Changing Unk to Unknown on LNAB for this profile

Question

On 27 Nov 2020 Nathan Kennedy wrote on Unk-1402:

Victoria is correct, can one of the two profile managers please make this correction?

Neither profile managers have changed this LNAB from "Unk" to "Unknown," nor have there been any comments in response to the request.  Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Sorry for the delay in responding. I had to verify with the Team that the extra redirect is appropriate. Please see the long response. 

Changing the LNAB from Unk to Unknown is appropriate if no other sources can be found for Catherine. I have asked for help from England Project members who might be aware of good sources for Yorkshire. Depending on the response, I will get her name updated within the week.

Answer 2

Victoria, although we want profiles for which we don't know the LNAB to be shown as Unknown, there are, unfortunately, many variants of that on a lot of profiles here.  Changing an LNAB is technically (to the computer, that is) the same as doing a merge and that is an activity we need to keep to a minimum because every time a merge is done, there has to be a "redirect" established in a database table so that if there are any links to the profile that no longer exists, it will automatically go to the profile that results from the merge.

I believe that the Unknowns project made the decision not to change LNABs from things like Unk to Unknown because of this - the hope is that someday, there will be a name change to a real name when it is discovered and it is better to have one fewer redirect going on behind the scenes.

If you edit your question and add:   unknowns   to the tags, it will draw the attention of project members, who can either confirm or correct what I have written here, since I am not any kind of authority on this.

Comments

Thanks, Gaile...the last I heard, the unknowns project was wanting these corrected.  But that was about 6-8 months ago, and maybe it has changed.  I have added the "unknowns" tag, so maybe we'll get some more info.

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Gaile, I'm going to remove the star from your answer. Unknowns project members do still actively look for sources and, when they can't be found, change unknown variations to Unknown. The reasons are laid out in this post. The Team feels the extra redirect is worth the benefits gained.