Validity check for hiding date?

Question

I noticed that there are a lot of caches which obviously have a wrong hiding date (before the year 2000), e. g. see http://project-gc.com/Tools/MapNESW?country=Germany&hidearchived=on&loop=10&submit=Filter

This falsifies every stastitic based on the hiding date. Can the hiding date be validated in any form? For example, it could be compared with the publishing date. Or the statistic could use the publishing date instead of the hiding date. Since the publishing date is set by a reviewer, it should be more accurate... Or caches with a hiding date which is too early to be true could be excluded from statistics based on the hiding date...

What do you think?

Answer 1

Our vision is that data validation should be performed by the site owning the data (Geocaching.com) and not us.

I don't know in what cases you would like us to change the hidden date, but for whatever reason you want it correct others will expect it to be as it should be (wrong). We will not take that fight and spend half our days tweaking invalid data.

Comments

You are right, it would be better, if the data sources was right. Unfortunately it isn't... So I will ask Groundspeak, if they can and want to do anything to this topic...

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Be aware if you do that
- a lot of old caches does not have a "published" log. It wasn't practiced the first couple of years .
- some caches are released at events (with head start to the attendees) so there will be "Found it"s before "Published"
- The hidden date is meant to be the date that the CO went out and placed the cache. He or she may have done so at any time prior to seeking its publication. Doing any (automated) kind of sanity checks on this may be next to impossible. You can of course state a policy that you are not allowed to pick a hidden date that is more than for instance one year in the past, but that may not be accurate in terms of how long the cache has been there. Not all geocaches are exclusively listed on geocaching.com :)

Answer 2

This is a good idea, though I am not sure whether this would be possible to do as it is only a log date and so wouldn't be picked up by Project-GC. This would be nice to see, though. I looked at the map, and to the oldest, and noticed that the hidden date was 1900 and not in 2014, like it should be. I didn't think this was allowed!