h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The search facility has always worked for me (not the friend of conversation boxes, obviously, just the main bit).

I think my main concern with LtU&E is that I never use it, because if I'm looking for something I tend to just use the search box. It also often has to put an Entry in several categories (mind you, that's probably a good thing).

If I don't use it, is it because it's badly written, or just because when I'm searching I'm not being the right type of user?

And while we are at it, could we think about a way to put a header or something after the A-number link?
It has happened to me often that I read something and the Entry refers to another Entry by way of the A-number. I click on the link and find it is an Entry I've read before but had the header of the Entry been after the A-number like this:
" A80173361 - The h2g2 Community Consortium "
I could have spotted immediately that I've read that before.

I imagine the mobile readers will profit from this as well, specially when they have that same number-blindness I have.

! Martin
--- Excuse the footwear induced halitosis

I use the categories if I am not sure what I'm searching for or how somebody would call an Entry about something. And it makes you see how many Entries exist about a certain group of topics and where big gaps could be.

In what context, Haragai? In search results, or do you mean when there's a link in an Entry?

Sorry for not being clear enough, must be the fog in the attick.

I meant to say a link used in an Entry or Conversation. These days one only has to write the A-number and with some hootoovoodoo it gets transformed into a link to the Entry with said A-number.
It only makes the text into a link, it does not transform it into and A-number_with_headline link.
Maybe some are needed as extra ingredients for the hootoovoodoo ?

Anyway, in the search-results this works fine as-is (in Brunel anyway) and I do not mind the search-results favouring the EG by placing these results at the top.

! Martin
--- Excuse the footwear induced halitosis

Hum... it's not something that bothers me because it usually occurs in a conversation where it is clear from context what the number means. Were there to be a whopping great line of text there are well it would break up the flow of the text and be intrusive. But, as you say, it would be clear what is being linked to, so it cuts both ways.

Funny how a (personal) Journal is also (technically) implemented as a Forum, hence the F-number and every Entry has an Article-number and Conversations are (technically) labelled as 'threads'.
What a supercallifragillisticexpedalidocious way to Keep Things Organized

! Martin
--- I got this itchy feeling in the resistors in my right ear

Last night I put up an entry about Universal Guide Theory, if you care to take a look: A81667227

This probably isn't directly related to the current topic, but I'd like to see conversation search restored and be searchable by tags as well as by text strings. Conversations could inherit the tags/categories of the entry that they are attached to. The owner of the entry should be able to add additional tags to an individual conversation, too.

Researcher pages should have tags, too. They could inherit the tags from their entries and add any additional tags they think are appropriate.

>>>
The Great Move will happen in two stages:
1 - get stuff working again the way it does now (hopefully within a few months)
2 - get our new ideas into place (probably a year away at best)
<<<

If the Interim Committee take over, this is definitely what will happen. They have explicitly said that they have no interest in reorganising the Guide. They are an *interim* committee.



>>>
keep what we have and insert the current UG material into that pre-existing structure
<<<

This would definitely be my preferred option. Having "Life" mean "personal experience" is silly. We have EG entries on biology. They should be under "Life". Where else should they be? We have UG entries on personal experience and various other things. Many of these should also be under "Life".



My suggestion:

Categories | Statuses | Tags | Types

Categories:
The current categorisation of the EG should, in my opinion, remain exactly the same as it now is. Current UG entries (and perhaps some others) should be added into the current system.

Statuses:
Current statuses are "Edited", "Recommended", "Unedited" and "Help Page". (Technically, UG entries just count as "Unedited": they don't have official recognition as a separate status.) "Edited", "Help Page" and some "Unedited" entries are in the categorisation system.

<./>Browse</.> / 4. All About h2g2 / The World of H2G2 / The Town / Town Square / The Forum A1146917
is an "Unedited" Guide Entry in the categorisation system.

So, we should switch all UG entries to status "Edited" and find a home for them in the categorisation system.

We should also introduce two new ways to sort entries: Tags and Types.

Tags:
Tags are non-hierarchical and open. It should be easy to create new tags (though we should keep an eye on tag synonyms and have a process for merging them). Think of them as a list of keywords. If an word you're searching for appears in an entry's tags, that entry will appear higher in the listings than when the word appears in only the entry's text.

Types:
And, finally, Types. Edited entries will have Types. (Perhaps Unedited Entries can have them too, just as Unedited entries can appear in the categorisation system at the discretion of the Editors. But I think it would be better to promote such entries to Edited status.) Initially, we'll have "Factual" for current EG entries and "Other" for current UG entries. In time, with the assistance of many volunteers, we'll be able to refine that, creating new Types and moving entries from "Other" (and perhaps from "Factual") into those types. "Personal Narrative", "Fictionalised History", whatever. These should be broader than Tags or Categories. And it should require discussion to create new ones.

TRiG.

I don't really see how all UG Entries should be fitted into the current system. There must certainly be a few new subcategories.

Not sure I see the point of merging synonyms in the tags. Since people might search for one and not the other, shouldn't we rather be careful that we include both synonyms?

I like it, TRiG.

Tav, the Eds create new sub-categories from time to time just to be able to categorise the Edited Guide properly (I assume). There's no reason they can't add a few more for the UG ones.

Mala, I guess there's got to be a happy medium; we don't want thousands and thousands of tags but at the same time we need to make sure the most obvious search terms are covered.

I'm still not sure who means what when they use the words 'category', 'tag' and 'keyword'. Maybe it's just me who's still confused.

Tavaron, I think I defined my usages fairly clearly. If you want clarification, I can try again.

TRiG.

Merging synonyms is something I picked up from StackExchange. Let's say we have a bunch of entries tagged "foo" and a bunch tagged "bar". If we define "bar" as a synonym of "foo" this happens:

(a) All entries currently tagged "bar" are retagged "foo".
(b) Any future entries tagged "bar" are automatically immediately retagged "foo".
(c) Entries tagged "foo" will appear in the listing for searches on "bar" as if they were tagged "bar".

TRiG.

I bet that's partly because everyone uses them in different ways, I expect! This is how I think of them:

Category - this is wherethey sit in the LtU&E structure. People go via the tree structure to gradually narrow down the sort of Entry that they want.

Keywords - are words that are in the article a lot. If you do a google search looking up a specific word, the results that come back rank the pages in order of how much they talk about that keyword.
The same thing would happen with a keyword search on h2g2.

Tag - this is a specific label that is added to each Entry. This is where it gets a little hazy because I think lots of people use the work tag when they are talking about both categories and keywords. It's probably the least defined of the three words.

When I have used them on blog sites, you can write a word, any word, in a box at the bottom of the blog. After you've posted the blog, you can see these words as clickable links at the bottom of the Entry. When you click on one, it brings up all the blogs you've ever written that have that tag at the bottom of them.

They can be very useful because they can be unique to you and explain what's going on in the blog/Entry very well, but as TRiG points out you can end up getting lots and lots of tags and only one or two Entries for any tag.
For example, you might have one person that puts 'Carrot' as a tag and someone else puts 'Carrots'. If someone wants to find out about carrots they miss the carrot Entry. We would need to have a House Style of tags to make sure that they were useful.

I hope that helps.

Tavaron, I said that all UG entries could fit into the current *categorisation system*. That's not the same as saying they could all fit into the current *categories*.

TRiG.

Thanks Vip.

And yes, I misunderstood you there, Trig.