The Flat Earth Society
The Flat Earth Society => Suggestions & Concerns => Topic started by: Tom Bishop on January 19, 2018, 05:31:53 PM
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I feel like redesigning the Library. I was thinking that we could just update the Flat Earth Literature (https://wiki.tfes.org/Flat_Earth_Literature) section in the Wiki, which we can rename Flat Earth Library, and we can just link to that from the main page in the Library link (https://www.tfes.org/library.php)?
Should I upload the books with the file upload feature in the Wiki?
I need to add in Zetetic Astronomy (https://archive.org/details/lady_blount_and_albert_smith-zetetic_astronomy) by Lady Blount and The Anti-Newtonian (https://books.google.com/books?id=i21bAAAAQAAJ&lpg=PA11&dq=%22Anti-Newtonian%22%201819&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false) by author unknown.
We also need to add Plane Truth: A History of the Flat Earth Movement (http://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/ebooks/PlaneTruth/pages/index.html) by Robert Schadewald, which I believe is critical.
Rather than just providing a bare link, I am also inclined to add a paragraph summary to the major Flat Earth works.
I would like to organize them by date, also indicating what era the work was created. I.e. Rowbotham's era would be the era of the Zetetic Society. Lady Blount's time would be the era of the Universal Zetetic Society. Samuel Shenton was the International Flat Earth Society, Charles K. Johnson was the International Flat Earth Research Society, and we would be simply the Flat Earth Society.
I would also like to categorize them by the monopole vs bipolar models the works promote.
Thoughts?
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It seems that these days Flat Earthers are creating videos rather than writing literature. Should videos of interest included in the library?
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It seems that these days Flat Earthers are creating videos rather than writing literature. Should videos of interest included in the library?
I think that's a very good idea - there's a lot of stuff out there, on YouTube and other sites. I also think the paragraph summary is a great idea.
Maybe there's some way videos could be organized by what aspects of FET they support or discuss? I've found that most FET videos focus on a particular topic and examine it in detail.
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You'd have to be careful with the videos. Anything we link, we're endorsing if it is in the library. And unfortunately most of the popular youtube videos are made with people who have ... a dark side.
There is Eric Dubay, who has been expunged from youtube for being anti-semetic.
There is Math Boylan who thinks he is in his very own episode of 24.
There is Mark Sargent who I'm sure is just using flat earth because he wants to sleep with Patricia Steere.
The list goes on, but there isn't anything we would agree has been 'peer reviewed' by the society.
But updating the library isn't a bad shout. I think a section for FE maps would be pretty cool. If we could add a searchable gallery or something.
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Personally, I think the Library belongs more to the homepage than the Wiki. I would be inclined suggest a move in the opposite direction - pushing stuff from Flat Earth Literature into the Library.
In my head, the Wiki should be primarily for our own work, and based on our analytics, visitors seem to agree. Currently, the most popular pages are the FAQ (by an enormous margin!), followed by the Wiki's welcome page, The Conspiracy, Experimental Evidence, The Ice Wall. Flat Earth Literature is left far behind in terms of visits. Over the past year, the Library (even in its current less-than-ideal state) has been viewed 3 times as often as FE Lit, and people spent more time there on average.
That said, I'm not married to doing things that way. I agree wholeheartedly that merging the two is the way forward, and that moving it either way would be an improvement over the current situation. If there is a broad agreement that we'd rather have stuff in the Wiki, so be it.
If you'd be willing to consider a move in the other direction, I'm happy to help implement your ideas - a short paragraph per resource/section would certainly be helpful, and we can reorganise the resources to make them more accessible. I appreciate that it would come with a downside of changes coming through a bit slower, but my initial feeling is that we're unlikely to be changing the Library (in either format) particularly often.
Your question about where to upload stuff will be best answered by Parsifal (I'll prod him in a moment), but I believe we currently host our library resources on Amazon's S3 cloud storage service. It would be best if we kept things in one place for (at least) the sake of future-proofing.
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Tom, I'll get you set up with a login for our S3 bucket so you can upload things to the library directly. I'm just testing things at the moment to make sure I give you the correct permissions.
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Tom, I've PM'd you with login credentials and instructions to upload files to library.tfes.org. As noted in the PM, this does not allow you to link to those files from the homepage, which would need to be handled separately.
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Tom, I've PM'd you with login credentials and instructions to upload files to library.tfes.org. As noted in the PM, this does not allow you to link to those files from the homepage, which would need to be handled separately.
Thank you. I logged in and took a look around the archive. I'm going to start writing up the new library and will make some threads in the general forum as I go. Hopefully we will get contributors. We can package it all up and put it in the library.
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Personally, I think the Library belongs more to the homepage than the Wiki. I would be inclined suggest a move in the opposite direction - pushing stuff from Flat Earth Literature into the Library.
It would be ideal if contributors had edit access to the wiki, to update on a whim, but it will be workable to push bulk edits to you. I will push the community to make contributions in an ongoing thread.
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Personally, I am also in favour of moving it to the wiki so that more people can edit it more easily.
The homepage code is managed on GitHub (https://github.com/TheFlatEarthSociety/www.tfes.org), so anyone can submit a pull request there, but that still requires for either myself or Pete to review the change, and then for me to deploy it. If we're going to start increasing the volume of contributions, that isn't an efficient pipeline.
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Ultimately, it's a question of what we consider more important. Do we want to prioritise ease of editing things, or the rate at which visitors actually see things? In my mind, this is a no-brainer - visibility is much more important, and I'll be happy to put in the work needed to bridge the gap in ease of change. It would still introduce a small delay to changed being published, but at our current rate of change (one person wanting to add a handful of books after years of silence), I don't see that as a concern. If the situation were to change, perhaps this model might need some revision (though I would suggest that the Wiki would still be the wrong answer here).
I would argue that the risk of losing reach is far of far greater consequence - it does not matter how easy a resource is to edit if nobody gets to read it. The current format of our homepage has allowed me to push our search engine positioning up - I'd be worried worried that our efforts here could hurt us more than benefit us.
The Wiki is great for some things, but I do not agree that the library is one of them. In some ways, even the forum would work better.
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I see visibility as a non-issue. We can easily just make the link to the library on the homepage go to a wiki page rather than a page that is maintained along with the rest of the website. There is no reason to conflate webpage organisation with content organisation.
That said, this isn't a hill I'm willing to die on, for the reason you have already stated -- we currently do not have a high throughput of changes. I am only saying that, if we want to make library edits more accessible, I believe the wiki is the better place to do that.
It is also possible that there is an inverse relationship here; that is, the fact that the library page is not easily editable may be the reason we do not have many contributors.
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I see visibility as a non-issue. We can easily just make the link to the library on the homepage go to a wiki page rather than a page that is maintained along with the rest of the website. There is no reason to conflate webpage organisation with content organisation.
I think you misunderstand the problem I'm trying to raise. With a relatively simple webpage, we can fine-tune our SEO far better than the Wiki will (practically) allow us. It makes sense to sacrifice that in some cases (Wiki content that we actually wrote), but for a listing of someone else's content, the benefits become much smaller.
I substantiate my statement with the fact that the Library (currently a page of much lower quality content than some of our Wiki pages) pulls in a lot more traffic than said Wiki pages. Granted, an exceptional Wiki page would trounce that result in no time, but I believe that we should aim for something reasonably achievable for now. If things don't work out in the long term, transferring to the Wiki will always be trivial (copy, paste, add a little bit of markdown).
It is also possible that there is an inverse relationship here; that is, the fact that the library page is not easily editable may be the reason we do not have many contributors.
It is possible, but I doubt it's actually the case. If people wanted to make edits, they would already be editing the Literature article. Similarly, uptake on (desirable) edit suggestions for other parts of the Wiki has been fairly low. We are looking at the very first instance of someone wanting to contribute to the library. I don't think that's a good justification for trying to streamline the whole system, especially when my perception is that it would result in a net loss of how many people we share our information with. Because of that, I propose that we keep things similar to how they are now. If the demand for regular changes increases, fair enough.
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I think you misunderstand the problem I'm trying to raise. With a relatively simple webpage, we can fine-tune our SEO far better than the Wiki will (practically) allow us. It makes sense to sacrifice that in some cases (Wiki content that we actually wrote), but for a listing of someone else's content, the benefits become much smaller.
Yes, that wasn't clear before. I see what you mean now.
If things don't work out in the long term, transferring to the Wiki will always be trivial (copy, paste, add a little bit of markdown).
Agreed, which is another reason I'm not about to commit seppuku on this hill.