Place talk:Guggisberg, Switzerland

Guggisberg's full location

If I search for places alphabetically, I find Guggisberg properly located in the Canton of Bern in Switzerland. But if I search from the top down, Guggisberg is not one of the inhabited places listed in the Canton of Bern on its page. How come?--Hh219 11:58, 14 April 2007 (MDT)

The place pages were, for the most part automatically generated. The system to info from several sources and compiled the pages. Probably the glitch came from the source material that had the info going only one direction. We have several volunteers cleaning up the place pages. If you see a glitch like this, please correct it. You can correct any page by selecting the edit button and typing in the proper data. When you see the edit screen you will see all the formating commands. Just make your edit conform. If you have any problems, please leave a message.--sq 21:08, 14 April 2007 (MDT)

I just looked in Place:Canton of Bern, Switzerland, and I see Guggisberg listed under "Inhabited places". It looks like you just changed it to an "Inhabited place" from "Unknown". Thank you. A large number of places (like Guggisberg) came from the Family History Library Catalog, which doesn't include a "type", so all of those places are listed under "Unknown" type. Hopefully people will enter their correct types (e.g., Inhabited place, district, county) over time.

Contrary to what Solveig says, if you ever find a place A that says it's located in place B, but place B doesn't include place A in its list of contained place, please let me know. That can only be caused by a bug in the software - all places are supposed to be doubly-linked automatically.--Dallan 12:37, 16 April 2007 (MDT)

More on places, especially Switzerland

You're welcome. I thought I'd try to do some similar tidying up in the Canton of Bern and came across some other issues of possible interest:

(1) There are 17 districts omitted from the list of districts within Canton Bern, according to the listing at Swiss Genealogy on the Internet. I don't know how to add them as "included places" to Switzerland or if that's a legal act. Not sure how critical this is; we're not using them in designations and I didn't deal with them much when digging for relatives in individual parish records there. (I think I did have occasion to use districts when I was looking for an ancestor in the Swiss census of 1837, though.)

If you wouldn't mind adding them, I would appreciate it. I'd like the place index to be more comprehensive. To add a new place, click on the "Research" tab, then on the "Places" link. Enter the title of the place you want to create under "View or add a place page" and click on "Add new page". Enter the information about the place and save the page. When you set the "located in" field to "Canton of Bern, Switzerland", the place will automatically show up as a contained place of Bern when you save the page.--Dallan 23:57, 16 April 2007 (MDT)

Can do, although it may take a few days! --Hh219 06:09, 17 April 2007 (MDT)

No rush; thanks!--Dallan 20:40, 17 April 2007 (MDT)

(2) Some inhabited places (Albligen, for instance) in the canton are properly designated as being in "Canton of Bern, Switzerland" but do not show up that way in the headings or on the list. Others are both properly designated and so listed. I suppose that's another cleanup issue, and I suppose that "Albligen, Canton of Bern, Switzerland" is how all headers should read for such places, for the same general reason that we use county designations in the US. But I don't know how to fix that either.

Don't worry about correcting the place titles. At some point over the Summer I'm going to rename all of the place titles for international places to include the full jurisdiction hierarchy (just like we've done already for US places). So Place:Albligen, Switzerland will become Place:Albligen, Canton of Bern, Switzerland.--Dallan 23:57, 16 April 2007 (MDT)

(3) I have a more general problem with sources. I use The Master Genealogist for my own database, and it distinguishes beween the "source" (such as a book) and the "citation detail" (such as the page number). When inputting individual people into werelate, there's a box for page number, which is OK when the citation detail is a page number. But elsewhere I seem unable to indicate the distinction. My source for the alternate name of another Bernese hamlet, Affolten im Emmental, was Swiss Genealogy on the Internet. When I made the source page for that website I used the URL for its main page. But it's actually a pain in the wazoo to navigate from the main page to the listing of places within each district in Canton Bern! (Site's not real transparent.) The only way I was able to indicate the specific URL for Affolten im Emmental, without having it wind up as the URL for the entire source, was to put it in the text section where research helps are supposed to be. I'm cool with that, but I wonder how this important distinction plays out in other inputting situations. (Maybe this is part of a larger later source discussion.) --Hh219 15:04, 16 April 2007 (MDT)

I didn't know that about TMG. The gedcom standard has a field in the source citation for "page number" and another for the text from the source. We're trying to follow the standard as much as possible so that when we get gedcom export working, the exported gedcoms will work well with most genealogy programs. I suppose the best thing to do is to put the specific URL in the citation text as you've done. Alternatively, you could add a Note to the citation and put the URL in there. Entering http://www..... in the text will display the URL as a link.--Dallan 23:57, 16 April 2007 (MDT)