World Rankings Lists
MastersRankings is working on gathering as many results as possible to compile accurate World Rankings. The challenge has been finding results and, in some cases, translating. Consequently, worldwide lists are not yet complete. There are multiple selections for rankings lists which make it easy to find any.
So many, like WMA, Regional and Affiliate representatives plus meet organizers, timing companies and athletes, are helping get meet results for inserting into the rankings. We saw a big increase in 2018. We will build on this progress and is promising that reasonably complete, all inclusive rankings lists from 2013 forward are achievable. Frankly, the willingness to help exceeds MastersRankings bandwidth to respond!
Sometimes it is difficult to communicate through emails what is needed to efficiently insert performances. Format, file type and information included can make huge differences in the time to insert. It took around 40 hours to completely insert an annual, international meet with about 2,500 performances when the results were taken from a PDF. There were probably many errors and duplicate athletes created. The next time we were provided a file with a set format and complete information. It took around 4 hours to insert the same number of performances with no errors caused by manual conversion.
List Quality
List quality means including all eligible performances accurately – no false marks, duplicate names or spelling errors. We are striving to achieve this. This site hosted US Rankings using databases starting in 2007 and World Rankings starting in 2014 using the model developed for US. We refine procedures based on lessons learned and sometimes use better understood factors within the US to test improvements. Most of the time these result in a program or program improvement making this site a little more manageable and complete lists achievable. Improvements made in 2018 include identifying source (mostly websites) of meet results; identifying & removing performances using non-WMA Age Group implements and different hurdles / distance easier; identifying unusually good performances for an athlete.
Using the 2018 US rankings as a barometer, which are published annually, we compiled more performances and included more complete meet results than ever before, reviewed over 1,500 flagged performances while doing final proofreading and banned an athlete for repeatedly submitting a rejected performance. We will continue our progress in 2019 to easily include more performances, fewer mistakes and fewer incorrect marks. Worldwide lists should be more complete during the year than ever in 2019.
New Website
It is needed to keep up with current security and technology. Since we are doing it anyway, we will incorporate improvement requests plus focus on getting to information quickly. Your requests and suggestions are much welcome and appreciated (make them here). The new website will be better organized, intuitive and, where appropriate, have multiple ways of quickly getting to the information you want.
