Geni, South Africa

Dear C (not sure what your name is)

As I understand things the Geographical locations are extracted from Google (I may be wrong) and are not loaded into a Geni data base.
If I enter Cape Town for example it gives me the correct one without having to type South Africa.
More common places such as Worcester requires me to specify what country as does Queenstown etc.because there are many places with the same name across the world.

I guess to assume that it is Queenstown South Africa would be a bridge too far as it may well be in New Zealand that someone was born - it is a World Family Tree.

After all typing the country beats having to type Town, Province and then Country and in addition the spelling is pre-determined and one does not have to check on the more obscure local spellings or heaven forbid some of those Cyrillic or Welsh names.

I have noticed that reference to Today or Yesterday is based upon USA Time Zone (Probably Western Standard Time) and is for me not a major issue. There has to be a place of domicile and I guess to have multiple world time zones based upon place of residence would be nice, but as it is a Family Tree I am not too fussed about such things - there are perhaps bigger fish to fry.

These are just some of my personal thoughts and not an official Geni response.

John

The time zone is not the problem, just an indication that they don't personalize individual homepages and also don't look at our location info in our profiles.

The problem is when you add John's 15 children all born in Queenstown, you have to do a lot of typing. It give like a drop down with options, but even the last option is not SA.
And copy and past is not a option as I'm already using it to carry the names over.

So that is whey I was wondering if someone could ask Geni to build in some artificial intelligence into their website.

I'm sure it wont just benefit me.

After all it is 2017 and if Geni was so behind the time that we had to type in Town, province and country, I think they would fail at building a world tree.

So all in the name of progress. Procrastination is never good for progress.

If someone don't come up with ideas, we all will still be sitting in prehistoric times

I dont want them to move the world, just my world :-)

Mmm
I understand your point.
What would be the case for an expat living in New Zealand and wanting to enter the same 15 children that you use as an example who were all born in Queenstown, South Africa.
Using your suggestion of artificial intelligence, the system would default to the country of residence of the capturer and abra cadabra it would show them all as being born in Queenstown, New Zealand.

There have been m,any innovations in Geni (such as DNA which you use) and for a free program (I see you are not a PRO member) you get great value for money.

Geni does not have an army of programmers and as I remarked I suppose all requests for improvements must get evaluated against users from many lands and languages. I think the fact that one can choose your language is a huge advantage to those (including Afrikaans speakers) who would like a program to address them in their mother tongue.
As I remarked, I believe that the domiciles is an app from Google which imports the details and I am not sure whether the outside owner would be prepared to introduce that change to satisfy a request from Geni.
The other consideration is that you would then need to enable the program to pass your IP address down the line to ascertain where the indexer is located and I am not sure that I would want that to happen willy nilly.

For my money (and I have captured 34,534 profiles to date) I have on occasions been mildly irritated by what you describe, but I have lived with it and in some way think that the inconvenience of having to specify those few towns where there are world duplicates is not too great.
Most of South African town ames come up correctly.
For your Queenstown example try typing in Queenstown, ec and hey presto Geni chooses South Africa and not New Zealand and whats more it even specifies the District and Province.
Middelburg, mp gives the Mpumalanga one and Middelburg, e gives the Eastern Cape one. - otherwise the default is the Netherlands city.

Salisbury, zim gives you Harare in Zimbabwe.
There have been cases where the former name is required and as the current name is displayed, you would have to access the entire location and type in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia if you require it to display that way.

Innovation and work arounds save the day.
Have fun.
John

As I live between two countries for most of the time, I can see possible difficulties in pre-programmed items if carried to excess, as it sometimes is. Inevitably the so called artificial intelligence is not that at all, it is just a programmer trying to work out the likeliest answers. They are never able to envisage all possibilities, and to do so would slow websites down. I do not see how they could cope with people like me who are all over the place, and not necessarily using the same computer, or ISP, or whatever.
I rather fear that if something like the concept that Mr. (?) Barry seems to want would result all too often in unwanted solutions being imposed by the programme, and as has happened to me in other sites they can be difficult to correct. For example if a forbear had children of different surnames (that would generally be a more than once married woman - in my culture! - it might be difficult to persuade the computer that a different surname was correct. (it has to cater for other cultures too, and things like sex changes.) I would suggest best left alone!
The time is interesting. The Pacific west Coast is GMT -8, and SA is GMT +2. So if you post at say 0900 CAT in SA, a computer on the US Pacific coast will think it is 2300 the day before. If you then post at 1100 CAT it will regard the previous post as yesterday. It is something that has come up between some friends and I on Hotmail, and we have found times to be inconsistent even allowing for BST and so on.
We suspected that it depended on the particular computer being used at the time by the system, and as we found out on and after the twin towers attack in the USA, that can be in one of many places.
I expect Geni uses several in different locations, if only for security reasons (the San Andreas fault for example is well overdue for its next upheaval). I suppose that it would be possible for the time to be qualified by the time zone being used by the computer concerned, but I believe that the concept of a computer as being one machine in one place is out if date these days.
I often wonder at the times shown on my in mail, but life is too short!

As a point of possible interest my last post (from Pretoria, SA) showed a posting time of 12.22 pm, which was my perceived time here. It is 1225 now. (Or would have been had the connection not dropped!) 1231, now.