What's the best way of getting people to use this catalogue ?

[carolynwhite2]

--- In HPFGU-Catalogue at yahoogroups.com, "sevenhundredandthirteen" 
<sevenhundredandthirteen at y...> wrote:
> 

> To use you example, Snape Loving Lily is difficult to code as a FAQ 
> (no matter how many times it is discussed) because there may never 
> been one definite anwswer, so linking directly to a variety of 
posts containing for and against arguments would let people make up 
their own minds. Any question which has the ambiguous answer 'Some 
people think yes, some people think no' should never be simplified 
into a FAQ, and a link to the broad spectrum of posts would keep the 
> discussion open for new arguments. 

Carolyn:
This approach is certainly one that I would find useful in many of 
the categories, and goes back to a distinction I made in an earlier 
post between 'browse' and 'search' functions.

Between them, Paul and Tim will be able to come up with any number of 
demon search routines, which will be able to find almost anything 
using a combination of free-text search and our category headings. 
However, using search routines effectively presupposes you know what 
you are looking for [think of your most recent Google search..].

The 'browse' idea is different - it is intended to give people a much 
better idea of the scope of the content, and needs a good deal more 
editorial thought. Essentially, it seems to me that at the second 
edit stage, we are going to have to take the bunch of posts under any 
particular heading, and manually go through them and decide on a sub-
set of headings appropriate to each category.

For some of the major characters, I think it would be invaluable to 
have major theory ideas listed, and if necessary, the for- and 
against- arguments sub-listed. [It was why I made all the effort in 
the first place to list out the theory acronyms under the right 
headings].

In other categories, for instance, the endless argument about number 
of children at Hogwarts, you might chose to sort the posts into the 
two basic groups - those that agree there are 1000+ as JKR says, and 
those who think she can't add up and have calculated it differently.

The choice of sub-categories would always vary with the subject. One 
question I have is whether we have done enough coding already to 
begin to set some of them up now, which would save time later ? For 
instance, nearly every character is accused of being ESE at some 
point, so should we have ESE/anti-ESE subheads ready set up?

As further example, on Snape, off the top of my head, the most 
repeated themes are: 

spy/or not/for whom 
did he ever love anyone 
teaching methods 
is he a vampire/bat
relationship with MWPP 
relationship with Dumbledore

My idea would be to have relevant theory acronyms under these larger 
heads, plus other posts on those subjects. But there would, of 
course, be a bunch of other posts not related to these heads; don't 
know how extensive these would be without doing the analysis. May be 
possible to come up with further heads to categorise them.

Laurasia:
Anything with the label FAQ makes it sound like the discussion if 
closed. Whereas links to posts about an openended idea will clearly 
demonstrate that what we *aren't* doing is just writing down a list 
of everything that has come before us. What we *are* doing is keeping 
all the ancient themes alive so that its easier to find them and use 
them to inspire new ones, IMO.

Carolyn:
We are certainly not writing FAQs - that's a different HPfGU project, 
which I assume this catalogue will greatly help with. Personally, I 
am much more interested in encouraging people to use the catalogue to 
generate interesting posts, as I agree with you that FAQs do tend to 
have an air of closure, unless they are rigorously kept up to date 
with new material.


Laurasia:
> So, I think some links to a few good ideas is great. It will also 
> help give people the idea of how they are meant to approach the 
> catalogue- add a few keywords, see if your exact idea has already 
> been discussed. If it has, does your POV add a new spin to it? Was 
> it sastisfactorarily answered before hand? Use the canon and 
> arguments which came before you to make your theory stronger.
> 

Carolyn:
But, returning to my original gripe, how best to get people to do 
this? I am continually amazed that so few people have even found 
the 'Fantastic Posts' section on the HPfGU home page. Granted, the 
FPs are out of date, but they are interesting nonetheless, and full 
of post numbers to follow up.

I do despair, but also recognise that people won't use this thing 
unless it is laid out in an interesting enough way that they can't 
argue that it should be their first point of call *before* posting 
some question.