July 11, 2014
2:12 p.m.
Lester Caine wrote:
I had thought there was an agreement that accurate historic data would be retained when the previous cull was proposed even though the 1970 limit is used?
Yes, we want to keep data that we have a reasonable amount of confidence in. The recent proposal attempted to discard data for which the only source (Shanks) has proven to be very unreliable in the past, when applied to out-of-the-way locations before 1970. (I clearly went too far in that proposal, and plan to fix that soon.) The general rule of thumb Shanks used seems to have been that when there was a gap in his database, he made something up. The tz database does not need to perpetuate this tradition everywhere.