Steve wrote: > > Yesterday I received an e-mail from someone who described himself as a syndicate co-ordinator and commented on what he thought one of my transcribed entries should have been. > > He'd had an enquiry from one of his volunteers, checked the source data, and mailed me to tell me what he "definetely" (sic) thought it was; and then asked me if I would edit the file. > > He also saw fit to mention a point relating to the use of asterisks, even though the way that I had entered it was appropriate for what I saw as "multiple unreadable characters". > > The issues this raises for me are:- > 1. Just because he said that he is a syndicate co-ordinator doesn't neccessarily mean he is. He could be anyone one of a million people who have stumbled onto the FreeBMD website. > 2. Even taking it on face value that he is a syndicate co-ordinator, he is not *my* syndicate co-ordinator or one of the Admin people and therefore his *opinion* on what he sees carries only as much weight as any other transcriber. I'm not in the least bit interested in receiving heaps of e-mails from people who think that just because an entry is a *definite* for them, that I should therefore amend what I have seen. I work on the basis of "type exactly what you see" except when I am unsure of the characters involved. Even after having another look at the scan file I thought there was still some uncertainty. > 3. File ownership:- if the files/entries I have sent to FreeBMD are to be carrying my name and my e-mail address, then to me it makes sense that *I* have to be satisfied in my own mind about what I have seen and transcribed; not to be told by a syndicate co-ordinator or anyone else what editing I *should* do because of what they "definetely" see in a scan. The alternative that I see to this is once a file is sent to FreeBMD, then transcribers give up all rights and responsibilities for their content and admin people or veteran transcribers fix up any errors contained therein. > > What do others think? In essence, I think you have about the right slant on it Steve. At the initial transcription phase, we have provision for peer feedback about mistakes (and we all make them!) Such feedback can only *ever* be a suggestion that the transcriber look again at an entry, and decide; a) that he stands by the original transcription b) that he agrees with the original transcription c) that he believes there is now doubt and changes a certain entry to uncertain Whether the sender of the e-mail is or is not a co-ordinator make no particular difference to the process of analysing the entry, BUT it does provide a useful filtering mechanism for those of us who deal will lots of these feedback e-mails. "I am a co-ordinator and I think this is wrong because..." is far more use than "This person is my GGGF and he always used this spelling..." As transcription and more formal checking proceeds, the people who are given responsibility for deciding between 2 variant readings by different transcribers will be given appropriate access to flag entries as incorrect (although they STILL can't alter what you have transcribed) -- Dave Mayall