On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 11:34:40PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote: Could you be more specific? What active admin do you think it needs (I'm tending to the pending moderations when I get time, but otherwise don't do much). What is embarrassing about its current state? -- Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/ PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:11:39AM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote: I'm sorry for not replying to this sooner. There are a lot of good points here and I felt I need to reflect for a while; I wasn't planning on it taking this long. I think that there is a clash of different philosophies here, to some extent. On the one hand, while I see the benefit of a well-looked-after wiki, I try and stick to the idea that there is not much on a wiki that is actively harmful, and that as long as the context is clear, out of date information is better than nothing. Maybe that's just my coping strategy for the situation that the Oxford Guide's in where something that's used up so much of my energy over the years is looking a little shabby round the edges due to me running out of steam, even though others do still contribute. It doesn't seem that we can really compete on a technical level with the current state of the art in web-based presentation of the geo-ful content we're interested nowadays - I come across sites that do better every week - but that doesn't mean that there isn't still a niche there waiting to be filled. (I also wonder whether we can completely start again with the OpenGuides codebase and come up with something which competes in the web2.0 space, but I don't think I will ever have the time or energy to drive that myself). All of that doesn't really address the specific points you made about the London guide, but on the other hand I do wonder to what extent you consider the other linked-to (from http://openguides.org) guides to be in a similar state. A lot of them never even took off. At the very least I do think we need to change the style of london.o.o to make it clear that the content is considered stale, and we probably also want to disable edits (having a completely read-only guide involves a little bit of work in the code, as it's not a concept that's currently supported). Maybe we also want to put some hints in to tell search engines not to bother. But should we take it down altogether? I don't feel able to; as custodians of community provided data we should try and keep it relevant and useful, but if we can't do that shouldn't we at least retain it so that the useful parts are still accessible? -- Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/ PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)

On Thu 17 Dec 2009, Dominic Hargreaves <dom(a)earth.li> wrote: I do agree that under many circumstances out-of-date information is better than nothing. You'll see that the vegan guide to Oxford is still up, despite being a decade out of date, and that's because people specifically asked me not to take it down. I also agree that the context needs to be clear - this is why on RGL we're moving towards being somewhat fanatical about dating things, stating our sources, etc. Even though RGL is actively maintained, London is so big that it's not really possible to go round and re-check things even yearly. The Oxford Guide looks fine to me, FWIW. Oxford is nowhere near as rapidly-changing as London (this is actually part of the reason I moved from Oxford to London in the first place). live in, OpenGuides is still the best solution in my opinion. I can't think of anything else that would let me organise my data so well (not just geodata, but the categories too). I wouldn't be against a rewrite. I wouldn't be up for driving it, but I would be happy to hack on it. Having said that, I think my main frustration with the current state of OpenGuides is the interface, specifically the all-or-nothing Google map plotting. I would like to have a slideable map that loaded pointers on-the-fly, and that I could ask to include only pubs, pubs+Chinese restaurants, etc. I don't know the other cities well enough to judge their guides - I can only really comment on Oxford, Cambridge, and London. I think the Oxford and Cambridge guides are fine. I have trouble finding any useful parts in it, to be honest. I do get your point about community-provided data - it _is_ generally somewhat unethical to solicit data from people, give them the impression that their data is safe, and then remove their access to it - but the reason I brought this up at the time when I did bring it up is that I'm not sure there's anyone left who actually cares about OGL's data. Kake

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 09:36:36PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote: I've now done this. Cheers, Dominic. -- Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/ PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 05:50:30PM +0000, Daniel Alexander Smith wrote: Patches or at least a problem report[1] welcome (and if it's fixed in the release versions it'll get rolled out to london.openguides.org), but I'm unlikely to spend any time on this particular issue. Dominic. [1] http://dev.openguides.org/report/1 or http://dev.openguides.org/newticket; register first at http://dev.openguides.org/register -- Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/ PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)