Taking census' more accurately (Questable Census?)

@_@ · Post by **@_@** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 12:45 pm

A problem i have with this site is the census information is sometimes completely inaccurate. Say an alliance character takes his census at night when most people play. then a horde character takes his census at 10am in the morning.

I can safely say the alliance numbers will be much bigger while the horde numbers will be much smaller.

I think you should do something like average the numbers. Or only display data if the census are one hour apart. There are all sorts of solutions.

Thanks for listening.

Post by **Rollie** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 1:18 pm

I don't think you have looked very closely at the data that is collected. The data displayed is a collection of all data captured in the past 30 days for characters over level 10. This includes all submissions which are taken all throughout the day.

If I were only taking the 2 samples as you noted, then yes, the numbers would be skewed. But more likely is the scenario where I will get submissions from several times through out the day, for both factions, over several days time. So in essence, the samples come from factions and times throughout the days. These numbers are then displayed.

You can also view the Activity pages to actually see the times when Censi were taken, and the average number of players seen during that sample.

Granted, for poorly represented realms, the numbers are less accurate. But a large number of the realms get regular updates and can be used to get a very near accurate result of realm makeup demographic.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Apr 30, 2005 3:36 pm

hmmm i read the faqs and didnt see that you took data from multiple polls didnt really look elsewhere but i did try to look for how the census were done thanks.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Mon May 02, 2005 5:39 pm

very interesting...

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu May 19, 2005 8:41 am

Anonymous wrote:hmmm i read the faqs and didnt see that you took data from multiple polls didnt really look elsewhere but i did try to look for how the census were done thanks.

The way I gathered it works is from all the users out there running the census mod and submitting their findings to this site. So the site is getting submissions from an army of users from different realms at different times of the day. I usually run my census at peak time, but sometimes I'll do it in the morning too.