Is it truly productive to flag omissions of umlauts as a data error?

Question

I received an error report for the marriage of Kimmich-28 and Kühner-20, indicating a spelling error in the marriage location. The location was listed as Altdorf, Nurtingen, Wurttemberg, Germany. Elsewhere in these profiles the location was given as Altdorf, Nürtingen, Württemberg, Germany. I assume that the spelling error was the omission of the umlaut in Württemberg, and I corrected both Nürtingen and Württemberg.

The spelling Wurttemberg is not correct. However, considering that the source cited for several locations in the profile was familysearch, and the familysearch index records (no images available)  do not include umlauts (for example, in one record, this placename is given as "Altdorf (OA Nurtingen), Wurttemberg, Germany"), I am not convinced that it's productive to flag the omission of the umlaut as an error. As I understand it, the omission doesn't inhibit the ability of most search algorithms to find the record, but nagging contributors about the omission of the umlaut is likely to frustrate people who thought they were "doing the right thing" by relying on a record to generate their information.

Comments

Umlaut or not does make a difference, for instance for Google searches (not for big and well known cities but for smaller towns). I have come across a lot of such searches where no umlaut produces no result but the umlaut does.

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Agree someone asking for Maklinta when it should be Måklinta takes 5 sec more to understand what they are talking about...

Spent 10 minutes checking in on a hotel in SF and then we find out that my surname Sälgö was spelled Saelgoe.... I get nuts of missing umlauts...

Answer 1

Ellen, error was shown due to ending #burg instead of #berg. Umlaut is not reported as an error, but it was right thing to correct it. 

Comments

Ah, now I see that! Thanks for explaining.

Answer 2

It's productive and correct!!

And please flag missing umlaut as an error if possible

That Family Search can't spell is not an excuse....  doing Genealogy in a World Wide Family tree is a challenge and one is to learn the name of the locations and spell it correctly....

I hope we all do genealogy with the ambition to write things as correct as possible. Not using umlaut or as we in Sweden use åäöÅÄÖ is totally crazy...

My surname is Sälgö not Salgo not Saelgoe its Sälgö

Worked in the 80:s for Digital Equipment and a girl in the US asked me do you use åäö often. My answer was just 40% of my family name

Comments

In addition, it can send you on a wild goose chase for records in a completely false direction: If your ancestors are born in Krähwinkel and do a Google search for it you'll get in the German Wikipedia

Orte und Ortsteile:

• Krähwinkel (heute Grünwinkel), Stadtteil von Karlsruhe
• Krähwinkel (Leichlingen), Ortschaft in Leichlingen
• Krähwinkel, von 1939 bis 1945 Name des Ortes Wronzcyn in Polen

If you search for Krahwinkel you'll get

Krahwinkel steht für

• Krahwinkel (Lohmar), Ortsteil von Lohmar
• Krahwinkel (Ruppichteroth), Ortsteil der Gemeinde Ruppichteroth
• Krahwinkel (Overath), Ortsteil der Stadt Overath
• Krahwinkel (Waldbröl), Ortsteil von Waldbröl

completely different lists and no hit at all in the English Wikipedia.

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@Helmut and that is the arguments for just having a text field for location is not a good solution

Best would be if we in WikiTree used the same location model as Wikidata using objects e.g.

Wronczyn_(Pobiedziska) is Wikidata item Q604106

and then on that object you add properties like

• coordinates 52°30'22"N, 17°12'41"E
• country Poland
• located in the administrative territorial entity Gmina Pobiedziska
• GeoNames ID 3081359

you can also without problem add different names etc.... but it's still the same place..... if administrative borders change you get a problem but then you have to say nearly same as ....and you start link to other places saying that our location Q604106 is the same as location yyy at site zzz

Step 1 I think is to understand that we have a problem....