Well, since I'm here already, I might as well join the discussion :) On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:39 PM, Karen Coyle <kco...@kcoyle.net> wrote:
> 1) Jessamyn - can you add a Q to the FAQ of the sort "Help, I made a > huge mess!"? I guess it should say to end email to help, and include the > URL of the page involved in the mess. > It should also give some idea of the expected reaction time. If I see "send an email" and a link to the report thingy, I might feel disheartened. If it says "please contact us! We try to fix any problems like these in a couple days" (or whatever is true - this one was certainly fast, and it's Sunday!) it'd make me more likely to write. > 2) Can we get the community page listed on the home page? Then we can > link from that to the FAQ as well. (In fact, I find the Help page > singularly unhelpful at the moment, but I assume that Jessamyn has > noticed that as well.) > The first thing I noticed on the Help page (and which still surprises me every time) is that it doesn't even *link* to the editing FAQ directly. I'd say the "edit/correct" on "You are welcome to edit/correct any errors or omissions you see on Open Library" should certainly link to http://openlibrary.org/help/faq/editing (either that, or it should read: "You are welcome to edit/correct any errors or omissions you see on Open Library - it's an open, editable wiki. Look for the EDIT button. See our Editing FAQ to learn more".) 3) We still don't have an online discussion forum -- we have pages, but > no where except email to discuss. Maybe that's just a matter of starting > up a page and making it a discussion? I just feel like we have a lot of > info that is buried in the email list that then doesn't help others who > run into the same thing. > For what it's worth, the first thing I looked for when I saw this was an IRC channel - that's usually the best place for people to get instant help in MusicBrainz, but of course it depends on having a group of people who are active on IRC which might not be true of OpenLibrary. Since I have a distrust of forms like http://openlibrary.org/contact (maybe undeserved, but my experience with those is that people take ages to reply) and also since it's generally more useful to contact the community directly, I then moved on to check mailing lists. But I couldn't find any description of the lists, apart from their names - while I won't claim we're perfect in this regard, we do have http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Communication/Mailing_Lists which clearly (I hope!) explains what each of the lists is for. Here, I wasn't sure where to write: lib, since this seems related to the librarianship-ish part of OL? tech, since it's clearly also a tech problem? Or discuss, since it's more general and probably more active? I picked the latter, but still don't know if one of the others would have been a better choice :) Also, there seems to be no easily-available archive of the lists. It's strange enough that they are visible only to members (aren't we an open project? Hope so, since I just included me in it without even noticing it with that "we"). It's just silly that once I *am* a member, I get "Message Archives - Message archival for this list have been disabled." Isn't this an Internet Archive project? How is *not archiving* lists something that makes sense in that context? I did find an external archive of -discuss (not of -lib, though) but it seems very weird that OL doesn't seem to have one. And since I just saw the "Problem?" button for the first time, I'm not sure it's in a very good place. And that seems to just send a mail to the same support centre as the normal contact option, skipping the users - a better way would seem to be something like Laurence suggests, where future (only logged-in?) visitors to the page would be told "Someone reported a problem! Can you help?". A dashboard page with every reported problem would be nice, too! 4) Related to #3, there isn't a way that I can see to "watch" a page and > be notified about changes. I still see a need for a full-fledged wiki > for some of this work. Might I suggest a similar system to the one we use? In MusicBrainz, each user can "subscribe to" specific artists, and get notified daily when changes are made to them. It works similarly to "watch" in Wikipedia, I guess - in our case it is useful in that since our changes aren't usually instantaneous, it lets people know if they have something to vote on for their subscribed artists, or labels... but I'd say it would certainly be useful even if only to see a diff. In answer to Laurence, I don't think edit wars would be a problem. I know they don't seem to be with our system, at least, but in general, books are hopefully less controversial a subject than most of Wikipedia's, and should mean we get a more peaceful crowd.
_______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
