Seal Wildbook, encounter dates

In which Wildbook did the issue occur?
Seal Wildbook

What happened?
We submit all game camera encounters only by date, not date & time. For example 2020-05-22 00:00. When our data was migrated from Codex to Wildbook, it seems that maybe because of the time zone difference all dates were changed to day before the actual date.

For example here: Seals Wildbook
The date is 2020-05-22 00:00 but I did check from our raw data, that the real date is 2020-05-23.

I did not run into this while data was in Codex, so I assume this happened with data migration, but I am not 100% sure. This could also be the case with encounters sent by public without set time or digital camera without set time.

Encounters with set time don’t seem to have the same issue.

Best,
Piia

Thanks for letting us know! I’ll need some time to research this further.

Thanks for your patience. Codex used a time zone calculation that was never fully implemented in Codex’s front end. When I look at the same sighting in the old Codex, it shows the date as May 22, 2020 corresponding with my own time zone.

Wildbook, however, doesn’t use time zones and transferred the date data without consideration for the time zone in Codex. If you find encounters that are off by one day according to your raw data, they need to be fixed manually.

I also noticed, that times are off, maybe with all older encounters, by 3 hours.

Never noticed this in Codex, since I had to use time as indicator of right encounter when we couldn’t see location names. But once again not sure how wide spread this is and was it there also in Codex.

I took some random 2021 encounters and they have it wrong:

New encounters submitted have the right date & time.

hi @PiiaMutka

I’m sorry, I saw this last week and started researching, but I had forgotten to post a comment here. We’re still looking into this.

It looks like this is related to the time zone issue you reported upthread. The short answer is that we’ll need to add time zone support to Wildbook. However, its implementation in Wildbook will have to happen in multiple stages over multiple releases. Here is a link to the ticket: Timezone support · Issue #721 · WildMeOrg/Wildbook · GitHub

You can fix the time/date issue manually as you come across them if you want it resolved quickly and don’t want to wait for the official fix.

Ok,

What happens to the fixed dates or times when the official fix eventually happens? Will they stay correct or are they going to change now to the other way?

Anyhow it’s probably easier for us to wait for the fix, there are so many encounters and all should be checked from old, stored data to be sure. But I did already fix some encounters, when I thought there would be only couple and the cause was human error.

We will work to be non-destructive and will provide an announcement for any changes so people know what to look for. The exact implementation hasn’t been determined yet.

Thank you! :heart:

We will leave the data as it is now for now.

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