

HN Yellow pages - followup - sdrinf

Previously on HN: HN yellow pages:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517198<p>&#62;On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 11:22 PM, Neil &#60;kngspook@gmail.com&#62; wrote:<p>&#62;Hi,<p>&#62; First, I want to thank you for coming up with this idea and getting<p>&#62; the ball rolling on it. And second, I want to thank you for<p>&#62; switching the HN post's link to the form/appendable version.<p>&#62; Last, I wanted to ask if you'd consider making the old, publicly-<p>&#62; editable spreadsheet read-only while we migrate the data from there<p>&#62; to the new one (which David has generously offered to do over the<p>&#62; weekend).<p>&#62;<p>&#62;Thank you again,<p>&#62;Neil.<p>I did not switched the HN post's link to the form, for several reasons that has to do with forking generally being a bad idea, and community freedom for curation / wiki level editing, which you took away.<p>Someone else, on the other hand, did. And also revoked my ability to edit the article, or any comments I've done there.<p>The publicly editable spreadsheet currently has 72 entries. Yours have 43. That's the least constraints principle at work.<p>Based on these datapoints, I will encourage the HN community to submit to the publicly editable spreadsheet ( http://spreadsheets2.google.com/ccc?key=tFgepUuuBHSgfeuKPKccxTA&#38;authkey=CIqAl7wO&#38;hl=en#gid=0 ), and disregard the forks.<p>The content of this e-mail, and my reply has been submitted to HN for discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1522928   . Should you have any comments, or replies, please do so there.<p>Regards,
-SDr
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david_p
Hello both,

First, please excuse me for the late reply, I've been away for several days
and couldn't get a chance to keep you up to date. I think we got into a dead-
end with both proposed solutions having notable drawbacks.

The original sheet (read+write) was (and is still) prone to vandalism, which
makes its content unreliable and fragile. The second sheet (read only + form)
I less editable, has no wiki-like features (discussion, correction of mistakes
after original submit, etc.). I think that the drawbacks of the original
solutions justified the fork, but I do agree that forks are generaly a bad
thing, mostly because of the dissolution of informations and energy that it
implies.

To date, I think the best solution comes from the site hackernewsers.com, the
site is simple and straightforward, it addresses all the problems of the
previous solutions, and adds some nice features (maps, classification of
abilities [improvable], etc.). I have not been in contact with the author(s)
of the site, but I'm quite impressed by the speed at which they delivered
this.

So after starting the migration of all country+city data from original sheet
to the forked sheet, I stopped and I now think we should direct the people who
use the sheets to this new website. What do you think ?

Regards,

David.

