WeRelate talk:Place review

Please ask clarifying questions on this page.

Thanks!--Dallan 16:36, 11 October 2007 (EDT)

Several random comments from Tom [21 November 2007]

I've got a few questions. If I'm understanding correctly, the "placelist" and "placehighlight" pages enumerate all of the places, and each line is of the form "proposed new name <= current name". So unless we make changes, the names on the left side of the <= are the ones that we'll end up with, come the big auto-renaming on Oct 27, right? And what we really need to focus on now is not the name, so much as getting the "located in" containment relationships right, yes?

You're right that the "placelist" and "placehighlight" pages list places in the form "proposed new name <= current name". Unless we make changes, the "proposed new name"'s are the one's we'll end up with. The "placelist" pages enumerate all places in a country, but the "placehighlight" pages generally show only a small subset of the pages -- pages that either

• high-up in the place hierarchy for the country and so are likely to contain a lot of other places, which means that their names will be repeated in the titles of a lot of other place pages during the renaming, or
• have "suspicious" jurisdictional hierarchies (e.g., a state inside of a district, or a place inside of a city); these are cases where the located-in field on one of the pages in the hierarchy is likely to be wrong.

It would be helpful to focus on two things:

• The new place name, which is the title of the place page up to the first comma (and removing any "type" words at the end). This is most important for places that are high-up in the place hierarchy and so contain a lot of other places. (We're ignoring the preferred name because in general, the title of the place page up to the first comma appears to be "better" than the preferred name when they differ.) The new title of the place page will start with this name.
• The located-in field. This is most important for the places listed in the "placehighlight" pages that are either high up in the place hierarchy or are listed under "suspicious" jurisdictional paths. The new title of the located-in page will be used as the rest of the title of this place page during the renaming.

So during the renaming, the new title of a place will become the name of the place (text of the title up to the first comma and removing any "type" words at the end), followed by a comma, followed by the new title of its located-in place.--Dallan 13:44, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

On your list of place type words to be stripped out of the name, you should probably include "Parish" as well. Are you also going to look for "City of X" forms, i.e. prefix as well as suffix? Just to make it harder, in Scotland, we've been putting all parish names as "X (parish)", so maybe you'll need to look for parenthetic forms too. In some cases, the parenthetical types were necessary for disambiguation, although that may cease to be an issue if all names are going to be fully qualified. Actually, what would obviate the reason we were putting "(parish)" in all our names is making a change to the auto-complete drop-down menus of place names. If those menus included the place type, as well as the place name, that would accomplish our purpose. That way, at a glance in the menu, you could see whether you were getting the parish or the town with the same name. (Had you thought about changing the drop-downs as part of this upcoming change? Currently, they show the actual name of the place, and then underneath, they show the fully-qualified name of the place based on the containment hierarchy. After the change, this would be redundant, wouldn't it?)

Regarding parish, most of the 50-or-so place page titles that currently end in Parish are located on a few small islands in the Caribbean. I'll defer to anyone who works on those islands whether we should keep Parish in the names or not. In general though, if adding the place type to the title is necessary for disambiguation even after adding all of the levels, the renaming will do just as you have done -- add the type in parentheses after the name. You and User:Sendelbach have both been adding (parish) or (former parish) to place titles (in Scotland and Sweden respectively). I can remove them or not; your preference.--Dallan 13:44, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

Regarding prefix forms, I'll take a look and see how many there are. I just checked "City of" and there were only 30 and most of them seemed ok. But I'll check the other forms as well.--Dallan 13:44, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

Regarding the drop-down, that's a great idea. I had been planning to use the second line to display the "redirected-to" page when the place was a redirect to another page, but when the place isn't a redirect I could easily display the place's type in the second line.--Dallan 13:44, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

On a related note, I've noticed that User:Sendelbach has been adding (province) to a number of places. I hadn't been planning to remove parenthesized words like (province) from names, but if the change to the drop-down means that you'd prefer not to have (province) as part of the place's name (and the titles of all of its contained places), just let me know and I can remove it.--Dallan 13:44, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

My feeling is that if we got the place-type shown on the drop-down, then we no longer have need to include it in the name. Especially as under the new regime, the name of a containing place will be imposed as is onto the contained places, I think we would not like to end up with place names looking like "Birse (inhabited place), Birse (parish), Aberdeenshire (county), Scotland". Sendelbach should speak up for Sweden and "(province)", but my feeling for Scotland is that we should strip the "(parish)" off of the name for the same reason as we're stripping the other place-type terms from names. --TomChatt 02:14, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

On the format of the place pages, I just noticed it now, but it appears that when the layouts were changed (e.g., when the place attributes moved from the right-hand side column to the left-hand side column), there was also a change in the way the "contained places" are presented. Unless my memory is playing tricks, I thought that the contained places used to be broken out by "type" of place, but now they appear to be all lumped together in one long alphabetical list. I think the previous organization, broken out by type, was more useful, especially when lists are long. And especially when you have multiple overlapping containment hierarchies (e.g., civil, ecclesiastical, historical, etc). My example is of course Scotland, where the contained places include "traditional counties", "synods", and "unitary authorities" (three different systems for dividing up the country). It'd be much nicer to see those contained places in three separate lists rather than one big one.

I changed this about the same time because someone said that they'd rather see the contained places listed alphabetically. How about if I include the type in parentheses after each place's name in the list? Would that help, or should I put it back the way it was?--Dallan 13:44, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

The way it was (organized by type) makes more sense to me, but I suppose it depends how consistent people are being with the types. At the country level, I think you're likely to have multiple ways of subdividing the country (e.g., civil, ecclesiastical, military, etc) and in that case it's definitely useful to keep them separate. On the Scotland page, for instance, I'd much rather see counties listed separately from synods, and from unitary authorities, etc. When you get to the county or parish level though (i.e. whatever is the first order container above towns), the categorization could be distracting if the pages aren't consistently typed. For example, some people like to make distinctions between a "town", "village", or "hamlet", and that may result in one having to scan several different lists to find a place. But I think in general, one would use the search function (especially after it's improved!) to find places, and the lists of contained places would serve more to give an orderly view over a containing place. Thus, I'd say the categorized view will be more useful, especially once we get our place pages better organized. --TomChatt 02:14, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

Once we get this place renaming completed, I'll see if I can add a javascript function so people can change the ordering dynamically :-)--Dallan 11:43, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

--TomChatt 02:57, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

Am very impressed. This ought to make things more easier for those of us who are computer illerate! Thanks.--StevenLewis 12:09, 21 November 2007 (EST)

Omitting Type Words [19 October 2007]

I just need some verification that "county" is a type word that is to be omitted from the title, but only if it comes at the end of the word. For example, the word "county" in County Antrim, Ireland would not be omitted, correct? --Ronni 17:11, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

Ronni, I think that the Irish "County X" is the same as the American "X County". That's just the way they say it: County Kerry, County Cork, County Mayo, etc. I would omit it. If everything is "town, county, Ireland", eg., "Belfast, Antrim, Northern Ireland", it should be clear that Antrim is the county without having to spell it out. That's my $.02. --TomChatt 00:55, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

That makes sense Tom. Almost every place name in Ireland though has the "County X" format, so the word "county" is going to be deleted automatically when Dallan does his thing? It's not something I need to change manually? --Ronni 02:22, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

Ok, I added a number of new words and phrases to the list of type words to be omitted. We'll now omit for example "County" and "County of" at the beginning, and "County" and "(county)" at the end.

Hmm, I've got another curve ball. I noticed you added some of the ecclesiastical terms "Synod of", "Presbytery of" to your list of terms to be stripped. Actually in Scotland at least, I'd like to keep those. My reasoning is that these represent an alternative place hierarchy. Thus, when you're looking at a specific place name, you'd see "town, parish, county, Scotland", indicating the civil "containment chain". The synods and presbyteries would only figure in an "also contained in" path. Since it's an alternative containment, I'd like it to be clear that you're looking at an ecclesiastical system, so you should see a page like "Presbytery of Garioch, Synod of Aberdeen, Scotland". Am I splitting hairs here? :-) If this is too hard to do for the automated rename, it could always be manually revised after the big change. As usual, I've got a specifically Scottish persective. Don't know how it would apply in other countries. --TomChatt 12:25, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

I wasn't sure whether to keep "Presbytery of" or "Diocese of" either. The main reason for taking them out is once we have a few hundred of them, when you start typing "Presbytery of..." into a place field, you'll get a big list that's not very helpful. You'll have to enter at least "Presbytery of Garioch" before you probably see what you're looking for, whereas if we titled it "Garioch (presbytery), Aberdeen (diocese), Scotland" you'd probably see it in the list after entering just "Garioch". But it's easy to put them back. What do you think?--Dallan 09:30, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

Same question for "Synod of". For example: Place:Synod of Aberdeen, Scotland. Should we rename this to "Aberdeen (synod), Scotland" or leave it as is? (There three places that start "Synod of" and they're all in Scotland.)--Dallan 14:41, 17 October 2007 (EDT)

I think that synods, presbyteries, and dioceses are not things that would ever need to appear in the drop-down menu, because they're not a specific place where someone would have been born, married, etc. They're just an administrative "container" place, and they'd only ever appear as an "also contained in" for a more specific place (eg a parish). Their utility is to see the ecclesiastical hierarchy of a specific place, and may be someplace else you should look for records. So my preference would be to keep them as "Synod of X". But I could go with "X (synod)". --TomChatt 03:16, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Does anyone else have a contrary opinion? If not I'll leave them as "Presbytery/Diocese/Synod of".--Dallan 11:39, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Not having come across the "synod" and "diocese" types yet, I tend to agree with Tom that they are probably not necessary in the drop down menu. Actually, I think it would be confusing to see them there. The "also contained area" for plugging in these types of administrative divisions is my preference. As to "Synod of X" or "X (synod)" I have no opinion. --Ronni 12:44, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Ok, I'll leave "Presbytery/Diocese/Synod of" at the beginning of place titles. You'll see them back in the proposed titles starting tomorrow.--Dallan 13:44, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

I now have a goal to remove parenthetical phrases (e.g., (county) ) from the end of all place names that have contained places. With this change we're just about there; there are about 100 places with contained places that still have a parenthetical phrase at the end of their name, but I'll take care of those. Also, there are about 9,000 places that don't have contained places but do have a parenthetical phrase at the end. I can't omit those parenthetical phrases easily -- they're generally there to distinguish those places from other places with the same name (e.g., Place:Angers (commune), France and Place:Angers (arrondissement), France). But since they don't have contained places, it won't be too difficult for someone to change their name if they want to after the automated renaming.

One thing about "City of": I did some further digging into this and it's problematic. For example, Place:City of Aberdeen, Scotland, Place:City of Dundee, Scotland, Place:City of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Place:City of Glasgow, Scotland all refer to places that used to be called "City of X" by Wikipedia, but are now generally called "X City Council". These places need to be renamed by hand, and perhaps should be removed from the place hierarchy (i.e., set the located-in field of their contained places to the value of the city council's located-in field, so their contained places are now contained within their parent -- just a thought). Most of the rest of the places are in Place:England. I'm hoping that someone who's pretty familiar with England will work with me on England -- it's going to require some decisions on what to keep and what to omit from the place hierarchy.

I came across these "X City Council" types in Northern Ireland and *did* take them out of the hierarchy. I didn't delete them, but they stand alone now, located in the country, with no contained places in them. They would be used in my opinion in the "also contained in" area. Northern Ireland is one place I want to adopt to work on when the renaming gets done, so I'm hoping to tidy this area up further. --Ronni 12:44, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Thanks!--Dallan 13:44, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

I'll get Scotland's four cities sorted. They're a special case due to the way Scotland's places were governmentally reorganized in 1996. I can give the gory details to anyone who cares. But one of the odd things is the way that they up-end the usual hierarchy: typically, towns are within parishes, but the cities may contain several parishes. A similar case in the US comes to mind: New York City actually encompasses several counties.

Thanks!--Dallan 09:30, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

Don't worry if you notice that after omitting the type words, two places will be renamed to the same name. There are about 1,000 of these cases (see duplicates list). I'll be editing these place names to make sure that they end up with different names after the renaming.--Dallan 11:43, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

Leaving a "located in" field blank [14 October 2007]

What happens if we leave the "located in" field blank? I am unable to properly add the "located in" place as it now stands, but in the morning when the update occurs, I should be able to. Will it be ok to leave it blank until then? If I do leave it blank, will I be able to find this particular place on my list when the update occurs? --Ronni 12:40, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

I've found some cases where I want to go ahead and rename a container place to what I know it needs to become, so that I can properly put things "into" it. You may need to do that to head off a "collision" when the impending automatic reorg does its thing. If you can't sort it out that way, it seems like a reasonable fallback would be to make it "located in" its country. For example, if you have some village, and for some reason the counties are tangled and you can't currently sort it out, you could just make it "village, Ireland" for now, and that way it won't get lost. --TomChatt 13:38, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

I'd also suggest setting it to the country when in doubt. Then you'll still see it in the full "placelist" for that country. If you leave it blank, then it disappears from the placelist for the country and shows up on the main index (where you can see we have quite a few places without located-in fields that Solveig and I are cleaning up :-).--Dallan 09:30, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

Historical / current placenames encompassing different countries [14 October 2007]

I'm a new addition among WeRelate users, but I'd like to help in the Place Review project, at least for my areas of interest.

Place names in both areas (Silesia and Transylvania) are indexed by the various online sources in multiple countries. For instance "Dunesdorf, Austria", "Dános, Hungary" & "Daneș, Romania" are the same location. Few not familiar with that region would be aware of these redundancies.

However, the direction to place re-directs to the current placename may be problematic, as the various placenames have always been used primarily by a specific (ethnic) component of the community regardless of the national affiliation, and sources tend to be specific to that community. Comments?--Bgwiehle 16:21, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

Thank-you for joining this project! This is an interesting question. Here's what will happen if you do redirect "Dunesdorf, Austria" to "Dános, Hungary":

• Dunesdorf will show up in the drop-down list for places in person and family pages and sources, and underneath Dunesdorf the drop-down list will show that it is currently Dános.
• If you select Dunesdorf from the drop-down list, and then click on the link in your person/family/source page, you'll be taken to the place page for Dános. The place page for Dános could include a section listing sources and research tips for when Dános was known as Dunesdorf, along with sections for when Dános was known as Daneș and when Dános was known as Dános.
• If someone searches for people/sources in "Dunesdorf, Austria" they'll find people/sources in "Dános, Hungary" and vice-versa.

Here's what will happen if you don't redirect "Dunesdorf, Austria" to "Dános, Hungary":

• Dunesdorf will show up in the drop-down list for place as before, and underneath it the drop-down list will show its type (village).
• If you select Dunesdorf from the drop-down list, and then click on the link in your person/family/source page, you'll be taken to the place page for Dunesdorf. The page for Dunesdorf would list just sources and research tips for when Dunesdorf was known as Dunesdorf. You would probably want to add "See also" place links pointing to Dános and Daneș.
• If someone searches for people/sources in "Dunesdorf, Austria" they won't find people/sources for "Dános, Hungary" or vice-versa.

I don't know how important having a separate place page for Dunesdorf is vs. having search results return people/sources for the Dunesdorf area when it was known by other names in other countries, but that's what the difference would be. What do you think?--Dallan 09:30, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

Alright. Knowing that much of Europe has been affected by border and nation changes, it makes sense to organize places according to today's maps. Including headings on place pages describing sub-communities, whether religious or ethic would preserve any needed distinctions.

Would it be fair to say that everyone working on this project should be aware of past changes and leave historical locations outside current borders to the person volunteering for the current country? Is there a best way for a reviewer to identify such locations if no alternate names are yet applied? (Example someone reviewing German locations should leave Alsatian locations to the reviewer for France - how would they know that? Should they place some indicator on the page to flag that no current German location matches?)--Bgwiehle 12:56, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

I think this is an excellent suggestion. How about if we use the country talk pages (e.g., Place talk:Germany and Place talk:France) to leave notes for the people who are to review those countries, where for example someone who knew about the history of Germany and France could advise the person reviewing Germany to leave places contained within certain high-level places in Germany for the person reviewing France, and could advise the person reviewing France to include in their review places contained within certain high-level places in Germany. These talk pages could be listed next to the corresponding countries in the country list, similar to the pages we already have for Sweden and Scotland. I know for someone like me at least, this information would be very helpful.--Dallan 23:47, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

Merging and deleting [20 October 2007]

I'm running into a number of extraneous pages I'd like to delete, and also redundant place pages that need merged. On the instructions on the Place Review page, it says that when merging, if the one you decide not to keep has no contained places, we should delete it. However, don't you also need to check that no other pages LINK to it? In some cases, I've got redundant place pages where different people have created Person/Family/Source pages linking to both of them, so I don't think I should delete either one (even after I've cleaned up the containment). I figure at best, I should make the one redirect to the other one. Will the redirects get consolidated by the automated process (ie patching up the pages that link to the redirecting one?).

In the case of some pages I'd like to delete, they are very clean (no links), so I go ahead and delete those. But in other cases, there are no user-created links, but there is a small tangle of cross-referencing wikipedia templates. I hesitate to just delete those, and am not sure what to do. For the moment, what I'm doing is changing the "type" to "DELETE-ME", changing the content to "This page should be deleted", and changing the "located in" to be the top-level country. That at least gets them out of the way for now. What do you recommend? Is there a "tagged for deletion" template we could/should be using instead? ---TomChatt 02:36, 17 October 2007 (EDT)

That's a good point. It might be simplest overall if I changed the instructions so that instead of asking that the place to replace be deleted, that it (always) be redirected to the place to keep. If we redirect the place to replace instead of delete it, then after the automated renaming I can automatically delete places that redirect to places within the same country and that aren't linked-to by Person/Family pages, and I can also detangle them from the wikipedia templates.

How does this sound? Is anyone creating redirects to other places within the same country that they'd like to keep after the automated renaming?--Dallan 01:44, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

I haven't come across any redirects that I can recall that would need to be kept. --Ronni 12:44, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Not sure of the end result of deleting a redirected page. Does this remove only the editable page or does the redirect disappear as well? I've been including redirects from historical names within the country in the alternate names section but omitting naming or hierarchy errors. Note: At this time I'm redirecting at all levels within the countries and only higher level redirects (counties, provinces, regions) outside the country. The full job for all inhabited places will take a lot longer than the original timetable! --Bgwiehle 19:02, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

It just deletes the page that has the "#redirect [[Place:...]]" in it (the one that points to the target). It won't delete the target (the pointed-to page). So if you rename a page with an incorrect/historical title to the correct/current title, the question is: are you ok if the page with the incorrect title (which now points to the page with the correct title) is deleted? We'd leave the page with the correct title alone.--Dallan 13:44, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

What I asked: if I searched on the place name that was redirected (ie incorrect or superceded), would I have any search results (ie the correct page). I think now my question doesn't matter as I've been moving and blanking any specific information from pages being re-directed. Those pages are ok to delete. I've also found that some historical references didn't have the current equivalent - those I changed to the modern reference with a previous entry, instead creating a 2nd page. --Bgwiehle 19:21, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

Sorry for the earlier misunderstanding. In order for the redirect target place to be searchable under the redirected title, you'd need to add the redirected name as an alternate name for the redirect target place, and possibly the redirected located-in as a previously-located-in for the redirect target place if that changed too. Does that answer the question?--Dallan 21:49, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

Question answered. Where I've added redirects on pages, alternate information has been transferred. Pages that have just been renamed, however, may not have a reference to the original placename on the new page. A minor gap. --Bgwiehle 22:39, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

In the Algeria list there are departments (now obsolete) and provinces. In most cases, the name of the department and province have the same name. When the stuff in the parentheses gets taken out, e.g., "(department)" and "(province)", both places will have the exact same title. Will that cause a problem in redirecting? When auto-renaming happens, will one page overwrite the other? What I've been doing is transferring all info and contained places onto the province page and then deleting the department page.--Ronni 09:06, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

There are about 1000 places like this (see http://www.werelate.org/placelist/duplicates.html) located in about 20-30 countries. I figured that I would take care of them, either merge them and make one redirect to the other has you have done, or make one located inside the other if that's called for. So in general you don't need to worry about it.--Dallan 11:39, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Cool. I actually just read where you commented on this very subject a couple of days ago, so sorry for the repeat question. :) --Ronni 12:44, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Making sure I'm doing this right [17 October 2007]

I'm starting with Kenya and want to make sure I'm doing this right before I go ahead and make some changes. According to Wikipedia, Kenya is divided into 8 provinces, which are subdivided into districts and then into divisions (which seem to correspond to the inhabited places). For example, Bungoma District is in the Western Province. Shouldn't the page be Bungoma, Western, Kenya rather than just Bungoma, Kenya? Then the city of Kimilili (which is located in Bungoma) be Kimilili, Bungoma, Western, Kenya?--Ajcrow 19:06, 17 October 2007 (EDT)

If you set the located-in field of Place:Bungoma District, Kenya to Place:Western Province, Kenya, then after the automated renaming, Bungoma's title will be "Bungoma, Western, Kenya". And if you set Kimilili's located-in field to Place:Bungoma District, Kenya, then after the renaming Kimilili's title will be "Kimilili, Bungoma, Western, Kenya". The automated renaming will create the new title of the place from the words in the current title of the place before the comma (minus any "type" words to be removed), followed by the new title of the located-in place. This means that the text that follows the first comma in a place's title will be ignored during the renaming, so you don't need to worry about correcting it. So if you set the located-in field of Place:Bungoma District, Kenya to Place:Western Province, Kenya, then you could also rename Place:Bungoma District, Kenya to "Bungoma, Western, Kenya", but the automated renaming will take care of doing that so you don't have to. I hope that makes sense. I'd be happy to review the changes you make to Kenya when you're done to make sure they look good. Thank-you for helping out!--Dallan 01:44, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Removing a division that is no longer in the hierachy [18 October 2007]

I thought I would take Azerbaijan because it looked like something simple I could review while at work. The country is divided into districts (or "rayons") and then cities. But there is one division that WR has included called "Central" and it has put the majority of the rayons under it. I cannot find any reference to a Central division (except Getty) and thus do not want to include it in the hierarchy, but how do I put the cities under the rayons without including the Central division when all the rayons fall under the Central division as WR now has it? Thanks! --Ronni 03:44, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

I think what you need to do is first edit each rayon to change its "contained in" from "Central Division" to "Azerbaijan". Then you can put the cities under the proper rayon. Note that the rayon place pages may still have a name like "Foo, Central, Azerbaijan", but as long as you've got the cities contained in the right rayon, and the rayon pages contained directly in the country, all should fall into place when the auto-renaming happens on 27 Oct. --TomChatt 04:14, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Ok, I was having a mental block again! :) For some reason, I'll be going along just fine, and then will hit a snag understanding how all this is going to come together. (lol) The box list showing Foo, Central, Azerbaijan is what was throwing me off. As long as I remove all the contained places in Central, it should work out right during auto-renaming, leaving Central standing alone, which can be discarded later? Gotcha and thanks! :) --Ronni 05:19, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Yep. :-) We could even keep Central as a separate stand-alone division; as long as it's not part of the place hierarchy it might not be bad to keep it.--Dallan 11:39, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Missing level in hierarchy [19 October 2007]

Currently working on Austria. Placename hierarchy should be Nation:State:District:Municipality. However, the District level placenames had not been created for any of the approx. 2500 placenames. I've created 2 but need some direction as to whether this is a desirable task. Or even whether there is an automated way to handle this.

Yikes! How many districts are there? I'm guessing one or two hundred? I don't know the specifics of Austria, so can only offer a general opinion (informed by a lot of work in understanding other place hierarchies :-)). I would ask whether the District is significant for genealogical purposes? Are there repositories of records that are kept at that level of government? Sources that tie to Districts? Do the Districts have long historical standing or are they a relatively recent bureaucratic innovation? I'd recommend those sort of criteria for deciding whether it's worth the effort to create them all. Also, you should double-check: do you need to create new pages for the districts, or are there districts really there, but misclassified as municipalities amongst those 2500 placenames? One hint: if the district had significant records or sources associated with it, then it would appear in the place hierarchy in the Family History Library Catalog, which was one of the sources of place information used to create the place pages that we have. --TomChatt 11:14, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

I just checked all of the districts in the Place:Burgenland, Austria; the Family History Library Catalog (FHLC) lists them alongside the inhabited places in the state, and so does Getty. Sometimes the FHLC will distinguish them as districts, but sometimes not. Getty always calls them inhabited places. So I'd suggest that we not worry about trying to identify the districts right now. For Austria let's just make sure that we get the states right.

In general, I think we should always try to get the first-level (e.g., state/province) divisions for a country correct. Regarding second-level (e.g., district/county) divisions, I'd say that when there are fewer than 100 of them and when most of them already show up correctly as second-level divisions because they are listed as such in FHLC or Getty, then we should try to make sure that we have all of the second-level divisions for the country, and that each is located in the correct first-level division. (Chances are there will be a page in Wikipedia listing all of the second-level divisions and showing what first-level division each one is located in.)--Dallan 13:44, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

(Also have a found a definition labeled as a place Place:Statutarstadt, Austria - should this be an article or deleted?) --Bgwiehle 07:35, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

Oops! :-). It didn't have any contained places, and by following the "what links here" link at the bottom of the page I could see that the only pages that linked to it were other place pages and the wikipedia templates. In this case it's ok to delete, so I went ahead and deleted it.--Dallan 13:44, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

Also contained in [19 October 2007]

I'm running into a number of occasions where I'd like to have an "also contained in" list on the Place page. I seem to recall a discussion a while ago about possibly changing the "Previously contained in" section of the Place page to be an "Also contained in" instead, so I've been putting my "also contained in" entries into the "Previously contained in" box without any from/to years associated with it. Is that the right thing to do? (As an example: the parish of Kilmuir is in the county of Inverness, but it is also "in" the Isle of Skye. It's not a "previous" kind of containment, it's just an "also" containment.) --TomChatt 11:20, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

Yes. During the place title renaming we'll also rename the "previously located in" field to "also located in", and whatever values are in there will be kept. Thanks!--Dallan 13:44, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

Will do the automated renaming in a week or two [27 October 2007]

It looks like we'll miss the original date of the 27th (today) to do the renaming, so let's plan on another week or two. Thank-you for doing a great job everyone! We're almost half-way there!--Dallan 08:32, 27 October 2007 (EDT)

Historic counties in Wales [1 November 2007]

In Wales, there are about 13 "historic" or "ancient" counties that no longer serve any administrative role. From what I read at Wikipedia, and if I understand their function now, they mostly have a cultural or geographic role. Kept around for nostalgia it seems to me. Their boundaries are no longer shown on offical Wales maps. WeRelate has a few of these ancient counties in the hierarchy with probably 300-400 places listed under them (Glamorgan, Monmouthshire, for example). BTW, the ancient counties are different from Wales' other counties which are principal areas and do have an administrative role. Do I leave the historic counties in the hierarchy?--Ronni 11:52, 30 October 2007 (EDT)

Monmouthshire was a bad example, because while its an historic county, it apparently *does* serve as a principal area, which only muddies the water further for me. --Ronni 11:56, 30 October 2007 (EDT)

I just checked Glamorgan. I followed the link to the Family History Library Catalog and it looks like they have a lot of sources listed for Glamorgan, so it is an important place to keep. The Wikipedia article says that Glamorgan was abolished in 1974 and replaced by West Glamorgan, Mid Glamorgan, and South Glamorgan. So what I'd do is edit Place talk:Wales and add a line:

• in 1974, places in Place:Glamorgan, Wales moved to Place:West Glamorgan, Wales, Place:Mid Glamorgan, Wales, and Place:South Glamorgan, Wales

After the renaming we'll run an automated process to look for places with matching names in the new counties, and merge the places under Glamorgan with matching places in the new counties if we find them, adding an also-located-in field pointing back to Glamorgan. If we don't find a match, we'll just leave the place listed under Glamorgan until someone comes along and updates its county.

After writing this, I see that you've already done just that :-) --Dallan 11:16, 1 November 2007 (EDT)

Historical designations unconnected with current countries [1 November 2007]

Started on Germany - I am finding a lot of historical designations (no surprise). Those I'll label as former whatever or attach to another defunct entity, etc.

My question has to do with placenames

• predating current countries (ie Place:Rhaetia, Germany a province of the Roman Empire extending across parts of Germany and Switzerland) or
• referring to extinct countries like the German Democratic Republic Place:Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Germany or
• undefined areas such as Place:Welfische Lande, Germany.

I've been un-attaching them from the Germany hierarchy (often with an explanation left in the text section) but that may not be the preferred solution.--Bgwiehle 23:28, 30 October 2007 (EDT)

This is a tough one. If we detach them from Germany they'll be harder for people to find who are browsing the place database by country. It looks like the Family History Library Catalog lists them under Germany. Getty usually calls these types of places "Former nation/state/empire" (e.g., Place:Venetian Republic, Italy) or "Former group of nations/states/cities" (e.g., Place:Papal States, Italy). If you attach them to Germany, but list their type as one of these two types, then when we switch the display of contained places back to being grouped by type (which I am more and more convinced should be the default), then they'll at least be displayed separately from the current German states. (The explanations and wikipedia links you've been adding are really helpful.)--Dallan 11:16, 1 November 2007 (EDT)

Almost done! [10 November 2007]

It looks like the place review is almost complete. There's an interesting discussion going on at Place talk:Scotland about whether we should list places under their modern jurisdictions or their historical jurisdictions for Scotland. The jurisdictions changed significantly in 1975. This has prompted me to compare our place structure with the FHLC place structure to see how different they are for each of the European countries. I expect that we'll finish up with the review this coming week, and I'll spend a bit more time the week after comparing WeRelate with FHLC, and then we'll be ready for the renaming in about two weeks (finally)! Thank-you everyone for the terrific amount of work you've put in over the past several weeks. And if you have any thoughts on listing places current vs. historical jurisdictions for places, please leave them on Place talk:Scotland. (If there's a lot of discussion I'll move the entire thread over to this page.) And don't worry, we should be able to find an option that can be implemented automatically during the renaming and doesn't require re-review! :-).--Dallan 12:40, 10 November 2007 (EST)

Proposal for final place review [21 November 2007]

We're just about done with the place review. I'm in the process of making a final pass over 20 or so of the most-used countries to address the issues I'll bring up below. These issues can generally be automated during the renaming, so I'm not asking anyone to go back and re-review their countries, just give thoughts to what we should do.

Thank-you again for your terrific support in reviewing the place index!

--Dallan 11:28, 21 November 2007 (EST)

Titling place pages [23 November 2007]

Some countries, like Germany and those in the UK have had significant changes to their first-level administrative divisions (e.g., states or counties) during the past 100 years. The question is, when a town like Aisgill was located in the historic county of "Westmorland" up until 1974 but is now located in the modern county of "Cumbria", should we title the place page "Aisgill, Westmorland, England" with an also-located-in link to "Cumbria, England", or should we title the page "Aisgill, Cumbria, England" with an also-located-in link to "Westmorland, England"?

Here what it will affect:

• How does the town show up in the drop-down list? When someone enters "Aisgill," do they see "Aisgill, Westmorland, England" or "Aisgill, Cumbria, England"?

If for example we chose to list Aisgill under the historic county, we could conceivably create a redirect for "Aisgill, Cumbria, England" to "Aisgill, Westmorland, England" and list that redirect in the drop-down as well, so both entries for Aisgill would appear in the drop-down with the Cumbria entry indicating that it was a redirect to Westmorland, but creating the redirects probably wouldn't happen for awhile.

• How are person, family, source, and image pages that link to the town categorized? Ultimately I plan to re-do the categories to create categories at the county level for England. So all pages linking to a town in the same county would appear in the same category. We'll get the name of the category from the title of the place page. So should the category for Aisgill be "Westmorland, England" or "Cumbria, England"?
• A place would be appear as a contained place in both the "main" place it is located in -- the one appearing in its title -- as well as in the also-located-in place(s).

For practical reasons it seems that we probably have to go with historic counties instead of modern counties for England and many other countries, simply because we have a lot of places listed under historic counties for which we don't know the modern county, and relatively few places listed under modern counties for which we don't know the historic county. If we went with modern counties in the titles, then a town like Aisgill, for which we know the modern county, would be included in the modern county category, but a town just a couple of miles away for which we do not know the modern county would be included in the historic county category. It seems like this outcome would defeat the purpose of the categories, which is to list pages of people, families, sources, images, etc. that are near your page.

It seems that we should pick a date and title places according to the county/state they were in on that date. But when we have a choice of dates, which should we prefer?

For most countries I think we'll leave them the way they are. It's the European countries that seem to have undergone so many changes recently. Here are some examples:

• France: two counties around Paris (Seine and Seine-et-Oise) and another county on the island of Corsica (Corse) were split about 40 years ago, but we know both the historic and modern counties for most of places in those counties so we could go either way.
• Belgium: Brabant county was split in half recently, and we don't know where most towns in Brabant ended up, so we probably have to go with a date prior to the split.
• Denmark: lots of changes: one set of counties prior to 1970, significant county modifications in 1970, and then replacing the counties with a few larger regions in 2006. Most places are listed only under the pre-1970 counties.
• Switzerland: Jura county split off from Bern county in 1979. We have a lot of places listed under Jura, but some places that belong in Jura may still be listed under Bern. So we could go with a modern date, but it would be "safer" to go with a date before the split.
• Scotland, Wales: lots of changes in the 1970's and again in the 1990's. For most places we know only their pre-1970 county.
• England: a few counties were split in the 1880's (Yorkshire into the ridings, Sussex and Suffolk into East and West), and the county of London was created from parts of Middlesex and other counties at the same time. Several changes in the 1970's and again in the 1990's. We're in the somewhat-unfortunate position here that the FHLC uses the pre-1880 counties for Yorkshire, Sussex, and Suffolk (before the split), but they do include the County of London. The easiest thing is for us to do the same, since we don't know the modern counties for many of the places coming from the FHLC.
• Italy: two other provinces were split off from the province of Catanzaro in 1996. Most places are listed just under Catanzaro, not under either of the two new provinces.
• Ireland: split into Northern Ireland and (Republic of) Ireland in 1920. Should we title all places in Ireland as ", Ireland" and not make the modern distinction? We could go either way on this; however, in 1898 Tipperary county was split into North and South Tipperary, and we have a lot of places listed only under Tipperary County. So perhaps we should use pre-1898 as the date for Irish place titles, which would be prior to the split of Northern Ireland. In addition, Dublin County split into three counties in 1994.
• Germany: lots of changes after WWI and again after WWII. We know the pre-WWI state for most places, and we could figure out the interwar state for many places. But after WWII places in Prussian states were pretty scattered. An additional challenge with Germany is that the FHLC generally lists places in their pre-WWI state, but also lists several hundred places under Thuringia, which was created after WWI by merging 8 of the pre-WWI states. We don't know the proper pre-WWI state for most of the places listed under Thuringia, so we would have to title those places as Thuringia even if we went with pre-WWI states for the rest of the country.

Speaking for Scotland, I heartily endorse going with the historic counties (the "magic date" being 1891), as that provides the best alignment with the vast preponderance of sources, not just FHLC, but also GENUKI and others. Commenting on some specific points you raise:

• drop-down menus. If we end up with redirects to account for alternate containers due to redistricting, and if the redirects show up in the drop-down lists, I think it will be important to make it clear somehow when you're choosing between two variant names for the same place, versus when you're choosing between two actually different places. Suppose that in addition to the "Aisgill" variants you've described above to account for Westmorland being redistricted into Cumbria, that there were also an Aisgill in a different county. Is there a way to make it clear that the choice being presented is two places with two variants each, and not four different places?
• categories. Speaking specifically to Scotland (and probably also England, Ireland, and Wales), I would prefer to see the categories at the parish level. In my experience, I'm definitely interested to find someone else with family in the same parish, as our families probably crossed paths one way or another. But a county seems rather over-broad for those purposes. If I meet someone else with ancestors from Aberdeenshire, we'll have some general common interests in sources and such, but the odds of our families being connected are low based just on that. In general, maybe it makes sense for the categories to be at whatever is the smallest level of container, i.e., the thing after the first comma in the full place title. (Based on Scotland, I'd also say that the parishes probably suffered less perturbation than the counties in the various redistrictings.)

--TomChatt 01:46, 22 November 2007 (EST)

I'm also going to suggest we go with historic places vs modern. My thinking has changed on this somewhat after I saw a comment, either from Tom or one of his group helping on the Scotland pages, in that a good deal of our sources and the ancestors we are dealing with are pointing to those historic places. Someone researching a "modern" ancestor, existing in a country where boundary changes have occurred in the last 50 years or so, is probably not going to have a problem locating the place and/or finding the resources to go with that place.

The "magic date" of when to cut off the changes I suspect will be different for each country. I would like to suggest the following site just as a reference -- Statoids. While Statoids' goal is to keep current with country changes, he also gives historical data on the countries that I found very useful. Wikipedia is good, but sometimes the information is incomplete or scattered across several pages.

I also agree with Tom in that I would like to see the parish level as well, especially in England, Ireland and Wales.

England (including Wales): my preference is pre-1888 changes
Ireland: One country, pre-1920 changes

--Ronni 05:58, 22 November 2007 (EST)

I'm thinking that every entry in the drop-down list has two lines: the first line shows the title of the place, and for non-redirects the second line shows the type. For redirects, the second line would show the title of the place that it redirects to (instead of the type). So "Aisgill, Cumbria, England" would show that it redirects to "Aisgill, Westmorland, England". We wouldn't want every redirect that we created for places to show up in the drop-down list, since many redirects are just used to redirect a place page that someone has created into its "standardized" place title. So we'd have to distinguish the redirects that we wanted to show up in the drop-down list by adding a special word or template link after the "#redirect". Also, I'm hoping that we could wait to create the redirects for a few months until after match/merge was working.

We can create categories at the parish level in Scotland because you and LSnellgrove have gone to the effort to organize places down to that level. For most countries (including England, Ireland, and Wales), most places are listed directly under the first-level administrative division (the county for England, Ireland, and Wales) because that's how they were organized in Getty and FHLC. So for those countries the best we can do is create categories at that level. But after the renaming if someone were to go through a country and move places into their second-level division, then we could re-categorize everything for that country into second-level categories.

Wow, Statoids is a really nice site! I'll have to start using this as well.

--Dallan 10:35, 23 November 2007 (EST)

What to do when two places have the same name [23 November 2007]

"Aberdeenshire" is the name of both a former county and a modern "Unitary authority" in Scotland. Both the former county and the modern unitary authority are directly under Scotland. The question is: Do we

1. create two place pages for Aberdeenshire: one for the former county and one for the unitary authority, or
2. create one place page for Aberdeenshire the former county, but delete the place page for the unitary authority, or
3. create one place page for Aberdeenshire that says in the text of the page that "Aberdeenshire" is the name of both a former county and a modern unitary authority, with links to wikipedia articles for both if we have them?

Here's a possible example of the third approach: Place:Jelenia Góra County, Poland is both a county and a city in Lower Silesia, Poland. We've merged the county and city pages together.

The issue is, when someone lists "Aberdeenshire, Scotland" as a place in their GEDCOM, which Aberdeenshire should the GEDCOM uploader link to? If we have two place pages for Aberdeenshire, we have to choose one.

1. If we go with option (1) we could make the title of the modern place "Aberdeenshire (unitary authority), Scotland" and the title of the former county "Aberdeenshire, Scotland", and have the GEDCOM uploader to link to the place with the shortest title. Both Aberdeenshire's would show up in the dropdown list when someone enters "Aberdeenshire," which might be confusing to some people.
2. The challenge with option (2) is that some people are starting to use the modern counties to record recent events, like deaths.
3. The challenge with option (3) is that a different set of places were contained in Aberdeenshire when it was a former county than a unitary authority. Two things could be done to possibly alleviate this problem: we could include the from and to year when a place is listed as a contained place, and if a place has two types (e.g., former county and unitary authority), when we display the contained places grouped by type we could display the place under both type headings. For example, Aberdeenshire could be listed as a contained place on the place page for England under both "Traditional county" and "Unitary authority" headings.

We could potentially choose one approach for one country and another approach for another. For example, in France, towns are generally inside Cantons, which are inside Arrondissements, which are inside Departments, which are inside Regions. But both Getty and FHLC put towns directly under Departments, so that's where we have them. So we're listing towns, departments, and arrondissements all directly under departments, and appending (canton) and (arrondissement) to the titles for cantons and arrondissements so the GEDCOM uploader will match the towns by default since they have a shorter title.

Or we could choose to merge place pages when they both refer to same-level jurisdictions for different time periods (e.g., pages for a former county and unitary authority are both first-level jurisdictions under England), but not merge pages when they refer to different-level jurisdictions (e.g., pages for counties and towns in Poland are at different levels in in the place hierarchy -- we have them listed at the same level only because nobody's put towns inside counties yet). I'm leaning toward this approach, but I could be talked out of it.

I like option 3 or 2 (I understand option 3 as a further elaboration of option 2). That being said, I think that we'll eventually end up at option 1 taking a long view over time, when there's enough critical mass of data having occurred within the new jurisdictions that they must be accounted for. But with Scotland's changes being so recent (1996), I think it's fair to say that that point is at least 5 or 10 years or more in the future. Given the nature of wikis, and that there will always be opportunities to revamp and improve later, I don't think we should be concerned now with what will be useful 10 years from now.

For the time being, I think the challenge with option 2, i.e., people wanting to enter recent facts using the current jurisdictions, is best answered one of two ways. If we have redirects (e.g., "Aisgill, Cumbria" -> "Aisgill, Westmorland"), then people can simply choose those. If we don't, they can enter it manually as the need arises (e.g., when somebody dies this year, on that person's page, the place of death is entered as "Place:Aisgill, Westmorland|Aisgill, Cumbria") using the "pipe" notation when they enter the event. (Keep in mind that this need will arise relatively very infrequently for quite some time.)

(Something I'm wondering about the redirects... what will things be like after the grand renaming happens? Will things continue as before, such that people could start to rename things against the convention of the place page title reflecting its containment? Or will the editing be modified to enforce that convention, such that you can only edit the place name itself, and the full title gets automatically formed? I think the latter would be a good thing. But what would that mean for redirects? Would you be able to create a "Aisgill, Cumbria" -> "Aisgill, Westmorland" redirect, without a "Cumbria" page actually existing?)

Re the challenge with option 3, multiple historical containments, I recommend not over-complicating it, and letting the text on place pages do a lot of the explanation. We should explain on the place pages for containers that the containment only represents one hierarchy. The Aberdeenshire page only shows the places that 1891 Aberdeensire contained. It can explain that post-1996, there was also a unitary authority called Aberdeenshire, and it can explain the differences, and provide "see also" links. I think where this matters more is on the specific town and parish pages, where you can explain how they got shuffled around. A given parish page can explain that it belonged to one county until 1891, then another until 1975, then a district, and then a unitary authority. This will give researchers the information they need in a convenient location, without overly complicating the number and containment relationships of place pages in the wiki.

You also mention the Wikipedia linkage, and that under option 3, the page for Aberdeenshire might have two Wikipedia links if Wikipedia has separate pages for Aberdeenshire the traditional county and Aberdeenshire the post-1996 unitary authority. That's definitely a good thing. Unfortunately Wikipedia is not rigorous in how it handles the changing hierarchies. Sometimes there are separate Wikipedia pages for the traditional county and equivalent unitary authority, and sometimes the two are described on the same page. When there are two separate pages, the other Wikipedia pages that may link there are not always thoughtful about which one they pick. Thus, when we map Wikipedia refs onto WeRelate place pages, I think it will serve us well to have separate pages there map into one "combo" page here.

Re the merging, we definitely shouldn't merge two things with the same name but at different levels in the hierarchy. "X (county)" and "X (town)" are two different things.

In any event, with regard to your specific examples above, can we all agree that Aberdeenshire in any of its incarnations belongs in Scotland, and not in England? :-) :-)

oops -- fixed now :-).

--TomChatt 02:25, 22 November 2007 (EST)

I am totally undecided on which option to use. I can see instances where I would prefer option #1 and other times, option #3. It probably would vary from country to country, situation to situation. I always prefer less complicated though. <g> Having said that, I agree with Tom in that option #1 is probably what we'll have in the long run. Isn't that how the township naming convention got created? Town vs township, both with the same name, but one being more specific than (or contained in) the other?

I also second the idea that somehow "enforcing" the new naming convention or automatically modifying it to fit the naming convention after its created would be a good thing.

--Ronni 06:43, 22 November 2007 (EST)

I'm thinking that after the renaming we'll remove the "preferred name" and "located in" fields from the edit screen, since that information will be determined from the title. If you wanted to change either of those two fields, you would have to rename the place page. We would treat redirects specially and allow a "Aisgill, Cumbria" -> "Aisgill, Westmorland" redirect page to exist without the "Cumbria" page existing, but my guess is that eventually we'll want the Cumbria page to exist anyway; I've already come across cases where someone has attached a modern death date to a modern county/district instead of a to specific city inside the county/district.

The challenge with having the Aberdeenshire page show only the places that 1891 Aberdeensire contained is that I'd like to have contained places show up on the contained place list for both their primary located-in place as well as their also-located-in places (which is how things work today). This allows us to show places that are also-located-in a presbytery in the contained places list of a presbytery place page for example. A similar situation happens when counties change boundaries. Suppose a place X was located in county Y from 1800-1900, and suppose we have chosen to title place pages according to the 1881 county so its title is "X, Y, country". But then suppose county boundaries were modified somewhat in 1910 and county Y lost the land containing X to county Z. In this case I think we'd want to show X in the list of contained places for county Z as well. It seems to me that including the year range next to each place in the list of contained places addresses this problem, but perhaps there's a better way.

--Dallan 10:35, 23 November 2007 (EST)

Using native-language place names [23 November 2007]

I think it would be better to title places according to their native-language name. So Place:Lower Silesia, Poland should be "Dolnoślaskie". When I did the intial merge two years ago, when there was a Wikipedia article for the place I got the name from the Wikipedia article, instead of keeping the title from the FHLC, which uses the native language. In hindsight this was a mistake. I'm planning to rename places during the final review to use the native-language title for the first-level and possibly also the second-level administrative divisions unless someone feels strongly otherwise. Also, we'll create non-accented redirects for each place with accented characters so that you can create links to it without having to enter the accents. So "Dolnoslaskie, Poland" would redirect to "Dolnoślaskie, Poland".

What are your reasonings for going with the native-language name? Why was it a mistake?

Creating non-accented redirects is definitely a good idea.

--Ronni 06:46, 22 November 2007 (EST)

I think it was a mistake. The genealogical records (including the Family History Library Catalog) generally refer to places using the native-language name, so I'm thinking it would be less confusing if we used the native-language name as well. At present we have a mix: when the index was intially created, if we found a place on Wikipedia we used the Wikipedia name for the place, which is in English; otherwise we used the FHLC or Getty name for the place, which is generally in the native language.--Dallan 10:35, 23 November 2007 (EST)

Mythological or really ancient places [23 November 2007]

A new user has just uploaded some data (Greek gods, Roman gods, Bible genealogy, etc) that deals with mythological and biblical places. This looks like a very interesting project and I'm anxious to get involved in some aspects of it myself, however this got me to thinking about the place names. Are there any problems with creating pages with names like "East of Eden" or "Hades"? --Ronni 07:45, 22 November 2007 (EST)

I don't think there's a problem with it. We're talking in the neighborhood of 100 places, right? Just a few extra places wouldn't clutter up the drop-down lists.--Dallan 10:35, 23 November 2007 (EST)

We're ready! [4 December 2007]

The place review is complete! I'm just making a final pass this week to make sure that everything is ok and to generally put places in European countries where they are according to the FHLC. The renaming should start on Saturday and will take several days. During this time I'm going to restrict editing the place database, since it could cause problems for the automated updater.

A huge THANK YOU to everyone for all of your hard work on this! The place index looks so much better than it used to. It will be a huge help to people who do genealogy research in countries outside of their own. Next year we'll re-do the source index and do a better job of matching sources to places so that you'll be able to see quickly for any of your ancestors what sources are available to you.

Thank-you again!

--Dallan 18:18, 4 December 2007 (EST)

The automated update process has begun [16 December 2007]

After a few false starts on the test system, the automated update process has begun. It's making 50,000-70,000 edits a day. We have to rename and update nearly every place page (430,000 pages), so the update process will probably take two weeks. But when it's done, we should have a terrific place index! Thank-you again for all your hard work!

A few of points of interest:

• When we started the place review we had just under 435,000 place pages. We now have just under 430,000 place pages. Approximately 5,000 duplicate pages were found and merged during the clean-up!

• The countries for which we have the most place pages:

1. United States (approx. 168,000)
2. France (approx. 35,000)
3. Germany (approx. 32,000)
4. England (approx. 20,000)
5. Russia (approx. 19,000) -- includes places in the Russian Empire
6. Spain (approx. 12,000)
7. Italy (approx. 11,000)
8. People's Republic of China (approx. 9,000) -- lacking coverage
9. Poland (approx. 9,000)
10. Canada (approx. 9,000)

• We now have maps on the place pages. If you click on the "Larger map" link below the map, you'll be taken to a page that shows (of course) a larger map. Places without latitude and longitude are listed below the map. You can click anywhere on the map to get the latitude and longitude below the cursor. This should hopefully facilitate adding latitude and longitude for places that don't have them yet.--Dallan 19:57, 16 December 2007 (EST)