Not the BBC Genome team at work - but we thought you would like this picture of an engineer installing cable in the new BBC Wales Broadcasting House in 1965
When we launched Genome just over two years ago we had no idea how popular the ability to make corrections to programme listings would be. It turns out that it's been quite popular - as I write we've accepted more than 175,000 edits. Thank you to everyone who has worked so diligently to improve the quality of the data.
When a correction is suggested it is sent from one of the four Genome web servers to an admin server for review by the moderating team. When a change is accepted it is then sent back to the web servers where it is applied to the main Genome database.
The current system has worked reasonably well but it isn't as flexible as we'd like it to be. In addition to individual corrections suggested via the Genome website we also want to make bulk changes to the data - for example when new sources of programme listings are discovered or to fix an OCR error that affects many programmes in the same way. We're also working on being able to split listings where a single item should be broken into multiple programmes. The Genome software doesn't currently handle those kinds of edits.
We've been working on a more flexible and general purpose version of this core functionality. It allows all changes to the Genome data to be handled in the same way. That makes the code simpler and more reliable which, in turn, makes it easier for us to introduce new editing features.
We've been testing this new code for a few weeks and now it's time to release it. Because we're switching to an entirely new way of synchronising edits between the public web servers and the admin server we will have to disable editing while we migrate to this new system. We hope to complete the switch over in a few days.
At first you won't (we hope) notice any changes; our initial goal is to get everything working as before with the new code. Once we're happy that we've done that we can start introducing new editing features and publishing some of the additional listing sources we've discovered.
