entry of a place name that is more accurate or more complete than the standard version.

In this index you can see the various ways this works. The place names appear under various entries as one of these three versions:

The free-form text version has not been linked to its standardized version. It is not standardized.

• Guacarí, Valle del Cauca, Colombia (in text box)
• Non-standardized place name (below text box)

The free-form text version has been linked to the standard. it is standardized.

• Guacarí, Valle del Cauca, Colombia (in text box)
• 📍 Guacarí, Valle del Cauca, Colombia (below text box)

The free-form text has been replaced by its standardized version. It is standardized.

• 📍 Guacarí, Valle del Cauca, Colombia (in text box)

I assume that at this point these non-standardized versions need to be fixed one at a time as you are doing. Since the free-form text and the standard are the same, cleaning up the second version above to match the third version is fine since you are not losing any data. If there were additional place names in front of Guacarí that there is no standard for, you should leave it as it stands like the second version so you do not lose that additional place information.

JuanZuluaga3

Thank you Gordon, this helps me to understand what is going on. Hopefully the linking glitch can be corrected for future batches.