On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 05:26:30PM -0700, john-e-be wrote: > Therefore, I would be willing to play the role of an editor to clean > up the information before we post items that may inadvertently make > us look presumably unpolished before the rest of the world. Thanks, John. I originally wrote a long email to address your questions, but decided this kind of discussion is better on the wiki itself, where links and cross-references are concise and live... http://buyorganic.org/live?EditorialControl Remember, you have to actually *start* editing the site to help improve it. I have intentionally left the spelling error Ruth pointed out unfixed, to see how long it will take someone else to fix it ;-) Today I called a bunch of people about the Spinach that's available, and found there were MANY people who wanted Spinach, (and who got the email about it), but didn't try to add their order to the site without some instant feedback to address their questions, (which is done well over the phone). The point is that we have other things to worry about such as basic communications before spending too much time fretting about looking polished. (Actually, I already spend quite a bit of time editing the site for clarity, but could use some help.) Regards, -jeb PS: For reference, here's my original draft email which I posted at http://buyorganic.org/live?EditorialControl after editing to be more concise, and follow the wiki "thread mode" format. Karinn's comments were valuable as well, and should be factored into that page soon... Thanks, John. The cool thing about the wiki is that you can already take the role you suggest, simply by checking the RecentChanges page, and fixing anything you find needs to be fixed. I understand that correcting typos after they've been "published" might seem backwards at first, (and in fact my original plan was to set up something like you suggest, with changes being approved). That was before I found out about the wiki concept though; and the many free software clones that implement it. (I didn't have to do any significant programming work to setup our live website, whereas I would have to spend a lot of time I don't have building something custom to implement a slower editorial approval system). This wiki method has been very successful elsewhere on the web, mostly because of it's simplicity and instant gratification of editing and improving a website in real-time. It's not perfect, but that's okay. See WabiSabi, a Zen principal which finds beauty in the imperfect... http://buyorganic.org/live?WabiSabi Here's a quick page on Wiki for beginners at the original site... http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OneMinuteWiki And finally, the page on our site which tries to explain things... http://buyorganic.org/live?WikiWikiWeb Of course, we can do better explaining this concept and getting more people to participate. But anyone is welcome to improve upon the website we are building. -- Jeb Bateman... http://jeb.ocha.net
