Tech Forum

thedqs wrote:Though a downside with competition is to get accuracy, when people are competing for numbers the quality might go down. If you could keep track of quality AND quantity then competition is great.

Easy, you post the number of errors along side the corrects. Or a percentage. Or subtract the bad from the total and only show accurate numbers. Or reject a batch for rework. There are lots of ways to deal with quality and yet encourage competition.

Not so easy when you're dealing with data entry. All of the work is done by two separate people. An arbitrator views and discrepancies. More errors, more work for the arbitrator. There's also be possibility that the two data entry people are wrong - but agree. In that case the error may not get caught.

The work can also vary depending on what packets you get. Some are easy to read. Others are more difficult, but both are necessary contribution to the work.

I'd much rather see people take pride in their work then to engage in any kind of competition for numbers.

RussellHltn wrote:Not so easy when you're dealing with data entry. All of the work is done by two separate people. An arbitrator views and discrepancies. More errors, more work for the arbitrator. There's also be possibility that the two data entry people are wrong - but agree. In that case the error may not get caught.

The work can also vary depending on what packets you get. Some are easy to read. Others are more difficult, but both are necessary contribution to the work.

I'd much rather see people take pride in their work then to engage in any kind of competition for numbers.

Points well made. Competition could create headaches for the arbitrator.

Lets concentrate on better feedback. Let's provide this information to people: " I just did X names. How much closer are we to finishing the project?"

RussellHltn wrote:Not so easy when you're dealing with data entry. All of the work is done by two separate people. An arbitrator views and discrepancies. More errors, more work for the arbitrator. There's also be possibility that the two data entry people are wrong - but agree. In that case the error may not get caught.

The work can also vary depending on what packets you get. Some are easy to read. Others are more difficult, but both are necessary contribution to the work.

I'd much rather see people take pride in their work then to engage in any kind of competition for numbers.

The Irish Death lists have about 375 names in them and no line numbers. When one or both indexers get off the arbitrator has to fix the mess. I wish feedback to the programers was possible because there is a real need to be able for the arbitrator to insert a record in either the A or B indexing to clean up a missed name. My wife is an arbitrator and has spent up to 4 hours cleaning up the messes where A missed 4 records and B missed 7 all in the early part of a 375 record batch. If she could insert a Record in them they would have cleaned up quickly.

srweight wrote:The Irish Death lists have about 375 names in them and no line numbers. When one or both indexers get off the arbitrator has to fix the mess. I wish feedback to the programers was possible because there is a real need to be able for the arbitrator to insert a record in either the A or B indexing to clean up a missed name. My wife is an arbitrator and has spent up to 4 hours cleaning up the messes where A missed 4 records and B missed 7 all in the early part of a 375 record batch. If she could insert a Record in them they would have cleaned up quickly.

That's a weakness in both the software and the process. It is solved by fixes to the software and / or process.
1) Let an arbitrator return a set for "reconsideration"
2) Let the arbitrator insert records.

I've done a couple of Irish death indexes. They get tedious because they're so long. I was very careful, but when I checked by column, I found at least one error in every column, so it's easy to make a mistake, especially leaving out a line.

srweight wrote:The Irish Death lists have about 375 names in them and no line numbers. When one or both indexers get off the arbitrator has to fix the mess. I wish feedback to the programers was possible because there is a real need to be able for the arbitrator to insert a record in either the A or B indexing to clean up a missed name. My wife is an arbitrator and has spent up to 4 hours cleaning up the messes where A missed 4 records and B missed 7 all in the early part of a 375 record batch. If she could insert a Record in them they would have cleaned up quickly.

There is indeed a way to insert records and work with the record matching functions of the program. It's all under the Record Matching tab.

I likewise am disappointed with the lack of feedback on familysearchindexing. I have been a participant on a number of distributed computing and distributed work projects (like Project Gutenberg). Over and over, the most successful of these ventures are those that provide frequent feedback about progress. Some simple daily counts are a place to start. For example, freerice.com has a simple count of the number of grains of rice contributed in the past several days. I would like to see something very simple on the indexing home page that just showed three daily counts: number of records indexed, number of names indexed, and number of indexers who submitted. These could be graphed out showing daily, weekly, and monthly trends.

The bi-monthly memorandum that goes out is not adequate. For one thing it is too Church-centric. It will make no sense to folks who are not members of the Church and it is too out-dated. With the call invitation going out to all to join the indexing effort, we need to be more inclusive with our communication, especially about progress.

The 'projects completed' page is a good start. But I would like to see a 'progress' page that showed the number of records and number of names submitted on each page. No more math than simple counts would be sufficient to let indexers know what they are part of.

It seems that for an organization as obsessed with counting and reporting, we could be doing much better in this arena.

Has anyone considered nominating Family Search Indexing for a Duke's Choice Award?

Distributed computing and especially human computing are pretty hot right now and Family Search Indexing is the most substantial example of this that I'm aware of. It struck me that Family Search Indexing was rather apt for nomination and that it might result in some good publicity.

http://java.sun.com/community/dukeaward ... m_new.html

I personally would agree that statistics would great . . . maybe not on an individual basis.

I would like to see more publicity as well to get more involved whether within the church or without. I know that I have seen many projects out there trying to do similar things and have tried to get some involved in the indexing.

Finally, I would like to see more feedback from my own indexing. I can learn from the errors that I make especially if I find that I make the same mistake over and over again.

I would like to know if it would be possible to use the data extracted during the old extraction program, rather that indexing the same films again. Many of those extracted films are birth, christening and marriage records which I consider the backbone of genealogy. If those could be put on line in additon to the projects currently being indexed, it would make a huge dent in the need for indexing of films. Also, many of the extracted records not in the IGI were made available in the Vital Records Index series of CDs. And I assume there are also many that have been extracted that have not yet been made publicly available - i.e. those being used for temple ordinance projects. These extraction projects represents years of work already done, if there is a way to connect the data with the film from which it was extracted.