On 7 April 2013 18:13, Nicolás Tamargo de Eguren <[email protected]> wrote: > Well, since I'm here already, I might as well join the discussion :) > > On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 6:39 PM, Karen Coyle <[email protected]> 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.
Jessamyn has been really helpful in the relatively short time she's been active :) [snip] > >> 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. There are about 9 people in #openlibrary on Freenode. I'm around regularly, usually in the evening CE(S)T. There is some info that I hope even beginners can understand on <http://openlibrary.org/community/irc>, linked on the <http://openlibrary.org/community> page. (Feel free to improve the text!) [snip] > > 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 :) I wrote the one line list descriptions on /community (I don't have access to /help). There aren't "clearer" descriptions of what message should go where, as far as I know. > > 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. So you mean there is no archive under openlibrary.org or archive.org, not that there is no archive at all. I don't really understand why either, but because of earlier questions "hey, is there no list archive?", I linked the available archives on the community page. ol-lib is really low traffic - I've seen one or two messages in the past year. Probably because noone knows what it's for... The community page is really one of the first steps towards being more open to contributions from the general public (other than author/work/book edits and code). > > A dashboard page with every reported problem would be nice, > too! There was one for admins some years ago (I found, whereas Im not an admin). I heard the admins wanted it gone, and it went. > >> 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. That would be nice. May I suggest that programmers look at the Recent Changes API, which can be queried for changes by certain users, changes of a certain type and changes to a certain page, all with optional time span limits :) Incomplete docs are at http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/recentchanges Ben > > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
