People being placed incorrectly in placename categories

Question

While working on profile for the USBH 1880 census project, I noticed that there were people that were placed incorrectly in the wrong placename category. I was working on White County, Georgia and found people who lived in White County, Georgia listed under the category White, Georgia.  White, Georgia is a city in Bartow County, and has nothing to do with White County. I am not sure why Georgia had to make things so difficult, but I see this error all the time, especially on FamilySearch since they just use the county name but don't say whether it is a county or city. Their placename standardization has made it even more of a mess.  Georgia has lots of cities that are not in the county with the same name. I know this since I am from Georgia and do lots of research on people who lived in the state, and it is a big area of interest for me. If you use AutoBio and don't use the word county in a place of birth or death, you have the chance of the person being placed incorrectly in the city category, when they should be in the county category.

I am going through the category for the city of White, Georgia, and it looks like a lot of the profiles have been placed there incorrectly, and should be in White County, instead.

Answer 1

Amen Kristin, and I would add that if you do not include the word 'County' when it's necessary to avoid an ambiguity, you will often find that the Google map link after the place name on the profile takes the reader to the wrong place.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, autobio is also picking these up from the census records that don't have the word County in the place names. I'm seeing that more often than incorrectly written birth location fields. Very frustrating! Thanks for fixing the Georgia ones. I have no idea how to prevent this except reminding people to actually look at what autobio adds to a profile before accepting the info. I also remove automatically added One Name Study stickers. Not all ONS are created equal and if I'm not working on one, I'm not adding the sticker.

Answer 3

Happens regularly in all sorts of categories. All we can do is leave messages about any disambiguation in the location category, which has been done quite often. Thanks for working on the mis-placed profiles, Kristin. That's not always the most fun part of WikiTree-ing, but it's necessary. 

Answer 4

I added a note at the top of the spreadsheet for the USBH 1880 census project that will hopefully help with any being incorrectly categorized from that. That won't help with any incorrect ones from other sources, though. Hopefully people will eventually get in the habit of checking the things that auto-bio is adding!

Answer 5

The problem is that the names of locations are not unique in the various subdivisions of countries. It isn't restricted to any particular state or country and profiles can even be miscategorized into completely different country category hierarchies sometimes. Blame our ancestors who didn't come up with unique names for the locations they named.

This can happen both manually and using Auto Bio or any other tools. The only solution is to ask people to confirm the categories placed in the profiles are correct before saving or check right afterwards.

Comments

Couldn't Auto Bio have a list of ambiguous locations, collected from nominations people would make, and refrain from adding categories in those cases?

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This is not just an AutoBio created problem. I see plenty of categories that are added to profiles from people doing it manually. They see something that is similar on other profiles and add the categories or they manually type the category or they use the category picker or so forth.

Then you have the fact that people used the same names in the same state, provide, country etc so that adds complexity.

Then when you add sources not being clear what location they are referring to and there becomes so many variables that one solution wouldn't fix all the opportunities that people are using.

The final problem is that people do not always check the category is what they think it is for. An example of this is the Conductors category is for musical conductors but I discovered that about half the profiles that were in there were for Railroad Conductors and had to be moved to the correct category.

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Just because there are other errors is not a reason not to implement a fix to Auto Bio.

Answer 6

This goes on with every state.  I was grumbling to a friend about it yesterday in another state.  

Happens with countries too.  A lot of people just put Georgia.  Well Georgia by itself is also a country.

I keep hoping with the improvements to come this year that WikiTree will get away from the family search names and make their own database of names including the counties, at least in the United States.

Thank you for doing what you can to correct these.  I am another Georgia girl and know how frustrating this can be.