Could typo in the place name suggestions please be fixed.

Question

In the place name suggestions list the country Australia is appearing incorrectly as Austraalia (doubled a) in many, if not all, suggestions within Australia.

Could this please be corrected?

Answer 1

The name suggestions list comes from Family Search unfortunately.

Answer 2

If you search for one of the Austraalia places here: https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/
there should be some way to give feedback.

You'll have to look around a bit to find it, I think they changed the look of the site since I got something corrected.

Comments

I checked FamilySearch before I posted here. Can't find an erroneous entry.

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I took it for granted that you meant the dropdown menu with suggestions for placenames when you edit profiles.

But perhaps you were talking about the DB_errors lists of suggestions?

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The drop-down suggestion list has Australia misspelled as Austraalia. The suggestion list has new errors each week either because people have selected a placename without noticing the typo or they have thought they had to select from the drop-down list. I have checked the FamilySearch placenames list. Australia is not misspelled. So why is it misspelled in WikiTree's drop-down list? Someone responsible for behind-the-scenes technical support should look into this.

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Yes, now I was able to replicate this bug in the dropdown (pretend editing without saving). A bit tricky, because the darn thing wants to give me "Australien" because I'm on a Swedish IP number.

My guess is that WikiTree does not tap into the FamilySearch dynamically. The question is how often the location database is re-imported (or whatever the update is called).

Adding the tag SYSOPS may get the right attention.

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Sysops tag added. Thanks for the suggestion.

Answer 3

I checked FamilySearch. If it was an error there, it has been corrected but is still an error here. Where do I report or what tag can I add here to have someone technical take a look behind the scenes.

Answer 4

I think this might be a multi-language issue. As far as I can tell, the name for Australia in Estonian is Austraalia, and Estonian is one of the languages supported by the FamilySearch list of place names. That probably makes it impossible to remove from the list, just as Italy and the Netherlands appear in the list even though they are not the correct spelling of the country names in Italian and Dutch.

Comments

I can see that. Probably can't remove the double-a spelling altogether. But why is the double-a spelling being presented in the drop-down selection list to users who work primarily in English? I'm an example. It's in my drop-down list and I work in English primarily on U.S. and Canadian records. I should be presented with Australia, not Austraalia.

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Good clue there. I went back and found the records where I had updated the birth or death location based on a suggestions report. The language selected on each of the profiles is Estonian even though the person lived their life in Australia and the biography is written in English. The profile language selection is driving the spelling presented. Okay. I can see where that is as intended from a specific design idea. But I just got a headache thinking about migrant ancestors and at what point to change the language of the placenames.

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That's interesting. So it's not really an error in the location name database - just a weird way of using the available language options. I don't think you can really stop people from doing that, other than by pointing it out to them in a friendly way that they are causing an error.

I should perhaps say that I normally have the autosuggested locations turned off - for Sweden they are not good enough; too many items where the parish is left out, and the parish is crucial for finding Swedish records.

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Oh, and of course Estonian is right after English in the dropdown menu for languages, so it's easy to just drag the mouse one step too far.

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It should actually not be necessary to choose English in the language menu if you are in an English-speaking country.

If I turn on the autosuggestion for locations, the system consistently gives me "Amerikas Förenta Stater" for locations in America. I specifically looked up an orphaned American profile to test on (it was not harmed in the procedure) - so it's not the profile creator's location or the birth locatioon of the profile that governs it. It's where I'm sitting while editing.