New suggestion proposal: Invalid Location Abbreviation: NL

Question

Use of the abbreviation NL as last word in locations is ambiguous: used for both country Nederland and Canadian province Newfoundland and Labrador.  Please see this Wikitree+ report. Abbreviations in location names should be avoided anyway according to the Location Field Style Guide.

Currently all NL's are interpreted as Nederland, for the purpose of determining country in WikiTree+ reports, suggestion reports, etc. So Newfoundland and Labrador profiles end up as locations in the Netherlands.

I propose a suggestion be implemented marking locations ending "NL" invalid.

Comments

add Ales as a tag since he creates the Suggestions and created the Locations table, which designates what is valid or invalid.

Currently the table has Netherlands as NLD. NL and NLD as an abbreviation are listed under the Netherlands group, but they are both designated as No  for 'Accepted Spelling' column and should be 'Ignored for Spelling'

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Good proposal, Jan. More generally, could any location ending in a word consisting of two (or three) capital letters be marked as invalid in a suggestion, since abbreviations are to be avoided?

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@Linda,

Yes, I know the country table. AFAIK the atrribute values of 'Accepted Spelling' and 'Ignored for Spelling' are not part of suggestion assignment. Also, maintenance of the country table is out of scope for the Netherlands project.

 Furthermore, no explanation of attributes in the table is provided.

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@Jim,

Yes, could be implemented but would probably result in a tsunami of suggestions. I proposed this one because NL is ambiguous. Where abbreviations are nonambiguous, or qualified by a country name (like NL, Canada) it would be not that important to fix.

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How many instances of NL are there in WikiTree?

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You may want to include NH (New Hampshire vs Noord Holland) and UT (Utah and Utrecht), both of which I saw this week. Both abbreviations in this case are considered the United States so are excluded from searches for Dutch profiles)

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@Ellen, the Query that Jan included in her question is looking for NL in the Location fields and returns over 2800 profiles.  Searching within the results for Canada found 8 profiles, for Newfoundland found 9 and Labrador found 2.

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NL is one of those shorthand entries that genealogy software has a record of auto-completing badly. At one there were bunches of profiles for 17th-century people with Dutch names and locations like Gelderland, Newfoundland and Labrador. I recall doing some research to determine whether there had ever been Dutch trading posts in Newfoundland and Labrador that might have had names like these, but I satisfied myself that these entries were due to software autocompletions.

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@Linda,

"the Query that Jan included in her his question is looking for NL as the last word in the Location fields and returns over 2800 profiles.  Searching within the results for Canada found 8 profiles, for Newfoundland found 9 and Labrador found 2."

Searching in the resultset for strings like "bay" or "cove" or "st." gives dozens of hits.

So if you suggest that the problem on the Canadian side is limited to less than 20 profiles, that is incorrect.

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@W,

Yes, thank you!

Not to mention NB as Dutch province Noord-Brabant and Canadian province New Brunswick and New Jersey city New Brunswick...

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@Jan, Ellen asked, how many instances were there. I was answering that statement. I don't know what to look for to distinguish them. Looking for Canada found a few entries that could probably be changed easily.

There are a lot of abbreviations used on wikitree, just as there are locations entered without the country because some people know what they are, but others don't, nor does a computer system.

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According to the table https://wikitree.sdms.si/function/WTShowTable/Table.htm?table=Countries&filter=NLD

there are 4885 locations ending with NL and 1760 with NLD ending.

I have a plan to add all not accepted spellings as a suggestion. 

I already did that in suggestions, that a user can enable.

460 Profile completeness - Birth Location Country not correct
466 Profile completeness - Death Location Country not correct

Another attempt to correct those was 

616 Birth Location Country not official
646 Death Location Country not official
676 Marriage Location Country not official

that checks orphan profiles. But since that generates too many of them it still didn't got released.

Maybe approach where we do that just for a few abbreviations would be the best and we can add them as users want.

Jan, if you are interested in field meanings, I can explain them (I already did a few over time), but they can be complicated. "Ignore for spelling" means that this spelling will not be used for 608 suggestion.

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Thank you, Aleš

• there are 4885 locations ending with NL and 1760 with NLD ending. The best query I could come up with was "Location Find And Replace" with "Find" NL, with resultset of 2805. Difference in 4885 counting multiple per profile (birth, marriage(s), death) and 2805 counting max 1 per profile?
• Changing the column header in the table from "Location" to "Location ending in..." would be clearer, I think.
• I have a plan to add all not accepted spellings as a suggestion. Would be nice to have EditBot do the unconditional corrections. Like Extending Dutch locations ending in province name with countryname "Nederland". So Friesland ==> Friesland, Nederland.
• BTW, I miss province Groningen in the table. Query "Find" gives 2112 resultset.
• That the numbers in the table are for "locations ending in" makes them clear, so I don't need further explanation, thank you!

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It is hard to change the title, since I use the database field names for the titles. I would need to change the system to have custom titles.

EditBOT will not change any location fields, since it can't. I also don't want it to, since all complaints about false changes will be directed to me. Changes should be done by a human.

Groningen is here. 

Netherlands, Groningen	0	0	272		NL
Groningen	3341	-13	no		no

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Aleš,

I understand. But in general it would be unfair to you being the object of complaints. Complaints should be addressed at the product owner (like the Netherlands project) that requested the EditBot operation.

Thanks for adding Groningen!

Answer 1

I prepared the suggestion for this. For now I added NL and NLD to be included. it is defined by setting Accepted spelling to Error. https://wikitree.sdms.si/function/WTShowTable/Table.htm?table=Countries&filter=NLD

Suggestions suggestions on 20210207	Total	0000-0000	0001-1499	1500-1699	1700-1799	1800-1899	1900-1999	2000-9999	Open
617 Birth Location Country not allowed	3302	32	23	426	1012	1574	235		3202
647 Death Location Country not allowed	2199	85	10	191	816	930	167		2137
677 Marriage Location Country not allowed	1198	31		89	376	638	64		1183

For other locations to include to this suggestion Suggest it in GG. I would prefer to add them when there is intention by the project to correct them. Otherwise they will be there for years.

Comments

Thank you, Aleš!

Answer 2

To answer Jim's question (Comment above) of any other Letter groups that can be used for more than one location - yes I have one...

SOM = I have seen this used for Somerset (county in England) and also for Somalia (the country).

I do think that some designation needs to made

Comments

Unfortunately, there are plenty of others. CA is Canada or California. WA is Western Australia or Washington (the U.S. state). DE shows up as Delaware or Deutschland.

The only real solution is to quit using these kinds of abbreviations.

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I have been hunting quite a few of these...  and not always receiving pleasant responses from (sorry, mainly:) USA based members.

It would be great to get rid of all abbreviated locations all together. It will help a lot as well to raise the global awareness, making users think bigger than their own local state.

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@All

In my proposal the focus is on resolving wrong country designations.

And of course I agree that the use of abbreviations should be abolished. But fixing the currently recorded ones would probably mean correcting millions of profiles. Maybe some low hanging fruit can be harvested by EditBot, but that would require in depth research first.

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To avoid further spread a Business Rule (at create/edit time) could be implemented that requires locations to end in a complete country name.

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I am sorry you have gotten rude responses, Michel. I have corrected many of these over the last several years but have rarely had any response (positive or negative)

Now that marriage locations are included in wikitree+ searches, many more have just come to light.

Jan, I would support an ambiguous abbreviation suggestion. Ales can hopefully create such a list from what is mentioned above and what other members identify.

I think UK and US and USA are currently specifically allowed and should remain that way, if there is going to be a check on the last element of a location name. I say last element because too often the country is missing.

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W,

Agreed, but only if it is certain UK, US and USA are nonambiguous.

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US is no longer acceptable.

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What an area is called before 'it became a country' is the next area that you are then opening up discussion about. There has been discussions with Ales and others about how to check the United States / USA 'states' before July 1776 when it became a country. There are suggestions for those already but what is then being entered is the next 'problem' that is being caused.

The easy solution isn't just checking for a country, when the area has different names before it became a country.

Answer 3

The Location Fields help page says, in part, "Use the full place name for counties, states, provinces, départements, etc. Examples: Rhode Island, not RI; New Brunswick, not NB; Hampshire, not Hants; Seine-et-Marne, not S-M."

I personally believe that location fields should also be completed out to the country name, so ending a location with "NL" when the location is in Newfoundland and Labrador would be incorrect, not just because it's using an abbreviation for the province, but also because it doesn't include the name of the country. (Before Newfoundland joined Confederation, it was called the Dominion of Newfoundland, so even pre-1949, "NL" would be wrong.)

Comments

Krek, Greg!

Krek is Dutch for exactly, precisely, accurate.