Hello. I've been thinking recently about the various different OpenGuides we have floating around, and the individual styles that they're all evolving.
I've been doing a bit of copyediting on some of the non-RGL guides recently; I feel pretty comfortable doing this on the Oxford Guide because Socks thanked me for it on #openguides. I was wondering if it might be a good idea if we maybe chose a week some point soon to visit each other's guides and do a bit of editing. Even if we're unfamiliar with a particular city, we can still do typo fixing, tidying up formatting, sorting out any duplicated content, making sure everything's in the category it should be in, even adding new categories to pull together existing content, or adding content such as external links if that's appropriate for that particular guide.
(Maybe making progress on the OGL Great Renaming could form part of this, if that project is still going on? Though I wouldn't want it to dominate the week.)
I think this would build up the community feeling a bit more, as well as breathing fresh life into all of the guides, and being a project that even non-coders can get their teeth into. What do people think?
A prerequisite for this would be some documentation about what is/isn't appropriate on a given guide, since this isn't always obvious - for example, I've not been sure whether it's appropriate for me to add new categories to the Oxford Guide - but having this documentation would be very useful anyway, and is a worthwhile project in itself. I think it's also a project that _demands_ external input, since it's only by having other people asking "is it OK to do this?" that we can be sure we've set down the things that are so embedded in our minds that we never actually think about them.
Thoughts?
Kake
On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 12:49:40PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:
I've been doing a bit of copyediting on some of the non-RGL guides recently; I feel pretty comfortable doing this on the Oxford Guide because Socks thanked me for it on #openguides. I was wondering if it might be a good idea if we maybe chose a week some point soon to visit each other's guides and do a bit of editing. Even if we're unfamiliar with a particular city, we can still do typo fixing, tidying up formatting, sorting out any duplicated content, making sure everything's in the category it should be in, even adding new categories to pull together existing content, or adding content such as external links if that's appropriate for that particular guide.
Yes - this sounds excellent.
(Maybe making progress on the OGL Great Renaming could form part of this, if that project is still going on? Though I wouldn't want it to dominate the week.)
I think this would build up the community feeling a bit more, as well as breathing fresh life into all of the guides, and being a project that even non-coders can get their teeth into. What do people think?
A prerequisite for this would be some documentation about what is/isn't appropriate on a given guide, since this isn't always obvious
- for example, I've not been sure whether it's appropriate for me to
add new categories to the Oxford Guide - but having this documentation would be very useful anyway, and is a worthwhile project in itself. I think it's also a project that _demands_ external input, since it's only by having other people asking "is it OK to do this?" that we can be sure we've set down the things that are so embedded in our minds that we never actually think about them.
And this is particularly good to have at a targetted time, so that people are geared up to answering these sort of questions - especially on IRC.
Thoughts?
To give people a chance to gear up to this, how about declaring the week commencing 14th May as such a week?
Dominic.
On Sun 06 May 2007, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
To give people a chance to gear up to this, how about declaring the week commencing 14th May as such a week?
Sounds good to me. So, it sounds like so far we have as definite participating guides:
The Oxford Guide The Randomness Guide to London The Vegan Guide to Oxford
Anyone else like to add themselves to this list?
Kake
On May 7, 2007, at 10:02 AM, Kake L Pugh wrote:
On Sun 06 May 2007, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
To give people a chance to gear up to this, how about declaring the week commencing 14th May as such a week?
Sounds good to me. So, it sounds like so far we have as definite participating guides:
The Oxford Guide The Randomness Guide to London The Vegan Guide to Oxford
Anyone else like to add themselves to this list?
Kake
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I'll happily comply after the 15th of that week (busy up to the 15th).
-Chris
This one time, at band camp, Kake L Pugh wrote:
Anyone else like to add themselves to this list?
Happy for anyone to jump into the Tourist Engineer. I'm reasonably happy with the content, as I wrote most of it ;) What I'd really love is for people to add their favourite geek-tourist things.
On Tue 08 May 2007, Rev Simon Rumble simon@rumble.net wrote:
Happy for anyone to jump into the Tourist Engineer. I'm reasonably happy with the content, as I wrote most of it ;) What I'd really love is for people to add their favourite geek-tourist things.
Ooh, yes - the worldwideness of the Tourist Engineer means we can all jump in and add content, regardless of where we live.
One thing I've never been really sure about is what comes under the remit of the guide - I'm not an engineer, though I do like looking at bridges and things. It'd be useful to have some kind of guidelines as to what belongs on the guide - as a possibly extreme example, is interesting brickwork enough to merit inclusion?
Kake
This one time, at band camp, Kake L Pugh wrote:
One thing I've never been really sure about is what comes under the remit of the guide - I'm not an engineer, though I do like looking at bridges and things. It'd be useful to have some kind of guidelines as to what belongs on the guide - as a possibly extreme example, is interesting brickwork enough to merit inclusion?
I chose "engineer" because a mate of mine who is one said he wouldn't look at a "geek tourist" site.
If you're a geek and you think it's interesting, I suspect it qualifies. Go for it!
Most of what's in there is big stuff or historical, but that's in no way what it's restricted to. Hell, I've even put in the Brogo Rotolactor, a device from my childhood for efficiently milking cows, which I thought was cool. http://engineer.openguides.org/?Brogo_Rotolactor
The Brogo Rotolactor seems like the kind of thing we need in Milton Keynes, it's the kind of thing they'd invent here, do they do a version for Concrete Cows? http://miltonkeynes.openguides.org/?Concrete_Cows
We'd welcome anybody taking a dive into Milton Keynes Open Guide and making any general critiques and advice for improvement as well as more specific grammar checking and tidying. http://miltonkeynes.openguides.org/
Tom's out in Canada at the moment though and I am up to my neck in deadlines this month so I think our contributions might be over a longer period to other folks (we are trying to get round to making at least one entry to everybody else's guide though as we travel around :-) ).
regards Mark
Mark Gaved Knowledge Media Institute The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes, UK MK7 6AA
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/mark
-----Original Message----- From: openguides-dev-bounces@lists.openguides.org on behalf of Rev Simon Rumble Sent: Tue 5/8/2007 1:01 AM To: openguides-dev@lists.openguides.org Subject: Re: [OGDev] Visiting other OpenGuides
This one time, at band camp, Kake L Pugh wrote:
One thing I've never been really sure about is what comes under the remit of the guide - I'm not an engineer, though I do like looking at bridges and things. It'd be useful to have some kind of guidelines as to what belongs on the guide - as a possibly extreme example, is interesting brickwork enough to merit inclusion?
I chose "engineer" because a mate of mine who is one said he wouldn't look at a "geek tourist" site.
If you're a geek and you think it's interesting, I suspect it qualifies. Go for it!
Most of what's in there is big stuff or historical, but that's in no way what it's restricted to. Hell, I've even put in the Brogo Rotolactor, a device from my childhood for efficiently milking cows, which I thought was cool. http://engineer.openguides.org/?Brogo_Rotolactor
openguides-dev@lists.openguides.org
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Chris Prather -
Dominic Hargreaves -
Kake L Pugh -
M.B.Gaved -
Rev Simon Rumble