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The following is an interesting development from FamilySearch. They are going to automatically standardize 25 million of the 172 million dates and places missing a standard on the FamilySearch Family Tree. Here is the official announcement from the FamilySearch blog article, "FamilySearch Updates Enhance your Experience."
A system-wide update will standardize many dates and locations in the FamilySearch Family Tree. In the View Details section, these changes will appear with the contributor listed as “FamilySearch” and the date change starting on May 30, 2019. This will occur for vital and couple relationship conclusions only and will not trigger users’ Watch Ancestor notifications.
This update will help users by removing the data problem “Missing Standardized Date,” and “Missing Standardized Location”, saving the user time. It will also assist the site in providing more accurate record hints and creating more reliable data. Standardized dates will help you find ancestors more easily when you search the entire site.
This update will be applied to 15 percent of the dates and locations that are currently missing a standardized value. We will make the update only in cases where the standardized value very closely matches the value being replaced.
I would be less than happy about this. I select the standardized placenames, but I have two important overrides. The namebase has Lynn in Box Elder County, but it is in Weber County. Lynn is the ward and neighborhood west of Five Points on Second Street and was formerly known as Bingham Fort. My other override is in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong Province. I preserve the 19th jurisdictions. The namebase would replace this with post-1949 placename jurisdictions.
ReplyDeleteI understand your concern. We still need to correct even the standard dates and places when that is necessary and appropriate.
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