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Categorising groups

One of my fellow members of the Guild of One-Name Studies has discovered a useful hidden feature which might be of some help with the categorisation of groups. If you fill in the location field on your group page this creates a URL with a link to a category page. If people can get organised we could therefore create catogories for different countries, societies, surnames beginning with various letters of the alphabet, etc We would all have to work together to come up with the appropriate category titles. You can see how it could work by looking at these two pages;

http://www.genealogywise.com/groups/group/listByLocation?location=E...

http://www.genealogywise.com/groups/group/listByLocation?location=G...

The location field only creates one URL and it doesn't seem to be possible to create multiple categories. Also the group categories don't seem to show up in search results unless I've missed somthing.

What do people think? Could this work?

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Permalink Reply by John Barrett Robb on July 25, 2009 at 2:56pm

This feature seems kind of pointless without a category search. However, somehow, you have obtained the URL for the category, for example,

http://www.genealogywise.com/groups/group/listByLocation?location=G...

and presumably all the other category URLs just require alteration of the final word.

One could set up a "supergroup" named "GOONS category" (setting up a link for the category URL in the Text Box) which all those who had defined this location could join, and the supergroup would presumably attract traffic of its own, because of its general interest (if the locator category made sense in the first place), so that it would soon float to the top of the Group search list for "GOONS". The supergroup admin could then monitor the link and if inappropriate groups popped up on the category page, their admins could either be invited to join the supergroup, or a differentiated locator could be negotiated.

Permalink Reply by John Newmark on July 25, 2009 at 8:37pm

GW has announced that they are working on their own categorization system, which won't require us to use the location field for something other than location.

Using the location field doesn't even work too well for location-groups since there's only space for one location, and it would be difficult to come to a consensus whether that should be city, state, or nation level

Permalink Reply by M. Diane Rogers on July 27, 2009 at 7:06am

I'm not sure how this could/would really work but looks better than nothing to me. I did fill in location for the British Columbia Canada group but I see the URL is thus:
http://www.genealogywise.com/groups/group/listByLocation?location=B...
I will edit the comma out, but maybe it should be under the category 'Canada' only ?

Permalink Reply by M. Diane Rogers on July 27, 2009 at 7:09am

Two groups only come up under Canada so far - the Billings Family and the United Empire Loyalists (not all of the UEL ended up in Canada, did they? Never mind, I digress...)

Permalink Reply by M. Diane Rogers on July 27, 2009 at 11:33am

There is a discussion in Genealogywise Problems or Suggestions about category lists, etc. too - which it seems GW staff is reading.

Categorising groups

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