Having spent time this morning reading Guy's posts about the Birds projects on here dating back to 2007 he must be glad to finally see something materialise. We have been working through trees and have come across transcription spelling errors and infant deaths in months recorded as years and have submitted feedback. Unless they re-read evey death image looking for mo rather than yr and re-enter our feedback will be the only way of isolating these.
I suspect the reality is that such corrections are unlikely to be utilised in the near future. For the Irish census similar feedback occurred for years and it was only recently that the following was added to their help page
Since the Online Census went live, the National Archives has received thousands of emails detailing error corrections through our error feedback facility. Until recently, we had no staff to undertake the task of verifying these suggested corrections, and entering them in the database. Over the last year, however, we have been able to make a start on this task, and have validated and corrected 12,600 submissions. We have now re-indexed the site to incorporate these corrections.
We hope, subject to resource constraints, to continue this important work, and we thank our users for their patience in waiting a considerable length of time to see their very useful corrections implemented.
Despite these hinderences we have managed to find said registrations (admittedly only with external knowledge & without that one would go looking fruitlessly for a 13 year old's baptism rather than a 13 month). However, as the system is under trial perhaps feedback on improvements to the Search functions are more likely to see results this year or next. It underwent Beta testing as outlined here
http://lostcousins.com/newsletters2/specialnov16news.htm#GROindexlaunch which includes the line "Also, if an infant died at the age of (say) 9 days, 9 weeks, or 9 months the age at death may have been recorded as 9 years".
I find Cuffie's improvements to the Search page result in quicker searching - but he is better to describe & feed that back than me a mere user.
I find just using Surname + Exact & inputing a known registration district quick but if I change to Phonetic or Soundex more often than not I time out with error and once it has started have to wait minutes till it has finished, or give up & close the window & log in again, for me that definitely needs fixed/improved in the programming and will feed that back to them.
So it has got database errors but living with them for now what needs improved and fedback not just on here but to the GRO?
Perhaps FFHS SOG etc might be able to summarise such comments in a document which would be more friendly to them than hundreds of individual comments that they need to read, some might say doing some of their work for them.
