On 2018-12-31 10:20 a.m., Aljaž Srebrnič wrote:

On 31 Dec 2018, at 15:35, "aimee@ecohackerfarm.org <mailto:aimee@ecohackerfarm.org>" <aimee@ecohackerfarm.org <mailto:aimee@ecohackerfarm.org>> wrote:

d. working with me on the harder cases ie where this is no contact info and only deadlinks to update profiles to identify whether the space is truly still active somehow before amending them to inactive

I can assist, we should probably have a Category for these special cases, or a list on the wiki.

We already have a category for that. I think these spaces should be categorized as "inactive" just like the ones which deliberately set themselves to that status, but perhaps with an additional "reason for inactive status = all links broken and the last edit was eons ago" sort of tag, so someone sifting through the dregs can understand what happened.

agreed for cases with dead contact info and dead links

The task becomes clearer if we first remind ourselves of one fundamental fact: *Inclusion on the list is voluntary* -- I don't think hs.o has any obligation to list a space against their will. And if they haven't provided working links that point to an active space, in a data-quality sense that's equivalent to linking to an inactive space.

There are a *lot* of "aspirational" entries created years ago with a single edit, no working contact info, and Googling for their name results in nothing more recent than that year. Chasing these ghosts and saying it's hs.o's job to chase them will just wear out volunteers and lead to a feeling of a sisyphean task. Simply remembering that ghosts aren't alive, makes the problem space much more practical.

That being said, sleuthing out the people behind those years-old inactive entries might be an interesting way to connect with locals who lost the vision in one way or another. I would still encourage people to track down their local ghosts and learn their stories just for fun. Maybe write down those stories into their pages, even as those pages sit in Category:Inactive. But I think that's a separate problem from encouraging the spaces that actually exist and want to be on the list and have shown it by creating a useful page which then went stale, to come brush the cobwebs off their page.

(Side note -- in many cases, the member who last edited a space's entry will be long gone, so someone new will be creating a user account and performing the update. Checking the user signup process and captcha and stuff, *before* blasting out an email that'll make several hundred new people come bang on the signup page and beat their heads against the captcha, would be prudent.)

Incidentally, I think this is precisely equivalent to the problem that many new spaces struggle with, of unknown stuff cluttering up their physical space. Finite physical space makes that a more obvious problem, but a map or list cluttered with stale entries is just as hard to work with. Most established spaces I'm familiar with have arrived at a pretty strong "abandoned stuff" policy -- the onus is on the owner to label their stuff. The job of the community should be limited to providing the tools to make labeling easy, but it's still up to the individual to do something useful with those tools.

Also, bear in mind that mass edits will upset the "merit of freshness" that makes the 500 most-recently-updated spaces appear on the map. If every page gets an update, the map will show a view that's very different from what it's been showing. This may eventually settle back down as the updates fade into history, but if there's ongoing automatic or semi-automatic editing, it'll continue to make the map weird. This shouldn't be seen as an argument against doing mass edits, but for a renewed push to improve the map generation. We used to say that exceeding the map limit of 500 active spaces would be a "a good problem to have", and it certainly is, but it's high time to find volunteers with skills to solve it!

are there any volunteers for this map generation issue?

also... wouldn't the map already exclude places that have been marked from active to inactive?

-Nate B-
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