General Forum

Last year I decided I would try and tackle the team validations for baseball sets.  I can't remember what the number was of unvalidated sets, almost all of which didn't not have complete teams listed, but I think it was around 18,000 or so.  I just looked and we are down to just over 9800.  So slowly making progress.  I made my main focus the mid-2000's where we had tons of sets, with tons of inserts and parallels.  I also was trying to tiddy up the checklists as I went, adding card prefixes and suffixes, notations, etc.  I'm still working on it, taking on a set when I have a break at work or at home.  But this isn't to toot my own horn.  It is a humble request to ask if there is any among us that collect Japanese or Minor League sets if they find the time I would love some help getting those sets tamed.  With over 9800 sets still yet to be validated there is plenty of work on MLB sets, which anyone is welcome to help with as well, and there are a tons of Japanese and Minor League sets and inserts to validate and it's not an area I have any expertise with.  Plus once the baseball teams are finished there's always that monster that is football.

Keep up the good work helping make this the best card collecting site on the web!!

I've spent many, many hours on name validation (I realize I'm not the only one) and I hesitate to mess with the Asian sets. So many names that seem new are very similar to existing names already existing.  I hate create unnecessary PIDs if a card is an existing player with a letter lost in translation.

I started dabbling in the foreign sets a while back (a year or so ago), but things have been a little upside down here, plus then some other features were added here that I've been involved with. I have been updating a ton of MiLB sets recently.

The thing with the foreign sets, and I got this directly from one of our experts who was entering the sets, a lot of the checklists were created by sounding out the Japanese or Chinese characters (or using computer aided voice synthesis). I found many, many instances where a name was spelled (for example) Yamaguchi in one set and then Yamuguchi in the next. Essentially, pronounced the exact same in Japanese, spelled differently in English characters. (This is why you may see some variation in some of the foreign PIDs already there.) Doing these sets takes a lot of time. Sometimes, if the name was spelled Yamaaguchi, I would edit the name to match (by removing the double letter - most likely a typo), but if it was Yamuguchi, I would just link it to the already existing PID.

At one point, I think I had most (if not all) of the MiLB sets verified. I know for a fact, I haven't looked at that (or the stats) Since August, and before that was May, and I think the checking of the stats in August was only that. A year ago, Baseball had almost 3600 sets that needed validation, just over 17,000 total sets. Nice job everyone!

And I'm sure I made some typos along the way.  I'll start working on these and see what kind of dent I can make.