Re: META: how-to ruin a perfectly good FGS
- From: Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 09:28:03 -0700 (PDT)
JYoung6180@xxxxxxx wrote:
I just did a global search on ancestry, and there are over 4.8
*million* surnames "Unknown" in the Ancestry/Rootsweb trees.
Which just proves that there are a lot of Newbie and uninformed
GEDCOM submitters out there.
I went to worldconnect.rootsweb.com (which is the same data) and its
search engine is friendlier to special characters. It lists the
same 4.8 million "Unknown", 15000 "-----", 75000 with any string
starting with "---", and 87000 with "[--?--] and 88000 with any
string starting with "[--". "Unknown" wins, hands-down.
Just because there are a lot of uninformed submitters out there
doesn't make them right.
But it does make them the norm. And most people would consider that
anything done 95% of the time is in fact the standard. Just as
Windows is the defacto "standard" operating system for most PCs
despite a large number of experts who say that Microsoft does
everything wrong.
That's a lot of votes-by-usage against the "standard" being all that
"standard". Indeed, it comes darn close to suggesting that "Unknown"
is the much-preferred standard, even though neither you nor I prefer
it.
Not at all--it just implies that more people who don't know how to
properly show a surname list "Unknown" which often results in other
uninformed users searching for the SURNAME "Unk" or "Unknown."
Who says that they are "wrong"? You? Your organization? People
who aren't in your organization don't much care.
That's not good.
It's reality. I suggest finding ways to live with it.
Preferred by WHOM? By professionals and writers of a certain
in-crowd that I never aspire to join (and I suspect most others
don't either).
Fine, I've stated before that if you were ONLY writing for your OWN
benefit and don't care if anyone else understands what you
write--then it doesn't matter much if you conform to any standard.
That was NOT what you said in your initial reply to me. Your
initial comment came across as unqualified ridicule.
And since my suggestion was intended for someone trying to solve the
problem of disambiguating names in their own database that was
causing THEM confusion and interfering with their own research, some
sort of publication standard should not even be relevant, especially
since more than 98% of the world ignores that "standard".
I use the format that >I< want to see in a report, which is one
conveying as much information as possible, and which makes my work
easier while I am doing it, by putting the information I need where
I can see it when searching and comparing names.
Again, if you are merely writing for yourself and no one
else--that's fine. But you say you also share with a few friends and
relatives--so let's just imagine your surprise when one of them
submits the data in the format you have displayed the names to some
master database and the entire world has to attempt to figure out
what you meant.
And that was the primary thrust of my original suggestion - to solve
someone's problem with organizing their own data for their own
research, when faced with a long list of people with surname unknown
and the same first name.
I actually have sent my data to others, but only as a private
interchange. Not one person has shown the least bit of confusion as
to what I mean.
Incidentally, I've been doing some work in 18th and 19th century
Quebec baptism records this week and have found it not at all
uncommon for them to use precisely the same method I suggested to
disambiguate locally common names. Thus I frequently see godparents
and witnesses referred to as, for example, (translating from the
French) "Marie Gagnier, spouse of Joseph Cardinal". Widows and
widowers are both normally referred to using their name, and the
disambiguator "widower of [firstname] [lastname], generally instead
of giving their parents names as is most common in a first marriage,
or birth/death of a child.
(And I've NEVER seen "[--?--]" in any baptism or marriage or burial
record, but somehow haven't had a lot of problem figuring out what
was intended, even though I don't even know more than a few words of
French, and was entirely unfamiliar with the style of those records
a couple months ago.)
Bob LeChevalier
Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@xxxxxxxxxx>
.
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