I noticed that Informatica have launched a new website called www.doyoutrustyourdata.com, to highlight issues with poor quality information from the media.
My personal opinion on the site is that it isn’t very nice looking (but then I’m not a big fan of black on green). However, I’m biased as I moderate the IQTrainwrecks.com blog for the IAIDQ which has been doing this for over 2 years now in an occasionally tongue in cheek manner. IQTrainwrecks.com gets reasonably good search returns on google (and we’re looking at ways to improve that further).
I’m flattered that Informatica have stumbled upon the same idea that the IAIDQ had back in 2006. I hope that we can figure out a way to have both sites working together for the benefit of information consumers everywhere. For example, the IAIDQ would love to reward members for submitting stories to IQTrainwrecks.com but our resources aren’t extensive enough to fund that (yet).
[Update] As Vincent McBurney correctly points out, the IAIDQ wasn’t the first to try to create a resource like this. IQTrainwrecks is a spiritual descendant of www.dataquality.com and also the listing of issues that Tom Redman has been tracking over on www.navesink.com). [/update]
That’s a catchy URL they have there! One of the earliest data quality monitoring sites was at http://www.dataquality.com who tried to write about data quality problems in the press a few years ago. They couldn’t keep up with all the mistakes! It has been silent for a few years now.
It’s a fancy looking site, I don’t know whether the “online book” interface will be as popular as a blog that you can subscribe to. I am guessing most visitors will visit it once and not go back. There are reasons why blogs are so popular – RSS or email subscription, comment threads on each item, Google search access etc.
Maybe you should submit a couple of your Trainwreck stories each month to win the Wii and then give it away on your blog!
Vincent,
You are right of course, IQTrainwrecks is a spiritual successor to dataquality.com (a much missed resource). A lot of people (Tom Redman for example) have done similar things. What we wanted to do was to open it up to comment and discussion a bit, hence the blog.
The hardest part for me in moderating the IQTrainwrecks blog is to filter the content and the news stories and write them up (or helping our contributors write them up) in an interesting way that engages the reader- otherwise people won’t come back. Also, I’m becoming a bit fanatical about ‘data lineage’ of the story… so we always try to have links back to the origin of our commentary.
That’s why there are often lags between posts over on IQTrainwrecks
On that note, take a look over at IQTrainwrecks over the coming days. I’ve been working on two recent trainwrecks (one a short one, and one big one), and Keith Underdown in Wales has submitted a new one as well.
As for your suggestion for taking the Wii out of Informatica… I’ll have to check with the IAIDQ’s Ethics Committee on that one.
Informatica are sending me a Wii! I picked up the monthly prize for a data quality story. Just a little one I hadn’t used on my blog. Easy pickings! I suspect I was one of the few people to submit a story.