Timeline for On tags and time periods
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
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| Mar 28, 2017 at 23:02 | history | edited | PolyGeoMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Mar 27, 2017 at 7:16 | comment | added | user104 | @JanMurphy There must be something in the water! I spent some time last night debating with myself whether we needed time tagging at all, which confirmed my earlier conclusion that we don't when we're taking about some specific datasets.But if we don't know what datasets we're talking about, then we may do (e.g. 19th-century so that somebody who is trying to understand what their options are for locating birth information in the 19th century are can filter down to questions that may be related. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 21:18 | comment | added | PolyGeo Mod | @JanMurphy I think time tagging is valuable, it just needs to be practical i.e. using a few well known and more or less global time periods, using decades (recently) and centuries (further into the past) to "fill in the gaps". I think new users will understand those few rules, and even when they do not time tag "correctly", it's very easy to re-tag as long as the guidelines are kept simple. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 21:12 | comment | added | PolyGeo Mod | @ColeValleyGirl "Or would you only use decade tags for places in the periods they had censuses every 10 years?" - of course not, that would lead to a ridiculously complex set of time tagging guidelines, especially compared to what I have proposed. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 18:47 | comment | added | Jan Murphy Mod | Having read the answers from the community, I now wonder if we should have tags referring to time periods at all. Yes, this is partly a tongue-in-cheek answer, but I keep coming back to the idea that the tag should be able to stand alone as the only tag for the question. In some of the scenarios I was thinking about, the time period is implied by the type of record being asked about (e.g. civil reg in the UK) and thus the time period tag is redundant. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 16:10 | comment | added | user104 | Or would you only use decade tags for places in the periods they had censuses every 10 years? -- which is (to put it bluntly) nonsense. Rather than chasing my tail (as you put it), I and others are trying to reach a decision about a simple, practical system of tagging for time period (even if it isn't 'purist') that is clear to newbies and addresses the limitations of our current systems. If you think the limitations are less important than the ability to filter by decades in some but not all periods, and our current system works well, explain why you think the limitations don't matter. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 16:09 | comment | added | user104 | As @HarryVervet says, this isn't a simple solution, as it either requires people to understand this discussion, or it allows people to add meaningless tags that will be replaced by synonyms (which won't encourage their understanding either). Further, just because individuals' locations and family structures may have changed every 10 years since some variable date in the 19th century (as revealed by the censuses) that doesn't mean that the relevant genealogy techniques and records changed. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 11:34 | comment | added | PolyGeo Mod | I think we risk chasing our tails on these time period tags, and that the way we have been using them previously works well enough, even if that has been less than prescriptively. In this answer lies a simple formula for deciding what time period tags to use. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 11:29 | history | edited | PolyGeoMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Mar 26, 2017 at 11:27 | comment | added | PolyGeo Mod | Users will not need to know that decade tags prior to the 19th century should not be used if each decade tag in the 18th century and earlier is made a synonym of its century tag. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 11:25 | comment | added | PolyGeo Mod | @HarryVervet There seemed to be resistance to the idea of decade tags in the 17th century, and the pace of change in the 18th century seems to have been only a bit faster. By the 19th century governments begin to take a census every 10 years suggesting that too much changes in 10 years to assume that what was true at the previous census still holds. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 11:08 | comment | added | Harry V. Mod | Why have you arbitrarily decided that decades only are appropriate in the 19th century and beyond? How will users know which type to tag without reading this post? Maybe you could include example usage guidances for the three categories that makes this clearer. | |
| Mar 26, 2017 at 8:46 | history | answered | PolyGeoMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |