Content of final catalogue

[a_reader2003]

Carolyn:
Now we have been using the reject codes for a while, what do
people think about amalgamating some of the categories?

David:
I think the answer depends on how the reject category is used.

Rejected posts are not, of course, actually deleted from the
database. We have the choice as to whether they are visible to
users.

If they are to be completely hidden, then it matters very little,
IMO, whether they are lumped together or not.


Carolyn:
As mentioned before, I think we do need to have them sorted to some 
extent, for two reasons:
- an 'audit trail', so we can find the reason a post was not included 
in the catalogue
- some reject categories may interest people for further searching 
and review - movies, fanfic and perhaps OT are the most obvious
- some reject categories - FAQ/adds nothing new will be used for 
other purposes subsequently

David:
An alternative, however, is to give users the option of looking at
them. To my mind this has the advantage that we can then present
the catalogue as a true alternative to the Yahoo search function: if 
a group member wants to call up *every* post with some property (the 
obvious property is that they - or a friend - are the author; in the 
days when the search went through 1500 posts at a go, I used to 
systematically look for posts by favoured posters, no matter how OT) 
then they can.

(snip)

Carolyn:

Well, if the final decision is to put categories such 
as 'Movie', 'OT', 'Fanfic' up as part of the catalogue, I imagine it 
would be possible to have a universal search routine which enabled 
you to sort them by author perhaps - this would be a useful search 
option across the whole catalogue, I agree. However, if you wanted 
any further refinement than this, eg any kind of subject 
categorisation within a category like 'Movie', there would be no 
alternative but to go in there and code up the movie posts. We've 
made a decision not to do this right now, but someone who is 
interested could maybe do this at some later date if they wanted to.

David:
I confess part of my thinking here is that, given we have a database 
of the entire list here, why not use it? It would be great to be able 
to call up all posts that, say, include the text
string 'Hermione' and are categorised as 'Snape'. This would give a
different (but overlapping) set to those categorised as 'Hermione'
and including the string 'Snape'. What about all posts
categorised 'Snape' but *not* including the text string 'vampire'?
Or all such posts whose author was Pippin, posted between GOF
release and OOP release. Really, I think you are sitting on
something of a goldmine here, and to focus only on the categories is 
to miss out.

Carolyn:
This is exactly what I am proposing - see the MEG document. The only 
difference is that, right now, I am not proposing to include any of 
the posts we are currently deciding are rejects for whatever reason.

There is infinite flexibility to the search routines that we could 
devise to work on the categorised posts. 

David:
In a sense I think there are two different visions here: to have a
high-quality selection (the 'present to JKR' vision) and to have a
way to defeat Yahoomort's obstructionist 'search' facilities (I'm
inclined to agree with Kelley that this is all about an eventual
plan by Yahoo to 'incentivise' us to pay for a slightly-better-than-
just-barely-acceptable service). I think both visions are great, and -
 aside from possibly competing for Paul's valuable time - are not at 
all in conflict. My feeling is that *technically* it's all quite 
doable.

Carolyn:
Certainly this catalogue would defeat any such plan from Yahoo - it 
will provide a much better search mechanism than anything they are 
prepared to provide.

However, you have not persuaded me of the value of including every 
post in the catalogue at this stage.

My pragmatic perspective is that even with 13 people having access to 
the database at present, progress is still extremely slow. If we 
start trying to code up the 70% of posts that are currently being 
rejected, we will frankly never finish the project. Any refinements 
are possible down the line, but right now I'd like to try and reach 
Base Camp 1, which I have suggested is getting up to post 50 000, and 
getting some kind of prototype search routine working on that body of 
posts.

Carolyn