Musings By Joschik Christian Braun obsesses over collectibles, antiques and toys more than the average person, but (he believes) in a productive way. Documenting collectibles has been a passion since working on a book about his favorite childhood toys from Timpo 38 years ago.
I recently wrote a blog post about When Websites Die and how much information we are losing (the BBC swiftly followed with an article about why so little of the early web is still around).
“You Shall Not Pass!”
Those websites were following the Gatekeeper methodology, meaning generally one person, sometimes a small team would add information. Often others can suggest but nothing passes unless it is allowed. These sites normally have a high level of quality and the information is generally homogenous. But the Gatekeeper cannot and does not want to document everything and their decisions are final. For example, they might not like a series produced by a brand or cut-off their effort at a certain date. Their sites are also in danger to be closed overnight; either because the gatekeeper is no more, has lost interest or is just enraged by ingratitude by their users, a hack of their site or another of potentially millions of reasons.
But crowd-sourcing the information has its own issues, this article is addressing the most important one – how to build a reliable course of information. Misinformation comes principally in three forms –
hobbyDB is not the first crowd-sourced project and was able to learn from many that came before it, in particular from Wikipedia and also the 10 collector forums I managed in a past life. Here is our plan to ensure that information on hobbyDB is correct –
We are constantly reviewing our approach and are open to more or different ideas and approaches, please use the Comment section to start a discussion!
Very informative!!
I think this is a great framework. I appreciate the tiered user system – CCC – with someone starting out as a C Contributor. Getting a message that a Contributor has changed or added an item would be a great additional feature. As a C Curator, I periodically check to see if someone has added an item to my categories. I would love an email notice when that happens.
Yes, that is high on the list and will make your and other lives easier. I expect we have that in place sometimes this quarter.
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