birth location too short

Question

Working on the Data Base project.  Error code 604 = Birth Location too short.

Just under 14,000 at last count.

Many profiles have the old 3 letter abbreviation of the state. For example Ill for Illinois vs IL and Ind for Indiana vs IN

My question -

Can the program add these 3 letter abbreviations as acceptable?

Comments

As it is a World Wide Family tree shouldnt you have country in it???

Better locations names make it easier in the future to plot family trees on a map

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And the Abbreviations should be spelled out.

Answer 1

Use the full, written out place name for counties, states, provinces, départements, etc. Examples: Rhode Island, not RI; New Brunswick, not NB; Hampshire, not Hants; Seine-et-Marne, not S-M. Abbreviations of country names is acceptable as long as the abbreviation is standard and is recognizable.

From the Help menu for "Location Fields".

 

You might say the Error Report does it's job.

Comments

Some abrevisions are alloved at the moment, but will also be added to this error after location field changes are implemented in wikitree.

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There are a whole set of 3 letter codes used for genealogy in the UK, it was only when I arrived on this site that I realised that they weren't universally recognised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapman_code

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And where is WA? Washington State or Western Australia?

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I added all official country codes for US to ignore list, since they are allowed. They will be added in the future, but for now, there is enough errors to correct.

If you are interested in WA, you can use http://www.sdms.si:92/wikitree/ShowErrors.htm and do errors search by location.

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But they're not allowed.  It says so.

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 Abbreviations of country names is acceptable as long as the abbreviation is standard and is recognizable.

USA, UK, ... is recognized by everyone, so I don't see the problem in using it. I would use it for multi word countries. E for Spain, D for Germany is already questionable since typo can move you for 1000km. Also I think "..., WA, USA" is ok, But that is it. 

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I agree that USA, UK is fine.  But the abbreviations for US states is not fine according to WikiTree (see Helmut's answer above).

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What I meant was, It is not correct, but there is no hurry in correcting them. We have plenty of other errors to correct.

Here is a list of common location endings.

http://www.softdata.si/osebe_staro/ales/wikitree/LocationCountries%2020160518.htm

Have a look at Pennsylvania, PA. PA appears 80K times, so correcting those is a lot of work. Half of them are PA, USA, So at first I will leave those out of error lists,  Error lists must be balanced, not to have to many errors, otherwise people loose interest in correcting them. That is also the reason PA is excluded from error (Location too short that)  has 30K errors If I would add all USA states as an error, number would go up ti 1M, but it is better to first correct those 30K.

Here you can also see how PA is used

http://www.softdata.si/osebe_staro/ales/wikitree/PA.txt

http://www.softdata.si/osebe_staro/ales/wikitree/PA.xlsx

Or summary

http://www.softdata.si/osebe_staro/ales/wikitree/Pennsylvania.htm

http://www.softdata.si/osebe_staro/ales/wikitree/PennsylvaniaNoUnique.htm

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I agree completely - far too many corrections if we did that!  I think  'balance' is an excellent keyword here. :)

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While we are discussing a '604 "location is too short,' does anyone know what NN stands for? And, is okay to mark a '634 death location' as Unknown if you don't know what the letters given stand for? This person married his spouse in Ireland, if that helps.

Thank you!