Matt, (well, maybe I'm also having a bad day, but........... You are not, by any means, alone in your frustration with the quality of data entry. Mal, Vinny, John, myself, and others, (and I think Michelle) are very concerned about this. I just exchanged email tonight with a relatively new volunteer, who works with Louisa J., who wants to help with data entry. She has a lot of solid computer skills and I have confidence that she'd be good in helping with the data entry problem. We can do some cleanup of the legacy data, but in my opinon, we need to really clamp down on our process for data entry. I think we have too many new volunteers who want to do things "their way" and there is no reason why we should put up with this if "their way" is hurting Mickaboo's birds. I don't think we need to stop improvements on our tools; I think we need to do continue with our plans, create documentation, and *impose* processes and rules about how things are done. And volunteers will need to follow those rules! Those whov enter bad data are not the ones running this organization, and we should not be run by them. Consider how much influence and "power' you have in this organization. You *can* make things happen and you can *make* things change. I think we should come up with a plan that involves: 1. upgrading the tools. 2. implementing and enforcing policies and processes we should not put up with sloppy work (birds lives are at stake) 3. cleaning up old data as much as possible Anyway, that is my opinion. And I am every bit as frustrated as you, and it isn't just the two of us. Chloe AMuse wrote:

Hi all! Maybe I'm in just a bad mood today, but it has occurred to me that I don't know why I'm even bothering with a custom mickaboo tab, when people aren't even entering in the most basic data into ASM as it stands.

Check out below; 899/1919 animal records don't even have an "original owner" entry set to show who they were brought in by. The "BroughtInBy" number is 866/899.

So, with 46% of our records not even being complete at a basic level, is it time to spend effort improving the tool, or trying to get people to use it in the first place?

mysql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM animal WHERE OriginalOwnerID ="0" AND SpeciesID != "99"; +----------+ | COUNT(*) | +----------+ | 899 | +----------+ 1 row in set (0.02 sec)

mysql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM animal WHERE SpeciesID != "99"; +----------+ | COUNT(*) | +----------+ | 1919 | +----------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)

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