User blog:Phlox/Informal versus formal location information

A central goal is to make inputting information as easy as possible for first time contributors. I am not completely satisfied with the scheme I currently have implemented with SMW templates and forms. I saw knowledgeable persons making errors, so some adjustments seem reasonable. Problem areas: I think what we want to do is have a loose way for users to quickly enter a location the way they see it in the records. The main thing we try and get them to do is to specify the narrowest wikipedia location they can come up with for a location. Once we have that we can derive the entire hierarchy. We can provide them explicit fields for county, subdiv1 and so on, but they can leave them entirely blank if they wish. We then run a bot try to sort out what the hierarchy and true locations are. Future bot runs might progressively produce more and more refined data.
 * exceptions such as cases where we need a subdiv2 (for instance Regions of England
 * the unnecessary requirement that users understand how a location is technically classified. Why should we require that users understand that Greater London is a "county", or that England is not a "country" in the sense that Familypedia uses the term (sovereign nation with a seat at the U.N., able to negotiate treaties independently of the U.K., and so on)?  Similar confusions may exist for other countries- especially those with dense populations.
 * the unnecessary busy work that users specify any locations that are supersets of a recognized wikipedia place name. For instance, if the user specified  Mangotsfield, it should a waste of their time to input Bristol, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom as values in other fields.  The article on Mangotsfield has that information.

Formality versus Informality clash It would be a bad idea to ask contributors to make guesses about filling in formal fields that they didn't understand, and equally a bad idea to have a bot overwriting a field that a knowledgeable contributor had corrected from a previous bot run. Alternatives: 19:18, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) Soft Simple form has a soft repeating field "Location". Contibutors may enter historic locations and informal names, being encoraged to use names used in wikipedia, and with the locations separated by semicolons arranged in the envelope address order of narrow location first to broadest location last.  Bury the formal fields subdivision1 etc. in the advanced forms.  By default, bots do not overwrite these fields but can if there is high confidence the data is wrong.
 * 2) Hard Only expose the soft field "Location" in all forms. Explicitly declare that the fields (address, locality, county, subdiv, country) are derived via bots.  People may preset the values in advance of a bot run, but it is understood that bots own the these fields, and the correct place for contributors to set locations is the informal locations field.  The bot location values may be overwritten at any time by subsequent bot passes unless a "no bots" property is set for the event.  Eg:Wedding1 no-loc-recalc = true.