Just to reinforce what Bill said above - I would envisage rerunning this every so often to check the geocoding in particular. I have a number of oddities (so this plug-in has proved
seriously useful, thanks) but without understanding quite how I got these oddities in the first place, I currently feel that an audit run every so often would help reassure me.
I've checked my Singletons and Plot Pairs - all are OK, so I've set Low Usage Place Parts to zero, rather than Exception them - my logic there is that if geocoding errors do creep in again, then I don't want to have Exceptioned some error places.
That leaves Deviation - plus some Repetition.....
Repetition is my name for a completely different check that I've done manually - I sorted the place-names tab on Latitude / Longitude, scrolled down and found a massive number of places with the same Latitude / Longitude - all in the middle of Loch Tay! It turns out that my geocoding for (just) Scotland gives or gave co-ordinates in the middle of Loch Tay. Some obscure places - e.g. Wester Caputh, Perthshire, Scotland - were geocoded as if they read just Scotland. Curious - not even Perthsire, Scotland. Even stranger, Montrose, Forfarshire, Scotland was also in the middle of the Loch but I just regeocoded it and it worked fine, so why it went wrong in the first place (or which geocoding routine I used), no idea.
Back to Mike's Plug-In...
I'm slowly working through my Deviations (ooh, err, missus
) where I found some amusing errors - some obscure places in Scotland had been mapped to
Snodland in Kent! And some obscure places in England had ended up in England, Arkansas, USA!
Trying to get the right Standardized value (to match the Google Geocoder used in the Map Life Facts plug-in) can be an art. I couldn't get it to pick up Rattray in Perthshire - I got one in Aberdeenshire. It mapped OK if I standardized to Blairgowrie and Rattray (they're twin settlements) - at which point I saw my Rattray
was on the map so nudged the icon to the right point and removed the standardization.
As for West Derby - well, that had previously mapped as the west part of Derby, Derbyshire. Of course. West Derby, Liverpool,
Lancashire, England doesn't geocode well - it ends up near Ormskirk. Instead, West Derby, Liverpool, England geocodes fine... Less is more.
So now I'm just working through the data - I may be some time but many, many thanks Mike.