Duplicate athletes in rankings

[NotVeryFast]

Just wanted to alert you to an issue in the swimrankings database that is only going to get worse. Some athletes are in twice, with one entry having a spurious 1st Jan date of birth, e.g. Rachel Komisarz:
http://www.swimrankings.net/index.php?page=athleteDetail&athleteId=1544542
http://www.swimrankings.net/index.php?page=athleteDetail&athleteId=1546449

If you look at the start lists for Eindhoven (http://www.omegatiming.com/swimming/racearchives/2007/eindhoven2007/index.htm), there are a large number of athletes shown with a 1st Jan date of birth, and it seems unlikely they were all born on the 1st Jan. I thought you should be aware this is happening then you can perhaps do something different when you import results to avoid the duplicate athlete entries being created.

[chkaufmann]

Some athletes are in twice, with one entry having a spurious 1st Jan date of birth, e.g. Rachel Komisarz
Thanks for the note. I will correct that.

Regarding the startlist from Eindhoven I don't know where you found one with date of birth. The offical startlist on omegatiming.com only has YOB.

Regarding duplicate athletes: We are aware of that. Since it is much easier to merge two athletes later than to separate, we prefere to have unclear cases separate first.

Our ressources to maintain the swimrankings.net website are very limited so we try to avoid errors in these lists, where federations pay us for the work. This is mainly European rankings and some national federations from Europe.

We appreciate when you find duplicates and report these to us. Just send me an email at ch.kaufmann@splash-software.ch.

Thanks for your help.

Christian Kaufmann

[Linny]

Regarding the startlist from Eindhoven I don't know where you found one with date of birth. The offical startlist on omegatiming.com only has YOB. Here (http://www.omegatiming.com/swimming/racearchives/2007/eindhoven2007/C51A1_SLHeats_2_Heats_Men_100_Back.pdf) is one.

[NotVeryFast]

Regarding the startlist from Eindhoven I don't know where you found one with date of birth. The offical startlist on omegatiming.com only has YOB.
Looking again now, I see that some only have YOB, as you say, perhaps they changed it because of this issue. A couple of examples where they still have DOB are womens 100 back (http://www.omegatiming.com/swimming/racearchives/2007/eindhoven2007/C51A1_SLHeats_1_Heats_Women_100_Back.pdf) and mens 100 back (http://www.omegatiming.com/swimming/racearchives/2007/eindhoven2007/C51A1_SLHeats_2_Heats_Men_100_Back.pdf), particularly if you look at the last heats you see a lot of 1 Jan examples.

I totally appreciate that you have limited resources to run the website, and I think you do a great job, it's a very valuable resource. I just wanted to warn you this is happening in case you weren't already aware and give you advanced warning that the Eindhoven results might have the problem when they reach you.

[chkaufmann]

I'm not so afraid regarding the results of Eindhoven. When matching swimmers during results import we have quite advanced algorithms to do that. But with the amount of results we import each week, duplicates still happen. And many duplicates we have are caused by older results from before 2004 that we collected from different ressources.
It looks like Swiss Timing used different layouts for the start lists in Eindhoven. Not sure why, out of our responsability :-).