Aggregated/curated guides

[andru]

I've been mulling over guides along the lines I started over in #120

As I understand, guides are currently set-up as author-owned documents. Factual crop information may be created as wiki pages #121

I think the approach of using guides is great: we crowd source opinionated information and let the best float to the top.

Where it seems to fall down is accepting contributions from someone with a bit to say, but who doesn't want to write a whole guide or, worse still, sees that 90% of what they want to say is already encapsulated by an existing guide but is unable to add their knowledge.

Here it seems to me the largest danger is losing valuable information. As a user, where do I enter my experience in handling Tomato blight organically? Should I contact the author and ask they include it? The most likely user experience here, as far as I see it, is frustration and early defeat.

The next danger is fragmentation. If I as a user persist in wanting to share my experience, should I copy-and-pase their entire guide into my own, then adding the little bit of information which I want to add? Or should I leave most of the guide blank and just include my piece?

Do we want to allow an informal wiki structure based on copy-and-pasting other guides? Is a half-empty guide a useful guide?

Looking at other crop databases (e.g. Folia) and from experience at PracticalPlants, I think it's rare to find a user with the time, knowledge and ability to write a full, detailed guide.

Has anyone considered approaches to handle this problem?

I'd like to argue for a possible approach to permit and foster collaboration while retaining the benefits of the guide system.

Atomic units of information and guide aggregation/curation

Rather than ask a user to create an entire guide complete with all relevant requirements and all associated growing instructions, media, diseases and care practices etc, we break this down into atomic units of information.

• We require a few crucial data points to help categorize their following contribution. E.g. growing environment, geographic location, organic/chemical agriculture, etc.
• Allow them to fill in the information they wish, which may be an entire guide or may be just some information on how to get the highest yield, deal with a pest, etc.

Multiple guides for a single crop would still exist, but they would also be atomised. The generation of full guides from these atoms of information could be an automatic or manual process.

Manual curation

We could encourage the manual curation of guide pages by allowing a user to select from existing information when creating a guide.
They may want to share their experience of growing Tomatoes in a unique and captivating way, but be happy to accept existing wisdom on common diseases. Accordingly, they could select existing matching information during the guide creation process, and that information would be displayed on their guide.

Automatic aggregation

Atoms of information which mutually agree on various requirements (growing environment, location, etc) could be shared on an automatically generated guide. An automatic guide could exist for each unique combination of requirements. E.g.

• indoor organic tomatoes
• outdoor organic tomatoes
• indoor chemical tomatoes
• outdoor chemical tomatoes

Surely each guide may have multiple voices on certain subjects, which could be rated atomically to help the best float to the top, and over time begin to demote and hide entries which are not appreciated.

Thoughts?

[roryaronson]

You bring up a very real use case: someone with just a bit of info. How do they contribute?

Let me start off with what I have up to this point imagined for this case: The forum below the Guide would be the place for anyone (even anonymous folks) to share extra tips and tricks and ask questions based on the core method presented in the main guide content (aggregation). If the forum posts were categorized, searchable, and rated, then they would become just as valuable to the Guide as the single-authored content itself. The author would presumably get notifications of comments and learn new tips themselves, and if they wanted to they could update the guide with their favorite bits from the comments (curation). Guides could be ranked in search results not only by overall rating and compatibility, but also by how many comments there are, and perhaps by how many upvotes those comments have!

I love your proposal for atomic units of information. I think there are going to be a lot of half created Guides with good info, and complete Guides with only some compatible info to what another author might want in their Guide. If an author could essentially copy and paste atoms of information from other Guides as you mentioned, then we allow more complete Guides to be created more easily, and the easy re-use and remixing of wisdom. So perhaps when filling out each section (atom) of a Guide, there is an option to enter in the ID of the Guide that you want to clone that atom from (or something more elegant). With this, some users may never create new content themselves, but simply remix the best advice they have found from other Guides. There could also be an option on each guide to 'Fork' it, allowing someone to quickly start with something they like.

I'm sure we've all noticed that in the current Guide layout there is no designated spot for how to deal with pests/problems. I have some new ideas for this in #124 along the lines of atomization.

[simonv3]

Loomio (reopen if we decide not to use it) https://www.loomio.org/d/ad1hu5L2/aggregated-curated-guides

Specifically looking for a roadmap proposal here I guess, I think everyone is in agreement this would be a good idea?