Help correct the location of your ward's meetinghouse

Many of you are probably aware of the Church's new meetinghouse locator found at http://maps.lds.org . Clerks, consider taking a few minutes to check the location of meetinghouses for your ward, branch, stake, or district. You can use the Feedback link to send corrected locations. Some tips:

1. Exact locations are often easier to see in "Aerial" or "Satellite" view.
2. When picking a correct location, the best place is usually the part of the chapel closest to the road. If you think that would be confusing for some reason, pick the spot you would want someone to drive to (like the entrance to the parking lot).
3. Microsoft and Google have different levels of both street and satellite coverage. If you're not getting good results with one of them, try the other.

While you're at it you might want to check the meeting times. You (or another clerk in your unit) can correct these yourselves on the unit's web site.

Thanks for your help -- feel free to spread the word to other clerks!

Mobilizing the clerks is a good move.

Unfortunately this forum reaches only a handful. Putting this in a broadcast message in the MLS system would be more effective, if you can accomplish that through channels at CHQ.

borenmt wrote:While you're at it you might want to check the meeting times. You (or another clerk in your unit) can correct these yourselves on the unit's web site.

Slight correction -- meeting times are set in MLS, not the web site. Once they are changed in MLS, they eventually (usually within a few days) are reflected on the web site.

In addition to checking the chapel locations, you may want to check the directions. Depending on where the chapel is "pinned", you may find the directions are having people cut though back yards and hop the fence to get to Church. I've set coordinates on the main driveway about 25-50 feet back from the street. The 25 foot offset insures that the correct side of the street is identified.

Pinning the main driveway helps in cases where the entrance isn't obvious when you see the chapel. In our stake we have two that are like that. One has the drive way entrance down a tiny lane. The stake center's main parking lot is a parking structure just "upstream" on a one-way street. By the time you can identify the building, you've passed the entrance.

This is a great improvement, IMO.

I was recently in Durban, South Africa, and discovered that about half the units in and around Durban have bad addresses on the meetinghouse locator. A couple had the name of the South African province, KwaZulu-Natal, listed as the city.

While South Africa, like most countries around the world, has a postal code system, similar to the zipcode used in the US, for some reason the meetinghouse locator doesn't use that code. All these postal code systems have a hierarchy, like the zip code, and close codes often indicate proximity.

Why doesn't the meetinhouse locator using the postal codes outside of the US?

I like the new meeting house locater. I do have a request for an update though. I would like to see added to the list the name and location of the stake the units are in. If a member is moving to a new area this would be very helpful.

fergie34 wrote:I like the new meeting house locater. I do have a request for an update though. I would like to see added to the list the name and location of the stake the units are in. If a member is moving to a new area this would be very helpful.

I like it, too -- it's a great improvement.

As for your suggestion: When you click on a particular ward/branch, you are presented with information on the ward, including a link for "Go to Website". From the website it is immediately clear what stake the ward is in. So the functionality you ask for does exist, but it's not presented directly.

Clearly that does require a couple of clicks, but specifying the stake for each ward that is listed would take a lot of space. It's a tradeoff -- listing the stake would be somewhat helpful, but might not be worth the room.

I'm glad there's a way to update the location in this new version. Our building has been shown on the wrong street for years, even though we have tried two or three times to get it corrected by contacting CHQ.

If the functionality is there, but is not apparent, it isn't very useful. I can't speak for everyone else, but I don't tend to scroll all over a page clicking on a bunch of stuff just to see if more detail is available. I used this site for a recent visit to Kanab, UT. My friend lives in the 3rd Ward and the "worship service" is listed as 10:50. We missed all of RS/AP/YW/Pri because it wasn't clear that those meetings were at 9 a.m. Looking at the website, there is no indication that the 10:50 time is not when church starts. I had no reason to double-check the info on the LDS.org ward website.

Alan_Brown wrote:I like it, too -- it's a great improvement.

As for your suggestion: When you click on a particular ward/branch, you are presented with information on the ward, including a link for "Go to Website". From the website it is immediately clear what stake the ward is in. So the functionality you ask for does exist, but it's not presented directly.

Clearly that does require a couple of clicks, but specifying the stake for each ward that is listed would take a lot of space. It's a tradeoff -- listing the stake would be somewhat helpful, but might not be worth the room.

scion wrote:My friend lives in the 3rd Ward and the "worship service" is listed as 10:50. We missed all of RS/AP/YW/Pri because it wasn't clear that those meetings were at 9 a.m. Looking at the website, there is no indication that the 10:50 time is not when church starts.

I noted what it was first put up that "worship service" wasn't a part of the member vocabulary. Apparently it's aimed at non-members. You can find the more traditional "First Meeting" time if you click on a particular ward. So the information is there and just a single mouse click away. Given the limited screen space, I'm not sure what to suggest other then to use "Sacrament" rather then "Worship".

Matt_Rasmussen wrote:I'm glad there's a way to update the location in this new version. Our building has been shown on the wrong street for years, even though we have tried two or three times to get it corrected by contacting CHQ.

I submitted two minor corrections today for meetinghouse locations (my ward and my father's), and received two auto-reply emails from "REMEDY."

To anyone who has ever worked in an organization that uses this tracking application, where REMEDY rules your life, we know what that means. This is now in somebody's queue at CHQ as an action item.

So I think you can be more confident that these feedback transactions will get attention.

I got a reply email with "REMEDY" in the subject so this is great news that they're taking feedback and acting on it.

I can see a problem that can be corrected.

Just to test the meetinghouse locator I only put in the town in which I live and the state. This is generally the only information someone has when they are visiting or moving to an area. The result was essentially an error. Since the town itself does not have a meeting house I got a revised window with this message in red - "In order to complete your search, select a city or town from the list and click on "Search" again." The state was now fixed and the city or town was a list box of cities or towns with meeting houses in the state. Without knowing any more information than this I am sure it will be frustrating.

To further test the locator I tried adding other information. First I tried adding the street address (street address, city or town & state). I got the same results. But when I added the zip code (street address, city or town, state & zip code ||| city or town, state & zip code) I got sixteen wards (eight meeting houses) to choose from. All but three (one meeting house) are in other stakes - and some of them quite a distance away. This is not comforting. While my house address has only been in existence for three years the zip code has been around for at least a few decades. The entire zip code is encompassed in only one ward.

So why can't the locator return my ward as the ward for my address or my zip code? I can envision ambiguity of correct meeting houses and/or wards where a zip code is split amoung wards but not for this situation. How about not knowing where an address is located even when web sites such as Google, GoogleEarth, Yahoo and others have no trouble finding it?

@jdlessley,

Were you searching for "Blacklick OH?" That seemed to work for me. The web site returned three potential meetinghouses, and said the assigned congregation is the Gahanna Ward at the Reynoldsburg meetinghouse. Is that wrong?

Yes I was. But my results are not like yours. I just tried it again before replying to your post and got the same results as before.

I am using IE7 if that means anything.

OK. I rebooted my computer and started over again. The results are different. I now get the closest meeting house as the correct one and the assigned congregation is correct.

Just as a note: Before the reboot I had four instances of IE7 open. On one instance I was running several tabs with one of them being the old or current meeting house locator running as a comparrative while on another tab I was running the new meetinghouse locator we are discussing here. It shouldn't make a difference what is on another tab or instance of IE7 but I was getting the old meeting house results on the new meeting house locator tab.

jdlessley wrote:Since the town itself does not have a meeting house I got a revised window with this message in red - "In order to complete your search, select a city or town from the list and click on "Search" again."

This message is not from the new locator at maps.lds.org... I suspect you were in the list-driven old locator, since it would more likely return a message like this. If you can reproduce it on the new site please let us know -- something very weird would be going on, since we don't have lists of cities or towns to pick from... Unless it was on a "Did you mean" screen maybe? But I don't think the wording is as you ahve it and there is no red text... so I'm still thinking it sounds like the old site. Let me know if I'm wrong.

@scion -- I'm sorry you missed your meetings. As others have suggested, it is a balance of member vs non-member and other screen real estate constraints., and of priority between meetings. The worship service is sacrament meeting and is the most important meeting of the day, so that has been highlighted. In many wards it is also the first meeting, but that's no consolation in your case. I will keep thinking about this issue as we design future versions...

Kent Larsen wrote:This is a great improvement, IMO.

I was recently in Durban, South Africa, and discovered that about half the units in and around Durban have bad addresses on the meetinghouse locator. A couple had the name of the South African province, KwaZulu-Natal, listed as the city.

While South Africa, like most countries around the world, has a postal code system, similar to the zipcode used in the US, for some reason the meetinghouse locator doesn't use that code. All these postal code systems have a hierarchy, like the zip code, and close codes often indicate proximity.

Why doesn't the meetinhouse locator using the postal codes outside of the US?

We do have postal code coverage internationally, but unfortunately we don't have local address formats and could possibly be missing some secondary address fields if they are country specific. Feel free to submit problems with details through the Feedback link on the site. That's the best way to get them resolved. As others have noted, the feedback is reviewed and acted on. Also note that some of the onus is on local clerks and leaders to make sure the information is in MLS correctly; GIGO applies Thanks for the feedback.

borenmt wrote:We do have postal code coverage internationally, but unfortunately we don't have local address formats and could possibly be missing some secondary address fields if they are country specific. Feel free to submit problems with details through the Feedback link on the site. That's the best way to get them resolved. As others have noted, the feedback is reviewed and acted on. Also note that some of the onus is on local clerks and leaders to make sure the information is in MLS correctly; GIGO applies Thanks for the feedback.

I think you misunderstand my point.

When I go to the old meetinghouse locator (at http://www.lds.org/basicbeliefs/meetinghouse/ ), I don't get any way to search by postal code outside the US. I choose the country, and it makes me choose a city and then gives me results. No search by postal code.

The new meetinghouse locator (http://maps.lds.org) is in a way worse.

If I enter the country "South Africa" and a postal code that I know is in the database for South Africa ("4001" in this case) I get results for Chihuahua, Mexico!!! If I enter "South Africa" and "1000", I get results for Chile!!

Is this system not meant to let you search by zip code outside of the US?

One additional problem with the new system is that it doesn't allow searching by partial zip codes in the US.

On the old Meetinghouse locator, if I choose the US and enter the first three digits of the zip code, I get all the wards and branches with zip codes that begin with those digits. For example, entering "400" in the zip code field, gives five meetinghouses and seven wards and branches with zip codes that all begin with "400"

On the new if I do the same, I get meetinghouses in another state! Entering "United States" in the country and "400" in the zip code gives me results from Plainview and Lubbock Texas!!!!

Huh?

borenmt wrote:Also note that some of the onus is on local clerks and leaders to make sure the information is in MLS correctly;

Note, though, that the only information clerks and leaders can put into MLS is the meeting times. MLS is not used to update meetinghouse addresses. In fact, it cannot be done in MLS.

In the US and Canada, meetinghouse addresses are updated at CHQ by way of inputs from Facilities Management groups around the country. I would expect that there is an area office responsibility that is similar for units outside of North America.

borenmt wrote:This message is not from the new locator at maps.lds.org... I suspect you were in the list-driven old locator, since it would more likely return a message like this. If you can reproduce it on the new site please let us know -- something very weird would be going on, since we don't have lists of cities or towns to pick from... Unless it was on a "Did you mean" screen maybe? But I don't think the wording is as you ahve it and there is no red text... so I'm still thinking it sounds like the old site. Let me know if I'm wrong.

You are right that the page was the old locator. The situation turned out to be an IE7, computer, or both issue. For some reason while I was getting the pages for both locators simultaneously, each on a different tab in IE7, the old locator page appeared on the tab for the new locator with the results from the old locator search request. Since I had not used the new locator for a while I just assumed there was an attempt to make the new locator look in some respects like the old one. Both tabs on IE7 were now using the old locator site. There is no problem with the new locator. Until I rebooted my computer I was unable to use the new locator.

I'm not sure of the details, but Ive found that tabs in IE7 tend to share data (cookies?). Sometimes the best thing to do is open a new IE7 Window.

@ Kent -- Wow! You're right -- I did totally misunderstand your post. Apologies! I will forward this to the right folks to start looking at this. My guess is that it is ignoring the country and going only with the first perfect postal code match that it finds, instead of using the country as a tie breaker... Thanks again!

fergie34 wrote:I like the new meeting house locater. I do have a request for an update though. I would like to see added to the list the name and location of the stake the units are in. If a member is moving to a new area this would be very helpful.

It would be very helpful if unit numbers were included with the ward and stake information so we could use it to help get records moved to the correct unit.

rpyne wrote:It would be very helpful if unit numbers were included with the ward and stake information so we could use it to help get records moved to the correct unit.

There is a way to get the unit numbers, but it requires a little clicking...

When you are viewing the popup window with all of the information for a specific ward, click the "Go to Website" link. This brings up the LUWS homepage for the unit. In the URL, you can find the unit number. The unit number is always the part of the URL before the ",00.html" part (and the last part of the hypenated number series). For instance, in the follow example the unit number is 480312:

...units/home/0,9781,600-1-7-480312,00.html

After I get the ward unit number, I then click on the stake's link on the ward's hompage to get the stake's unit number the same way.

I learned this trick about the unit numbers in the URL when I was trying to HTML scrape the Membership directory for family photos and then linking them (unsuccessfully) with their vCard entries.

I checked out the the new meeting house locator map web site http://maps.lds.org/ about five weeks ago and discovered that the indicator for my former ward building was incorrectly placed on the map. I sent off a correction form on the 3rd September and duly received an acknowledgement.

Today (7th October) I re-visited the web site and found that the information has not yet been amended!

How long does it normally take to update the information submitted?

Biggles wrote:How long does it normally take to update the information submitted?

I imagine many people have had quicker response than 5 weeks, but I wouldn't think 5 weeks should be considered outlandishly too long of a wait. Keep in mind that Church employees have to verify the corrections submitted are actually...correct. That mapping software is quite public, open to the whole interent audience worldwide; so they have to double-check that the corrections are legit and not somebody playing around or trying to mess with the Church in anyway. I don't know how long it takes to do that.

I have seen a Church Employee encourage someone to resubmit their correction before, so I would say in this case, it couldn't hurt for you to do the same.

mkmurray wrote:I imagine many people have had quicker response than 5 weeks, but I wouldn't think 5 weeks should be considered outlandishly too long of a wait.

... particularly in France, where it may be much more challenging to verify proposed corrections.

I think no one is workng on that. I submit place correction more than 5 weeks ago and nothing happen yet.
To present unwanted corrections it's easy: use an LDS login as for newfamilysearch.
I'm thinking that could be a problem of visualization!
Could be that map and geo-coordinates are not syncronized? It seem to me that all places (for the italian units I checked out) are SudWest misplaces.
How can I check if coordinates in the maps.lds.org match with graphic?
I mean, can I put the coordinates from maps.lds and check them with google earth?

This are geod-coord from maps.lds
latitude (y):45.556312
longitude (x):11.530709
In Google earth this point is not in Vicenza but in Austria!
So I suppose they don't use the same coord-system.

I would expect them to be using the same coordinate system. However, they may use a different way of expressing it.

For lack of a better terminology, theres:

Decimal degrees: dd.dd...
Decimal minutes: dd mm.mm...
Decimal seconds: dd mm ss.ss....

To translate from one to another, you have to do "clock math" since 1 degree = 60 minutes, 1 minute = 60 seconds.

Then there's the issue of what side the hemisphere letter goes on....

"Coordinate system" is a separate issue and involves where the reference point is and the shape of the earth. Most systems today use WGS84. However, if you use information from before 1984, it may be in some other system. Some are close, some are off by quite a bit.

Google earth give me this coordinates.
45°33'22,56"N (latitude, my add)
11°31'47,28" (longitude, my add)
If I transform maps.lds coord from decimal to grades I found:
45°33'22,72" and
11°31'50,55"
This is the difference between the two.
I'll check better.

Alan_Brown wrote:... particularly in France, where it may be much more challenging to verify proposed corrections.

In my original question I omitted to mention that the ward meeting house postion was not my current location, but my previous ward in England. I didn't mention that, as it was just a general question on the time taken to update the information.

However on the the advice given, by mkmurray, I submitted the changes again and in addition added the full zip/postcode, that I was a registered member of this Forum, incuding my pseudonym.

Today (9th October) I checked the Meeting House Locator site and the information has been corrected. Certainly a result.

So I don't know whether giving the additional information speeded things up or that it was just a coincidence.

PS I'm new to this adding contributors quotes etc. So please accept my apologies for not including any additional quotes.

Biggles wrote:So I don't know whether giving the additional information speeded things up or that it was just a coincidence.

It may have been that the system or process is still being developed and it fell through the cracks the first time. I doubt that anyone intentionally drops things, but most folks have more than they can do, and are not paid enough, or are volunteers and are not paid at all.

My to do list piles up much faster than I can get it done, and I have to make a conscious effort every once in a while to rumage all the way down to the bottom of the pile to make sure something important (ha ha, it is all important right) doesn't get missed.

And don't forget to save.

lajackson wrote:It may have been that the system or process is still being developed and it fell through the cracks the first time. I doubt that anyone intentionally drops things, but most folks have more than they can do, and are not paid enough, or are volunteers and are not paid at all.

I appreciate volonteers effort cause, even if in other place, I do the same.
Usually organization help! You can't open the door of a small room to the world wide, hoping that only fews take interest of it.
In my opinion is better to give a key to whom can came in.

lajackson wrote:My to do list piles up much faster than I can get it done, and I have to make a conscious effort every once in a while to rumage all the way down to the bottom of the pile to make sure something important (ha ha, it is all important right) doesn't get missed.

Look at Moses experience! Call captain of 50!

Forgot to say.
Yesterday I made position chance of my unit once more, adding information of my LDSTech profile, and ... today all is done!!

I'm happy to say that not only my last submission is ok. Now all my 5 previous notifications are correct!
My appreciation to all those whom works on it!