In reply to my posting Marie wrote:
> jr wrote " I honestly don't know why Legacy is set up to change people's
> data by default."
>
> John, I think I'd be a prime example of why. I tend to be inconsistent,
so
> one day I'll type in the full month, the next I won't. One day I'll type
> people's last name in all caps, the next I won't. What's worse, I can't
> necessarily remember which way I last typed it and then I'll do it
> differently. Legacy changes it for my feeble benefit, however, there are
> those of you whose minds work well and make a priority of remembering what
> you want and then you can change to 'don't change what I type'. Maybe
> there are far more of us who don't recall than those of you who do so the
> default covers the majority.
Marie, thanks for what you wrote. I realize that having the option of
allowing Legacy go through and fix things is a good feature of the program
for
all the reasons you state. We all forget things from time to time.
However, it seems to me that this is not a matter of how the majority of
the users use the program. It's a matter of doing solid scientific
research.
I think that when one is recording information and citing a source of that
information, one should record EXACTLY what the source says, as near
as one can make it out. (I understand that some documents are nearly
unreadable.) So for example one source may say that a person was
born in "New York, New York", another may say of the same
person that he was born in "New York City, New York", while a
third may say "Brooklyn, New York". To compress these three
down to one standard place is just wrong IMO because no matter
which one of the three is picked the other two will NOT be EXACTLY
what was in the source.
Future users of the database will be led to the conclusion that three
sources all said the same thing, when in fact they did not. The three
sources all gave slightly different locations, which most reasonable
people would conclude are different names for the same place.
But that's just this one example. Other examples could be given
which are less clear. Is "Calais" Calais, France or Calais Maine?
I've had this discussion before and I recognize that I've opened
a can of worms here and many will disagree with me. Nevertheless
I do feel strongly about what many people see as small point, but it is
an important point to me.
Thus in my opinion, the default behavior of the program should be
to leave people's data as they type it in. If users want to change
that behavior for whatever reasons, they are welcome to do so.
There is a way to have both things. One is to do as I suggested
and record each place exactly as shown in the source. Then
make another event as an alternate, or even as the "main" event of
that type. This additional event can be left unsourced or can be
given the source of "Author's Analysis", and in the master record
for that source you/me the user can put an explanation about how
this is what the author has concluded after analyzing the available
data from the various sources. Note, however that if this is done,
then using the automatic-fix-names-features of the program become
even more problematic.
jr
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