| |
Currently we have notes in the set database but no links to the various reviews
of that set within LUGnet. Is it possible to extend the set database to allow a
set of URLs to reviews in LUGnet newsgroups? I was thinking just in terms of
linking to the first of any thread that contained review material, and not to
each message in a thread (since displaying the first one gives you the option
of seeing the whole thread). I assume that the set display page would then
offer to show reviews in the same way as it offers show notes or see them all
on one page, and that what would be shown would be the subject line, first
author, date with a link to the news message URL to see the actual message. I
think you would want to display the subject, author and date as this
information may have a bearing on whether you want to read the review and any
ensuing discussion.
I realise I can go the search-news and enter a set number or name, but in my
experience, that gives you a lot more stuff than just reviews. I think we need
something a bit more discriminating, i.e. a human assessment of what message
about a set is or is not a review.
In principle, the URLs could also go to external (non-LUGnet) sites, but in
practice, I think over time there would be a maintenance issue with broken
links, so I would be inclined to restrict links to other parts of LUGnet at
least in the first instance, and then maybe later allow links to other
known-to-be-stable domains (as we do to brickshelf and peeron). Obviously the
lugnet.reviews group would provide a lot of the links, but there are a lot of
reviews that occur only in the theme groups (or other bizarre places in
LUGnet).
While the link would usually be to the first message in a thread, I guess this
is not mandatory. Sometimes in a long thread, a review might appear in response
to some non-review discussion. What would be nice technically is that when a
new review message is linked in, a check is made on any existing review links
for that same set to ensure that they are all independent threads, that is, one
is not reachable from another. If the new review link is reachable from an
existing review link (or vice versa), then there could be a default policy of
recording only the earlier of the two. Since threads are structured as trees,
there is a possibility of multiple links into different branches of the thread
not reachable from one another. These could either be left as separate links,
or merged by linking in their lowest-common ancestor (from which the original
links are all reachable), so if there were enough links proposed into different
branches of a very large thread, then eventually the link would propagate out
to the root of the thread tree.
Similarly some messages review or compare multiple sets, so there should be no
restriction on a message being linked as a review for multiple sets.
OK, that's the technical side of the proposal. Now for the administrative side.
Who gets to make the decisions on what is a "good enough" review to be worth
including?
Who gets to decide what reviews should be linked in? Possibilities:
* anyone -- just have a form where people can input the set and the URL or a
"recommend as review" button
* only members -- just as we do for notes -- gives members more privileges than
others and hence encourages membership
* only curators who can link a news item from the group that they administer,
other people have to request the curator to do it
* only <insert name of divine being>
* the system is automated based on number of recommendations like spotlighting
If we want a person to make the final decision,my feeling is that members or
curators is probably the appropriate level, as that spreads the workload over a
large group of people and not just one divine being. If there is software to
automatically merge multiple links into the same thread (as discussed above),
it is probably OK to let members do it. If there isn't such software, there is
the danger that your average member may do stupid things like link in all
messages in a thread or duplicates etc etc, in which case it might be better to
restrict it to curators (who you hope are a little more savvy than average). Of
course, I think it is only the more active groups that have curators which
means that reviews in non-curated groups might be overlooked. The solution to
this might be to have a review curator who takes overall responsibility for
maintaining the links, and use a button beside a message to recommend it as a
review, just as we have to highlight a message -- but you would have to
indicate the set number too. If the message comes from a curated group, then
that curator is given the recommendation for them to decide upon. If the
message comes from a non-curated group, then it goes to the overall review
curator for decision.
An alternative to human decisions would be to use the same mechanisms as
highlighting, and simply sort the review links on the basis of the number of
recommendations received (highest shown first) maybe with some maximum number
to be displayed (as we do for highlighting top stories), but to be effective
there would need to be software to merge links into the same thread. There is
still probably a need to have an overall review curator to manually remove
inappropriate recommendations, but hopefully this would be relatively
infrequent. There is a small difference though between highlighting and
recommending a review and that is the issue of aging. I believe that the
highlighting has an aging mechanism to ensure the top stories are the more
current ones. In contrast, reviews don't tend to age in quite the same way. It
might be argued that they don't age at all, but they do to some extent. For
example, if one person reviews a set when it is released, they may say
something about new parts or new colours or say it is the best/worst of a
theme. However, a few years later, those parts/colours may be commonplace and
the theme contains many more sets so the best/worst assessment is not so
appropriate. So, I would argue that some aging is appropriate but it should not
be as aggressive as top story aging. Of course, if aging was the only issue
preventing implementation, I would not care if/how aging was done. I am just
over-engineering the solution (we call it "whiteboard euphoria" at work).
What constitutes a review? A great topic to argue about, but I'd start with
letting common sense apply and develop rules if/when common sense seems to be
failing.
Is this do-able, technically and administratively, oh mighty divine beings who
decide these things?
Kerry
--
============
Kerry Raymond
kerry@dstc.edu.au
Proud to be LUGNET Member 599
www.lugnet.com/people/members/?m=599
|
|
1 Message in This Thread:
- Entire Thread on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
|
|
|
|
Active threads in Database
|
|
|
|
|
|
