What fun. To be part of a huge and worthwhile project like this one. A whole week of the dedicated work of 8,658 arbitrators at FamilySearch.org. I have been indexing and arbitrating since 2004 when the LDS Church first began this work. It is fun to do and so worth the effort to make records available to family historians. It is hard not to get caught up in what the records are saying and in the people in the records. I sort of adopt them as I am doing the work.
Onced in awhile FamilySearch announces an EVENT like this one. When a big backlog of records are waiting to be arbitrated something like this is announced. A week of total dedication to the task at hand to bring the backlog down and get those records out to the people that are waiting to find them.
The announcement was just received from FamilySearch telling those that joined in what the results were. 1,042,454 images were arbitrated and thus released to the data available at FamilySearch.org. It is always amazing to me what a concentrated effort can accomplish.
The usual procedure is to have two indexers index the same batch of records. If they both see the same thing the batch passes on to being published at FamilySearch.org. If they DON'T see the same thing, it goes to an arbitrator who looks at the batch and decided which is correct or if neither is correct they fix it. Three sets of eyes have read these batches and hopefully increase the accuracy of the information. But of course, being humans, we can't always get it exactly correct, but it is so much better than nothing that I will take it any day.
Even though I am a small fish in this huge pond, it makes me feel good to have participated.
Stay tuned, Patj
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