Problem with Place Name Entry

Gordon Collett

You may or may not have noticed but some posts over in Suggest an Idea show that there are some very strong feelings as to whether United Kingdom should ever be added to the place name for places in the United Kingdom. I have no opinion to take in that discussion.

However, in poking around, I find that there is still a problem entering certain place names such as London:

This is still missing the option of preserving user entered text. Try as I might, I could not find any way to do what you usually can, that is, enter the free-from place name however is needed or desired and link it to the correct standard.

Here, if people are entering London for a person who lived after 1801, people are forced to either include United Kingdom even if they feel that is incorrect or to pick the standard with the wrong time span. Having the wrong historical time span will be a problem if FamilySearch ever starts using that time span in some type of error checking.

Things do work properly if one is entering a place name within London.

Paul W

Gordon has explained this problem perfectly well, but I thought I'd add a screenshot showing the difference in using the old version. As can be seen, "London, England" can be selected as the displayed version of the placename, but with the advantage of it being standardized as "London, England, United Kingdom". As Gordon suggests, standardizing as "London, England" (not an option in this example when using the new version) might well cause problems if a future algorithm differentiated between the "correct" standards for London, pre and post 1801.

lyleblunttoronto1

There's something about matching a standard exactly that is not giving the right options shown below. Even with the option it still standardizes. I'll see if we can do better. Thanks