I'm thinking it's time. Time we designated a particular day to give over to ganging up on Pleiades content and making it better. Looking at the low-hanging-and-annoying-fruit list, the first thing that comes to mind is improving our titles and descriptions to facilitate discovery and disambiguation. I've laid out what I see as the landscape in a document on the Pleiades site: Improving Titles and Descriptions for Prominent Places.
So what remains is to see who would be willing to devote at least a couple of hours (if not a whole day) to this enterprise and to fix a day for it. You don't need to be an expert to help with this job. Anyone interested at all in ancient geography who has basic web skills and can get on the internet at the scheduled time should be able to make a substantive contribution, whether they are a student, a scholar or an interested "layperson".
If you're interested, leave a comment on my blog and I'll send you a link to a doodle poll to do the scheduling.
3 comments:
A couple of people have written privately to ask (reasonably) "what's a hack day?" The term comes out of software development (particularly open source). You can read a bit about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_Day
In this particular case, what I mean is a time for anyone interested to get together and work on improving not so much the pleiades software as the content. So the idea is that I'll try to set aside everything else in my schedule -- and I'll encourage other Pleiades key team members to do the same -- and we'll be standing ready to help any and all Pleiades community members who want to make changes or additions to content. Community members needn't devote an entire day to the effort, but at least a couple of hours will be needed to make a significant contribution I suspect.
The main focus I'm proposing for this first 'Pleiades hack day' is to improve titles and descriptions for "prominent" or well-known places.
Does that help explain things?
I'll sign-up for some time if you send me the link.
I'm in!
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