Before I forget, here is some of the stuff we discussed during my week
in Oxford, regarding various aspects of the scope of the guide.
1) Geographical scope.
http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Scope_Of_The_Guide says:
"Obviously the guide should be about things to do within Oxford
City. However, locations outside the City may be okay as long as they
don't stray too far and don't belong better on another wiki. For
example, we have articles on places in Kidlington, but Witney, Didcot
or Aylesbury are probably too far away."
Janet has however suggested that Kidlington is also too far away, as
is Abingdon, but Botley is certainly part of Oxford, so saying
"nothing outside the ring road" doesn't really work. Owen has
suggested the traditional "6 miles from Carfax" definition. Dom
thinks it's a bit tricky because Abingdon is unlikely to ever have its
own Open Guide, so where should a person write about/document
Abingdon, if they happen to want to do so?
(Please correct me if I have wrongly paraphrased anyone there.)
2) Completism vs. selectivity.
Owen thinks (and I agree with him) that completism is the way to go,
rather than trying to be selective on the grounds of e.g. notability.
This means that the Guide should have an entry for every business
within its geographical scope. These entries don't have to contain
"reviews" (see next point) or a vast amount of text, but should give a
brief yet comprehensive overview of what the business is/does.
Example:
http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?William_Morris
3) Subjectivity vs. objectivity.
Related to the above, we've started splitting off subjective "review"
content from the main pub/restaurant/etc pages into subpages of
people's userpages.
Example:
http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Arbathttp://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Kake/Reviews/Arbat
The idea is that we would encourage most people to write their reviews
on Daily Info, or on their own blogs, and we will then link to the
relevant Daily Info page or blog post. Regular contributors can be an
exception to this, if they really don't want to host their reviews
elsewhere[0], but in this case the reviews will always be under their
userpage rather than on the main restaurant page.
[0] I fall into this category, so am somewhat biased on this question.
4) Things that have closed.
The plan that Janet and I hashed out between us is thus. When a
business closes, we remove all its categories and locales, add it to
the "Closed" category, and make it very clear on the page that the
business is no longer in, er, business. When something else opens up
on the same spot, it gets a new page of its own, which is linked from
the old one, and which links to said old one in turn. The "summary"
field for both pages is updated to mention the old/new occupant of the
premises (the summary shows up in search results, so if someone
searches for e.g. "Hajduczek" and Arbat comes up, there is text saying
"Russian restaurant on Cowley Road, previously a Polish restaurant
called Hajduczek." to explain it).
Examples:
http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/search.cgi?action=search&search=hajduczekhttp://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/search.cgi?action=search&search=trichy
5) AOB.
Have I forgotten anything important?
Kake
I've just run a script to import some OxPoints data into the Oxford
Guide (thanks go to Janet for providing the data in handy CSV form).
This covers all the colleges in OxPoints, which I believe is all the
colleges which form part of the university.
In some cases, the data import simply added a few bits of missing
data, e.g. geodata, summary, Wikipedia link, etc. In others, we
didn't yet have a page for that college, so it created a stub one.
I copied the existing practice of adding the following categories to
each: Colleges, Education, The University. I also added locales in
the cases where the name of the road the college is on was already
defined as a locale in the guide. I didn't add locales such as
"Central" because I'm not sure what counts as central.
Here is an example of an update:
http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Lady%20Margaret%20Hall;version=1;diff…
and here is an example of a new stub page:
http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Exeter_College
Let me know if anything weird seems to have happened as a result of this.
Kake
The Oxford Guide spam trap just refused to let me edit
http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Co-Op_Walton_Street
even though all I was doing was adding the "Walton Street" locale
(which I had just successfully done for Walton Street Cycles).
Could this be loosened up a bit, please?
(As previously mentioned, it also refused to let me change the category
links on the front page earlier this week.)
Kake
