Db_error improvement - kill double commas

Question

Speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Comments

I know why some people do them - but I don't like it much. I've seen them used to denote that are missing a piece of data. So they do a "city, , state, country" sort of thing. I get it, but it's not that hard in today's day and age to just look up the missing data. I generally look it up or remove the double commas and make it "uncertain". Lots of better ways to do it than double-commas.

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I remove double commas when I find them in a profile I'm editing for other reasons, but getting rid of double commas across WikiTree ranks pretty low on my priority list for an error correction campaign. Double commas are an aesthetic problem that does not affect the integrity or utility of data. There are plenty of other types of errors that are more serious.

And I have a concern that the initiation of crews of Corrections Officers who focus on double commas and similar editorial errors may lead to the kind of situation seen at Wikipedia, where a person's activity feed can be dominated by minor changes like removing extra commas, adding different punctuation, and replacing hyphens with en-dashes -- detracting from the usefulness of the activity feed, and inspiring people to trim their watchlists because of the blizzard of trivial changes in their feeds.

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At the very least they should all be properly marked uncertain in the database.

Re: minor edits. We need a way to distinguish preferably as part of the normal and automatic operation of the site between minor and major edits. Based on my experience with MMORPGs and similar massive online collaboration tools, I would suggest that the activity feed be split into channels and edits be reported according to the size of the change weighted according to what fields are being edited. Merges and changes of LNAB would not be classified or categorized as low priority or minor edits. Changing the basic vital statistics should generally be a non-minor but possibly relatively insignificant edit.

Generally I think edits should be classified more according to the percentage of the profile they represent.

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Double commas are generated by Family Historian for good reason. Hence they can get imported. I think I've removed them in my profiles.

Answer 1

Isnt things like this a candidate for a bot or for Chris cleaning?