Adding sources to "new fact" screen: need to show more than 10 sources in the drop-down?

#1

When you add a new fact to a person, there are several numbered steps, of which No. 3 is “Source.” Just looking at it, you might think that you have to type in the name of the source manually – but when you start typing you get a dropdown of possible completions of what you type. How long is this dropdown list? It appears to be taken from an outside list of sources (at WeRelate maybe?), in which case it seems awfully short. That is, it’s not the list of sources you’ve previously entered, and which you might want to re-use (though perhaps it ought to be). But for the facts I’ve experimentally entered, there seem to be only a dozen or so choices in the dropdown. There’s no slider-bar on the right to indicate a continuing list. Is this correct? Or, if the list is actually much longer and the rest of it is hidden – how do you get to the lower part of the list? Clicking on any visible entry selects that source. You can’t down-arrow to see the rest of the list, if it’s actually there.

Mike

#2

It’s a list of the top 10 matching sources. The list is composed of sources that you’ve previously entered (which appear at the top), followed by matching sources from WeRelate. The sources from WeRelate are ranked by how often they’re cited at WeRelate.

The list could contain thousands of matching sources, so there’s no way I could display all of them in a timely manner, and there’s no way most people are going to want to scroll through them. Most are going to be hidden. As you continue to type, the number of sources that match all of the words you enter decreases, which increases the chance that the source you are looking for appears in the list.

I could increase the number of matching sources in the list from 10 to say 20 or so. What do people think?

By the way, the list of matching places is similar - only the top 10 are shown, though there could be thousands of matching places. As you continue to type, the list of places shown is refined to show only places that match what you’ve entered.

#3

Ancestry seems to be able to pop up a couple hundred pretty quickly. However, they don’t refine the list as you type, they reset the position in the list with every keystroke which is very annoying.

I think the more modern approach would be to do what you suggest and refine as you type. For people with large files and lost of sources I think it would be nice to have 20 if you can do it efficiently.