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/?Arbat http://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=hajduc... http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/search.cgi?action=search&search=trichy
5) AOB.
Have I forgotten anything important?
Kake