Excess commas

Question

would it be ossible for double commas autoomatically to be made single?

Comments

The typo of double commas I can understand! Perhaps we might concentrate more effort on capitalization and the use of spell-check.

Answer 1

Where do you mean?

Most likely, the answer is no. Any automatic edits are complicated on a wiki where you have users doing edits.

Chris

Comments

Place names.
All over.
Worth asking the techies?

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Regarding place names, it's likely that at some point we'll undertake a project to "normalize" these. Even though we want to preserve the variety of names -- to match the place names people themselves would have known -- we can still find a way to make them match certain standards. But that won't be very soon.

Answer 2

While I agree it is annoying I think it would be a bad idea to automate their removal.

I suspect the reason you see so many double or triple commas, particularty in locations, is because of Gedcom imports. Many Gedcoms have commas in the location to demark place holders, for example you might see "Miilford, , ,United States" because the source did not specify which of the 20 states that have a town of Milford it was.

Similarly there is a difference between " , Sussex , , United States" and " Sussex , , , United States", the former could be Sussex Co., in Delaware, Virginia, or New Jersey, while the latter could be Sussex, Sussex Co., New Jersey or Sussex, Waukesha Co., Wiconsin. In this case automatically getting rid of the extra commas would make more confusion since it could be any of the 5 places.

Comments

By the way - I am intimately familiar with this problem; when I was first starting out I used a bulk editor for my records to get rid of the double and triple commas that came in my gedcoms then realized I had no way to tell if Grey, Ontario was Grey township or Grey County and if an event happened in the town or the county of of New Haven, Connecticut.

The ideal solution is that people explicitly use Twp., Co. or the appropriate designation.

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No. Sussex is in England, Europe

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Sir William,

Yes there was a Sussex County in England, United Kingdom, until 1974 when it was divided into East Sussex and West Sussex; and prior to the county was the Kingdom of Sussex; There is also a town named Sussex, in Kings County, New Brunswick, Canada. They were the Sussexes (not sure that there is a correct plural for Sussex) that my examples excluded, as United States was specified.

This does illustrate another example of the commas in action - " , , Sussex" would indicate an unknown location in the Kingdom of Sussex (from about 477 to 825 C.E.)

But, perhaps I should have chosen a different place name; to play on a quote from Bill Gates, Sussex is a lousy teacher.