The new ratings system will have something the current system lacks, the ability to schedule an event for re-rating if there are changes to it. The most common error is an incorrect ID, though we do get some reports of mis-reported results of individual games. (Based on the e-mail to the feedback addresses, at times I suspect that 5% of events have at least one ID error in them.)
This raises an interesting technical issue. If a tournament needs to be re-rated but some of the players who competed in it have already competed in other events, what should we do about any change to their rating in the re-rated event?
The logical answer is also the most complicated one: If an event has to be re-rated and there are followup events for those players, re-rate those events too!
This would allow us to do several things:
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We could rate events as soon as they pass all the validation steps. (See my lengthy post in another topic on this issue.) Such ratings would be PRELIMINARY.
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Right now the goal is to rate all events that have passed validation in a batch process once a week. That cuts down somewhat on the number of events that are rated out of chronological order, since within each batch we rate in ending-date (and section number) order.
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If we’re re-rating for other reasons, why not re-rate the entire file (back to some reasonable starting point) so that events are rated in chronological order?
Bill Goichberg and I have discussed this notion quite a bit, we feel it would be practical to re-rate events just ahead of a ratings supplement. (Bill actually wants me to go back and rate all of the events going back to 1992, but I see a lot of data quality problems with that.)