I've been tracking a few areas (mostly in things that still need to be done around here). It started in December of 2015, when I wanted to start tracking our progress on the Sets Missing Abbreviation Descriptions (glossary). By September of 2016, we finished it. We took care of over 14,000 sets (along with any new ones that came in along the way) in 9 months. It was when we were finishing that up, I started tracking the other areas: Missing Checklists, Missing DOB's, Name Validation System, & Team Validation System. I also have stats on how many names were added to the database month by month (because that's how the database keeps track).
If you're not interested in numbers, I suggest you move on to the next Forum thread. :)
Missing Checklists: Baseline was taken August 2016 - 11,290 versus Today (July 2018) - 6,541. That's a difference of 4,749. Sets that get added to the system with no checklist fall in this bucket. That means we've been adding more sets with checklists and just checklists than just sets. This is adding about 200 checklists on average each month. About 6 or 7 a day. That's in addition to the new sets being added with checklists. Very impressive.
Missing DOB's: As each new PID gets added, if the person adding the PID doesn't take the time to add the bio info, that PID will fall into this area. Baseline was in October 2016 - 40,560 (almost half of those in baseball!). Today - 48,901. That's a negative difference of over 8,000. So what changed? Baseball is down from over 19,000 to just under 12,000. Major progress there. Hockey went from 6,381 to 20,784. (Most added for the name validation.) Just looking at Baseball and Hockey, there's around 7,000 added to the list there. It's only gone up 8,000 since I started keeping track. We need a hockey expert to help us out.
Name Validation: Every time a new set gets added, names and teams need to be validated. If the name isn't linked to a PID, one should be added (with DOB). Baseline was also October 2016 - 17,047 versus today - 13,869. Now, at first glance, this doesn't look all that impressive, however, it actually is. Because of Non-Sport. Baseline - 6,581, today - 11,454. Non-Sport up almost 5,000, everything as a whole down 3,000 - that means everything that's NOT Non-Sport (NNS) is down about 8,000 sets. I have broken the stats down to show only NNS numbers. Baseline - 10,466 - Today - 2,415! When I first started tracking the stats for this one, NS made up only 38% of the sets needing validation. Today, it's over 82%. We need a NS expert to help in this area. Another thing can help is if we can get these sets that shouldn't have any PIDs in them to be converted to having all cards with PID=0.
Team Validation: Baseline October 2106 - 56,559. Today - 37,033. Whoever has been working on these has been doing a tremendous job (this is one area I've pretty much stayed away from, only if I'm in a set already, will I validate it, but I have not gone looking to do any of these. Also, of note, Racing was not being counted as a Team sport in October 2016. It wasn't until December 2016 when the racing teams were added, and there were 5,225 sets introduced at that time missing team validation, and it climbed to almost 5,600. Racing is down to 3,780 today. Baseball was almost cut in half. Basketball is down about 33%. Football is down almost 70%. Soccer is down to about 1/6 of where it started. Multi-Sport has gone up almost 50% while Hockey and Misc Sports have dropped only slightly.
What makes the Name Validation and Missing DOB counts even more impressive is the amount of Names Added to the database in this time frame. Since most of the baselines weren't taken until October 2016, I decided I would only look at the number of names added since that month. So, in that 22 month span, we have added a staggering 83,000 names. (Rounded number, because we always lose some along the way for various reasons, and I didn't recapture all the numbers.) So, even with adding 83,000 new names in the last 22 months (that's about 125 new names PER DAY!!), we've managed to only increase missing Missing DOBs by 8,000 (about 10%). Name Validation goes down because of adding the PIDs. And by the way, in October 2016, we only added about 1600 names, comes out to about 53 per day. We peaked in December 2016 - we added more than 9,000 names that month (more than 290 per day that month alone!). In 2017, we averaged about 140 names added per day.
So, what does this all mean? It means we have a fine team of members working their behinds off making this site better by the minute. We still have a lot of work to do. I also think one place for our opportunity to improve in a really easy manner is simply in the addition or update of sets. Whenever you add a set, do the name and team validation. If you need to add a PID, most DOBs are easy enough to find these days. Add that too. Do it when you're there basically. I know that seems to open up rabbit holes, but generally speaking, the detours aren't too major. :)
We also had a pretty major accomplishment in the Inaccuracies Manager the other day. We actually got the list down to fitting on a single web page (each page will hold up to 50 reports) and all entries were "Admin Needed" - which meant the Level 8's couldn't do the tasks needed. Admin was impressed. Direct quote: "What you guys have done with the Inaccuracies Manager is pretty remarkable. It hadn’t been down to one page since like March."
Keep up the fantastic work. It's really showing now!
-- Dan --
Note: Please see my profile for more info regarding trading (section updated 3/4/2024). I have added a large portion of my inventory to the site, and currently have trading turned on (details are in my profile).