On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 11:34:40PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:

On Mon 21 Sep 2009, Paul Lombard Paul.Lombard@1stcontact.com wrote:

...

I'm on the London open guide directory (1st contact jobs duplicated like 5 times (!) )

I realise this might be a slightly sensitive subject - but if there is nobody willing to step up and actively admin OGL, it may be time to gracefully retire it from service. Its current state is kind of embarrassing.

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?

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:11:39AM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 11:34:40PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:

...

...

I realise this might be a slightly sensitive subject - but if there is nobody willing to step up and actively admin OGL, it may be time to gracefully retire it from service. Its current state is kind of embarrassing.

On Wed 23 Sep 2009, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li 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?

The only new pages that have been added recently are adverts. The information that was added by actual users is all out of date by at least four years. The transport pages are particularly misleading, since there have been many changes in those years. Nobody is curating the information, and there's no consistency of style. The coverage is confusingly patchy. The naming scheme is stuck between the pre-great-renaming postcode-in-title thing and the half-completed great rename. There are too many pages with content consisting solely of e.g. "View all pages in Locale Newington Green".

Is it really just me that thinks this? Are my standards too high?

This may be a London thing - to my eyes, as a Londoner who keeps up with the various London blogs and online guides to London, OGL is a mess - but perhaps to someone used to less-crowded online "markets" it's not quite so bad?

I'm not trying to criticise your work in keeping OGL free of wikispam

• that's an achievement in itself - but I do think that for a large

and constantly-changing city such as London there is a lot more to the job than the task of keeping the guide viagra-free.

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?

On Thu 17 Dec 2009, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

From the perspective of a person wanting to write about the city they

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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'm starting to agree. And no-one on the OGL list replied when I dropped the hint about getting rid of it at

http://lists.openguides.org/pipermail/openguides-london/2010-January/000536....

so I will implement the read-only bit as soon as I get a round tuit (if someone reading this fancies a little coding, then a patch to OpenGuides to disable all the writable features would be great :)

I'll probably also put robot meta tags to stop indexing.

I've now done this.

Cheers, Dominic.

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 05:50:30PM +0000, Daniel Alexander Smith wrote:

I'm interested in grabbing a copy of the RDF export of the data (and possibly, a dump of the DB history's sake), so that it can be reused in Semantic Web projects (initially here at University of Southampton).

There is a bit of a bug preventing me from doing so at the moment - ampersands are not properly escaped in RDF.pm - It looks like they are not transformed by the escaping module (I think because it's designed to escape HTML entities, not for XML serialisation).

Is there any chance this could be fixed on OGL so that I can crawl download the RDF?

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