The recent flurry of new Associations has provided us with thousands of new summits. It should be clear that the Management Team cannot possibly check the precise details for every new summit, so ensuring the accuracy of the data in each ARM is the responsibility of the relevant AM. Unfortunately human errors do occur, sometimes only coming to light well after the publication of the ARM. Some errors in the summit details of new Associations are presently coming to our attention, and we ask for the patience of participants in the programme whilst these errors are identified and dealt with.
It is a miracle that such a small group of volunteers can manage such an organisation. Thank you and good luck.
May I request that the MT develop a prescribed process for the AMs to report and request correction of the various errors that can occur in the program? A database which logs and tracks status of such requests would also be welcome.
With the new system, AMs can correct errors in their association directly by editing their file on Google Docs. All you need to do then is email me to advise, and I’ll upload it to update the Database.
What is that old phrase? “The merely difficult we do straight away, miracles take a little longer!”
The master copies of the summit data are held in Google Documents and are accessible for online editing by members of the MT and the relevant AM. A task progression spreadsheet is being developed. Requests for specific new facilities and formal procedures should be made directly to the MT, we are always open to new ideas.
We are now in a position to give a little more information about the recent spate of errors affecting the database.
It has been determined that there is a systematic error affecting three of the Spanish Associations – EA3, EA4 and EA5. Instead of the summit position being input as decimal degrees, the superficially-similar UTM position was used instead. This had the effect of moving the indicated position significantly to the north-east, well away from Spanish territory.
Now that the cause has been established, the Association Managers have been advised of the details, together with various tools that can be used to correct the data. Once these tasks have been completed, the revised data will be uploaded to the SOTA database, and the amended ARMs posted on the website.
In the meantime, participants can continue to work all Spanish activations, safe in the knowledge that all listed summits fully comply with SOTA rules. All that is wrong is the quoted lat/long.
superficially-similar UTM position was used instead.
Thanks for posting that detail.
However it’s not the only error. I’ve tried applying that transformation, and the vast majority of the summits do indeed move to a plausible location. However it still leaves a few out at sea, and some colocated pairs.
I have released a new summits.kmz despite these remaining errors.
Reading Tom’s post “With the new system, AMs can correct errors in their association directly by editing their file on Google Docs.” It seems that AM (and may be RM) have been advised of the " various tools that can be used to correct the data".
I’ve done a few corrections to the UTM transformations I did yesterday and released yet another summits.kmz file to the usual places.
I had forgotten about the inherent zone ambiguity in UTM, and that Spain crosses 3 different zones. Since the zone isn’t present in the database coordinates, it has to be inferred. There may still be a few mistakes, but the visualisation is looking a lot better now.
