Identifying a Place, not a Government Entity

The place field is used to identify a Place Page. That is all. It is not used to provide the political name of the place. The software only uses the place to provide a graph of where events happen. So the goal is to use the place name that will map to the closest location possible. (To see the mapping functionality, in the more menu on the left side choose Pedigree Map. Then choose one of the place options. (This functionality appears to not be working at the present time.)

The Place page will have information and links to information that describe the history of the place name. It should not be replicated on every page, since then if the information needs changing, it requires changing in multiple places. By keeping such general information on the Place page, there is only one place that needs to be changed when the history needs changing or augmenting.

So, yes, we all know the United States did not exist as an entity until sometime between 1776 and 1783, depending on what event you may choose to mark the emergence of a universal agreement of what the name meant. But that does not rule out using United States in place names before 1776.

WeRelate provides a "pipe" mechanism to provide alternate labels for the place name. This should be used sparingly for several reasons:

1) It makes the data too long to fit in the visible area on most people's screens, effectively hiding errors. For example, a long name like "Chelmsford, Middlesex, Massachusetts, United States|Chelmsford, England", only shows "Chelmsford, Middlesex, Massachusetts, United States|Chelmsfo" when the page is put into edit mode unless one specifically scrolls the field past the visible part (example based on my default screen, being subject to various preferences that may vary from user to user). Besides not being visible in edit mode, the error is not obvious in display mode, since the left half is valid, so the right half is not flagged as red, but appears to be a normal link, despite linking to the wrong Place page.

2) It impedes the auto-matching of place names, making it easy to enter errors since no checking is done. For example, "Kingston, Surrey, Jamaica" will display a matching name in the drop-down menu, verifying you have matched an actual place page, but "Kingston, Surrey, Jamaica|Kingston, Surrey, Jamaica" will not.

3) It is nearly impossible to figure out historically accurate names (i.e.,names in the period when no colonial charters were in force, or taking into account shifting county and state borders, etc., etc.) so using it for that function has been, based on the people that have tried to put this into practice, almost always, incorrectly done. The use of historical names is dependent on some associated date field, which means that changing a date (such as changing an estimated marriage date because an earlier child was discovered) could very well require a different place name, which is too hard for most people to do correctly. As an example recently, for an event on 16 May 1684, someone tried to change Dedham, Norfolk, Massachusetts, United States to Dedham, Norfolk, Massachusetts. In 1684 there no Massachusetts there was a Massachusetts Bay Colony (although its charter was revoked a month later on 16 Jun 1684 and in 1686 it became part of the Dominion of New England and then in 1691 the Province of Massachusetts Bay was created), and Dedham was in Suffolk county not Norfolk county (which wasn't created until 1793).

4) It masquerades the Place naming conventions of WeRelate, making it harder for people to learn and understand them.

5) Location is a fact that needs to be supported by sources. As with all information taken from sources, the source should be cited and its contents communicated, in a source citation, but that information may not be universally agreed on. Use of the universal WeRelate name (i.e., the Place page name) is then sufficient because it is supplemented by source citations which give further details.

The only essential use of the pipe mechanism is to capture incomplete input and show the data that was used to generate automatically-generate place names. For example, if the input is Salem, MA, and the system generates a link to Salem, Essex, Massachusetts, United States. Once a human editor verifies that the automatic matching was correct, they usually delete the incomplete entry to show that the place match appears correct. So the use of the pipe mechanism appears as an unchecked page to many users.

Other reasonable uses may be to add qualifiers for the location (i.e, possibly, probably) or to provide more information that is not obvious from the 4-level place name. However, all the additional uses can, and often should, be alternately accomplished with a source citation (i.e., a source describing that the homestead was in the part of a town now called something else), or the description field (though the description field can be ambiguous in whether it describes the information presented in the date or the location field, or both - i.e., does "probably" in the description field mean the date is not certain, or that the location is not certain, or neither is certain).

See also Template:Googlemap, used for example, on Person:Thomas Roberts (11).