|
This month's column consists of a tasty stew of news bites and restaurant guide tidbits. The same Year 2001 bug that caused confusion in the DMoz fora plagued ChefMoz. All threads with postings in the new year were listed at the bottom of the "show all threads" forum display, thus invisible to the casual user. The fix came just minutes after the DMoz fora went back to normal, with Keith Peters (cptginyu) announcing that all was right again. Er, well, until the year 2010, that is. One assumes that new forum software would be in use by then. But wait a minute -- wasn't that along the lines of what software engineers were saying in the 1960s about coding only two digits for the year field? The United Kingdom top level organization mentioned in the last newsletter is all but decided on. Votes are being tallied and re-counts look unlikely. The first choice candidate could require a software change though, adding an extra level. In this case, expect a bit of a delay as this is implemented. As ChefMoz gains more exposure, some of the reviews rolling in are starting to look a little suspicious. Some of them are being discussed in this forum thread http://chefmoz.org/forum/threaddisplay.cgi?t=Forum2/HTML/000064.html. Editors are trying to find a balance between allowing honest expressions of opinions about positive and negative dining experiences and weeding out what could well be abusive submissions. Speaking of exposure, the directory got a nice mention in Industry Standard's Food, Wine, and Web newsletter with the heading of ChefMoz: The Web's Zagat. Did You Know? ChefMoz data is available at no charge, with similar conditions attached as DMoz data. The RDF dump has just been updated and is available from the ChefMoz front page. ChefMoz is less than a thousand listings away from the nice round figure of 50,000 restaurants. The majority of them are in the US right now, making that portion of the directory a serious player among US restaurant guides. The second largest number of listings are in Poland; currently at 1,087. These were added almost single-handedly by meta-editor Grzegorz Albinowski, caius2ga. Editall Kent Slade, kslade, has amassed the largest number of edits and unique adds, 5,233 and 4,325 respectively as of this writing. His main area of activity is Utah, USA. ChefMoz edits aren't directly comparable to DMoz edits. To add a complete restaurant listing, for example, with details and a description, can take 20 minutes or more. Accepting a publicly submitted review, on the other hand, will normally be a matter of a minute or so. Restaurant listings can now be edited in small, discrete sections. For example, you no longer need to pull up the entire edit page when adding review links, changing cuisine or modifying web information. You don't need to be a food critic to be a good ChefMoz editor. You don't even need to eat out a lot. Most of the tasks you will face as an editor are things like filling in restaurant details from other web-based resources, searching for outside reviews, checking existing listings for correctness and typos, and accepting new listings and reviews from members of the public. A love of good food helps, but is not necessary. It's especially easy to sign up if you're already an editor at DMoz. Just go to the editor dashboard at http://chefmoz.org/editors/. If you can't log in there, get your login activated by going here: http://chefmoz.org/cgi-bin/apply.pl?where=dmoz and filling in your username. (If you have an account, but have forgotten your password, you can get a password reminder at http://chefmoz.org/cgi-bin/password.pl.) Then apply for one city, usually your home town. Read the fora, guidelines, and FAQ for advice on how to edit and go to it! Statistics as of the beginning of January, 2001:
Happy eating!
  |
