How Do I Determine When to Send a Batch Back To Be Redone / Finished?

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This question comes up quite often…

As an arbitrator how do I determine when to send a batch back to be redone / finished versus being the 3rd indexer and completing the work myself?

This is one of the hardest questions I’ve found yet to answer. Mainly because as arbitrators we don’t have enough information from FamilySearch. If we knew how many indexers are within Stake Indexing / Society Groups where they have a leader monitoring their returned work vs. how many are not in groups then we could feel a lot better about just returning the batches or not.

For those in groups:

• Those group leaders don’t get a flag that you’re doing something wrong unless 0.01% of your indexed batches get returned in a month period.
• We know that those group leaders for those in groups don’t have access to see what we’ve done wrong with batches, only that a batch has been sent back to be wiped and redone or sent back to be finished.

For those not in groups:

• Does FamilySearch keep track of you?
• Do they get a flag if you’ve got more than 0.01% returned?

Then these questions / points have arisen:

• Who do you trust to know you’re doing something correctly or wrong if you don’t understand the rules of the project? There’s too many bad arbitrators to trust your Arbitration Review results if you don’t know whether you’re following the correct instructions.
• Support gives conflicting answers all the time as well.
• Then problems are not put into the updates until months later with a lot of the projects. Or with some of them never put into the updates or the instructions are never fixed.
• We’ve also heard support tell our indexers to take it easy on the beginner level projects and to index what they made mistakes on instead of returning it even to be finished. So you’re asking us arbitrators to break our rules by being the 3rd indexer. Which makes the arbitration of batches backlogged even more cause arbitrators are now doing the indexers job that they couldn’t do in the first place.