13 Apr
2012
13 Apr
'12
9:51 a.m.
Janet McKnight <janetmck(a)chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> There are lots of pages about the City and the
University about
> non-geo-locateable things which are probably adequately covered
> by Wikipedia, e.g.: [snip list]
On Thu 12 Apr 2012, Owen McKnight <owen.mcknight(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm happy for all of that to go, precisely because
Wikipedia covers it
all far better than the Open Guide ever will. I think they're all
arguably within scope, but our efforts would be better concentrated on
content that isn't available elsewhere, much of which Wikipedia would
consider too trivial to be notable. Shops, venues, parks, schools...
I agree!
Question: Is there anything appropriate for the Open
Guide that
doesn't have a geographical location?
I'm not sure I can think of anything on RGL that doesn't have a
geographical location (aside from pages about RGL itself). But then
RGL is not a completists' guide. The Oxford Guide does have this:
http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Category_Societies
but then again that might be better off subsumed into GroupsNearYou,
if that's still going.
I think the strengths of OpenGuides are its categorisation and mapping
systems, so it could potentially be used to store any local
information that's easiest to find when it's categorised and/or
geolocated - assuming someone else isn't already storing it and making
it available in an appropriate way.
[warning, sidetrack approaching]
I did once consider making an OpenGuide that would just store links to
blog reviews of London restaurants, since there's nowhere that
aggregates these sensibly - UrbanSpoon is the closest thing, but is
systematically incomplete (they won't link to you unless you display
their widget, and not everyone wants to do that), their categories are
very coarse (you can only search for African food, not Nigerian food),
and their list of locales (like their list of categories) is laid down
from above rather than growing out of how people living in London see
their city. I didn't pursue this project mainly because it would have
been a lot of work and I found a better way that would work for me (though
not for others, since it partly relies on grep and a text file).
Kake