I have been going through all my people oriented works and adding Community Tags so they can readily be found via Factbook or a <person> Search. I am doing this because Faithlife, quite reasonably, decided that tagging all such resources was a poor use of their resources - they did tag a significant number. However, I am becoming very frustrated at the number of people that appear in resources that Faithlife indexed that are not indexed separately and therefore not available to me to accurately tag my books. I don't think a file of notes of things I've deliberately miscoded is an appropriate solution.
Takes as an example, Azmazveth which
- Powell, Mark Allan, ed. The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary (Revised and Updated). New York: HarperCollins, 2011. identifies as the name of four distinct men.
- Freedman, David Noel, Gary A. Herion, David F. Graf, John David Pleins, and Astrid B. Beck, eds. The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary. New York: Doubleday, 1992. identifies as the name of five distinct men.
- Orr, James, John L. Nuelsen, Edgar Y. Mullins, and Morris O. Evans, eds. The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia. Chicago: The Howard-Severance Company, 1915. identifies as the name of four distinct men.
However, the mighty Barry, John D., David Bomar, Derek R. Brown, Rachel Klippenstein, Douglas Mangum, Carrie Sinclair Wolcott, Lazarus Wentz, Elliot Ritzema, and Wendy Widder, eds. The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016. decided that three men was quite sufficient:
AZMAVETH, SON OF ADIEL (עַזְמָוֶת, azmaweth). The keeper of King David’s treasuries (1 Chr 27:25).
AZMAVETH, SON OF JEHOADDAH (עַזְמָוֶת, azmaweth). Son of Jehoaddah (1 Chr 8:36) or Jarah (9:42) and a descendant of Benjamin.
AZMAVETH THE WARRIOR (עַזְמָוֶת, azmaweth). A Bahurimite who was one of David’s champions (2 Sam 23:31; 1 Chr 11:33). The father of Jeziel and Pelet, who were also among David’s warriors (1 Chr 12:3).
Major Contributors and Editors, “Azmaveth the Warrior,” ed. John D. Barry et al., The Lexham Bible Dictionary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).
Which Factbook has reduced by conflating the Treasurer with the Warrior.
I do not want to study the Bible according to Faithlife - I want to study the Bible according to the text as received in this century in my Bible and references. I don't expect Logos to do the research to show all proposed identifications - but I do expect to be able to tag at the level of distinctions of major resources and I do expect Faithlife to annotate where they have made an editorial decision as a reminder for me to ignore them.
We need a more effective way to provide feedback on the Factbook tagging - one that ensures that Faithlife actually gets feedback. And on all tagging, there needs to be an effective way for the user to label the tagging as misleading and capture the alternative information. In the particular resource I am dealing with Faithlife consistently conflates characters that my Jewish source separate by a century!
