2-tier Submissions for Theoryland?

[Kurkistan he/him]

I suppose this is aimed at Joe, resident God King of Theoryland.

 

I've been doing some thinking as to difficulty you guys at Theoryland have in keeping up with new interviews and Q&A's and whatnot. You guys work hard, I know, and I know that you're overworked, understaffed, and underpaid (ha! monetary compensation!), but the small number of people with editing privileges and inclination is a big bottleneck.

 

I know that re-formatting and tagging Q&A's can be a surprisingly difficult and time-consuming process, but you guys need to do it all yourselves (I think? If not, then ignore this thread, please) not only because you're the only ones with privileges  but because you have an (admirable) vested interest in keeping up the quality and consistency of the database, especially so far as tagging goes.

 

In order to take a bit of the work off your shoulders, might I suggest a way for the community at large to contribute? It may not help all that much, with a relatively small "active" base like the Coppermind has, but anything that took at least an equal amount of work off your plate would be worth it.

 

The system I propose is that you open up the database to allow any number of "junior" accounts. The one and only privilege of these accounts will be to submit provisional entries for the consideration of the powers that be. Then you guys review the entries and edit them as you see fit before adding them to the database proper. That way, you get at least some amount of links, formatting, and maybe even tagging that you don't have to work on. You can just alter submitted entries, at least some of the time, which should be easier than writing them up from scratch.

 

Now this may be too hard to implement or you may already have this system in place and I'm just ignorant, but I think such a system, if easy to put in place, could be beneficial.

Edited May 22, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Joe ST he/him]

That's a fairly large code change, for the chance that people will help. And I have no control over what code gets accepted by Theoryland. If you wish to contribute transcriptions, I suggest making google-docs and sharing them with the community. Thanks for the suggestion, though. I do agree that something could do with being improved.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Okay, thanks. I suspected that the code wouldn't support it, at least not easily, but I had hoped there was a module or something. Ah well.

[Joe ST he/him]

It's a totally besopke system, so there's no modules or anything easy implementable without rewriting code.

[Morsk he/him]

How is Q&A data entered on Theoryland currently? Is there a format for it at all, or is someone manually interacting with a database UI?

edit: n/m I guess you just answered this.

Edited May 22, 2013 by Morsk

[Joe ST he/him]

Simple web forms, a form for the interview as a whole (that fills in the sidebar), and then a form per question/answer pair.

[Windrunner he/him]

As a side note, my last day of class is June 7th, so my first priority after that is going crazy entering all the recent interviews into the database. I've been putting smaller reports in as the come, but the larger ones take serious chunks of time. Rest assured, they will all make it in there.