Are you looking for something new to refresh your interest in editing? Or are you unsure where to turn next now that your category has no greens? If so, then Regional has the perfect challenge for you - building a village!
At the ground roots of Regional ontology, villages and localities are categories that perhaps offer the best opportunity for all editors to contribute their personal, everyday knowledge to the ODP. Is there a category for your hometown, the place where you went to school or the place where you now work? Everyone lives somewhere and has local knowledge of that place and the villages nearby. Some of these places may be under-populated, or may not be 'signposted' at all in the Directory. Also, there has been a massive increase in the number of local businesses with their own sites in recent years. This makes categories for many smaller places viable, when previously they were not. You can use your local knowledge to search for the sites of businesses, schools, centres etc. that don't currently appear.
How to get started?
If you already have sufficient permissions to create new locality categories or add sites to existing localities, then go right ahead! (Please make sure you're familiar with what qualifies as a locality in your branch of Regional - ask in the forums if you're not sure.)
If you don't have the required permissions then you can still get involved. How? By creating a new category in your bookmarks (or a private test category), with a view to getting it moved into the live directory.
- First find a locality without a category (perhaps somewhere near where you live) and look for some sites that would be suitable for listing there. Possible sources include search engine results, sites already listed in the ODP, and possibly local knowledge and print media.
- Then create the category in your Bookmarks (or Test) category. If you name yourself as editor when doing so, you'll retain editing rights there when the category is moved - but don't worry if you don't, a meta can always arrange that later.
- Next add the sites you've found, and give them suitable titles and descriptions.
- Finally you should post in the appropriate regional forum to get feedback from other editors, before requesting that the category is moved into the live directory. Some forums (e.g. the UK forum) have a dedicated thread specifically for discussion of new localities. In others, you may have to start a new thread yourself. Every forum has a thread specifically for requesting moves, but please don't post there until after any necessary discussion over the category has taken place elsewhere.
Team projects you can join
In the UK, the "Build
a Village Challenge" aims at creating and filling localities that
currently have no category at all.
Other projects, e.g. the "Strive
for Five" in Florida and "Help
a little Village Grow" in the UK, grow existing locality categories
with only few sites by finding more sites to add to them.
Building a village is a stimulating challenge as well as an interesting way to find out more about your local area. Shop fronts, flyers, advertising, libraries, phone directories, newspapers... all contain a wealth of information to which you have privileged access purely through your daily experiences of living and working in your local area. If all editors use this personal advantage to build and grow a village category, Regional will soon exemplify further how ‘humans do it best’.
