Janet McKnight janetmck@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@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