Sorry that the easiest example is Catholic simply because that is the easiest for me to find a good test case in. The same thing occurs in Biblical figures, historical figures, denominations ... anything in which many similar names occur, no strict naming convention has been used, and alternative names are incomplete. In other words, this is as much a data problem as it is a processing problem.
John is the most commonly used name for a (Catholic) pope coming in at 23 or so. So I look for Pope John I using the full name because I know only the top few matches are shown. Note I can only see the Factbook TOC if I am using autocomplete inside Factbook. So I'll pretend I haven't shown it as a hint to what is going on.
Okay, the returned values show I'm off to a rather ridiculous start. So I take the "Show all" route ...
Hmm ... well, at least I'm getting popes now under persons ... but a rather random collection of popes with random names. So I try a less specific name i.e. go from asking for the person I want to asking for any of the 23 and hoping that the right one manages to land in the top 10.
Okay, I actually lucked out and got my hit. So now we can see some of the problems:
- The entry is Pope Saint John I rather than Pope John I ... an additional fact that it is unrealistic to expect users to know.
- The alternative names of Pope John I, Saint John are missing
- There is no disambiguation between Pope John I (Catholic) and Pope John I (Coptic)
- Pope John XVI and Pope John XX are completely missing
- Some of the results match only on "Pope" and completely ignore the remainder of my specification
- There is no find on the page, so that even though I click "more" multiple times under Persons, I do not see the one I am looking for.
As an alternative, I can say that looking for Saint John looks any more promising but fails to get me to the Pope:
I can't even find an occurrence and use the context menu to find the appropriate tag, my usual alternative approach. Note I can't search for person: because I don't know the tag
The only way I know to find the entry/tag is to know enough about the person (or other headword) to be able to navigate the TOC/ontology of Factbook to find the entry. The I can go back and enter it in a selection menu.
Until cases like this work reasonably well, I will continue to be a critic of the selection menu routine/data. Providing a mechanism to add alternative names when we do eventually find the entry, would be a powerful first step in improving this nonsense.
