Katrina Help Info:Community Portal

From Katrina Help Info

Wiki contributors: post about possible improvements to the Wiki and exchange non-related information. Don't put real On The Ground information on this page, as it might be missed. Real data central to this wiki needs to go to the appropriate category pages.

Remember: If you suggest improvements, you can often make those enhancements yourself. That's the wonder of wikis.

Table of contents
1 Resources
2 Here is the place to share ideas for improvements.
3 The Next 2005 Hurricane
4 Wikinews
5 Data Finder

Resources

Here is the place to share ideas for improvements.

  • The Main page of this Wiki needs a prominent link to a Press page - that should have a brief sumary of the project(s) and a list of people that agree to be interviewed by the press. If such a page exists, I couldn't find it on the main page so I doubt that anyone else not extremely familiar with everything could find it either. That list should include developers who can explain the technical and background info and a few volunteers who have worked on the data entry and front end parts of the project. If I was a Journalist who stumbled on this or was directed to the site, I would have a hard time figuring out what it was all about.
  • It appears some data scrapers may be abusing this system to promote their own businesses. For example, do a search for Jack Mandroc and look at the details (http://www.katrinalist.net/katrinaPeopleFinder/detail.do?id=00Q30000006xfnXEAQ). The contact information for the person who is looking for Jack Mandroc has been dropped, and replaced with the contact details for the person who did the scraping. True, the original data is still available in the link back to the original site (requiring another search), but there are still two problems: 1) if that original site goes away, vital information will be lost and only spam will be in its place; 2) hurricane victims, who all us original authors (not scrapers) of data hope will call, will see an unfamiliar name there and will not call. Granted, in the case of this particular scraper, he has kindly put a message on his phone to tell callers to check the original site. But he fails to point out that the link is right there on the page, and some people will miss that. We are talking about people who are in shock from what has happened, so we need to make it easy for them, and not be showing them strange unfamiliar names that will put them off.
  • I have found it difficult to avoid making errors entering data and while I have rekeyed entries containing misleading information (eg telephone number for the previous entry's author) I'm sure I must have missed some. As long as it's not possible to make corrections other than via a new entry, can I suggest adding a note to each search suggesting that if anyone finds the information incorrect or misleading they should refer to the source post if included in "Details".
  • It would help non-US volunteers to be reminded of the date format to be used on the new form - the old form specified mm-dd-yyyy.
  • Data entry is helped by having two browser half-windows open - I used up a lot of effort and made a number of mistakes hopping backwards and forwards between two full screen windows.
  • The pages available to claim don't appear to include new postings (eg Yahoo News Message Board for Slidell, LA)
  • The "Description" box might be better titled "Additional information".
  • To distinguish between incorrect and corrected entries it might be useful to have a box "NB Correction of Original Entry - Detail Corrected: ..."

The Next 2005 Hurricane

--Jwalling 16:06, 21 Sep 2005 (EDT)

Wikinews

Colleges Listings (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Colleges_offering_admission_to_displaced_New_Orleans_students)

The Wikinews (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page) article above has collected an extensive listing of colleges offering admission to displaced New Orleans students broken down by regions. The article, and the lists, are available to be reused on Katrina Help Wiki - all Wikinews articles are in the Public Domain.

The reason I'm pointing this out is that Wikinews is about news, and these lists are continuing to be maintained/developed even though the article is no longer current news. Wikinews may soon be archiving the article(s), at which point the lists can no longer be updated. - Amgine 18:39, 20 Sep 2005 (EDT)

Data Finder

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