What does everyone think about adding hyperlinks to the transcriptions? I've noticed in a few transcriptions there are links for certain people or items mentioned. It's been brought up on the community talk page that there are external wikipedia links and internal wiki links, though I'm not sure which things in the episode are worth links.
I've mostly been putting in links when I've needed to look up something for spelling. But it's a good question... I think perhaps if there's a skeptical/scientific concept or person of note then it's probably worth a link. I guess if you look at Wikipedia, we could use their linking policy as a good first approximation?
I also thrive on rules and regulations, and I think it's important we lay down a set now, nice and early. Such as adding timestamps to the subheading in <small> tags, which I think has the advantage of being seen in the table of contents. The other option is to vote on whether or not to use wikiboxes containing a picture, Skeptical Quote of the Week, timestamp lists and links to the forum topic, show notes and download, all in one place.
Haha, I thrive on almost the opposite, a more organic process. But I'd like to work on a set of guidelines for those things.
So here are my votes:
- I personally don't really like the timestamps in the headings, I think it unduly emphasises them. I think if someone needs to find a section in the podcast it's easy enough for them to click on the section heading to take them to the section where they can find the timestamp. This is the format I've been using, say here:
http://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_352#Aristolochia_NephropathyI don't feel too strongly about it though, so if everyone likes the timestamps in the headings I'm happy to change.
- I like the idea of wiki boxes, but I think that we shouldn't make them too complex. They should be easy to add and give the most important summary info. Specific notes on the sections:
* Images: I like the idea. We'd need to get permission to copy or link to the images from the podcasts, though. Should we just email
info@theskepticsguide.org and ask for permission?
* Timestamp lists: I think I prefer them in the contents and suspect it'd be a lot of work to duplicate them into the wiki box. Am I contradicting myself now?
Now that I've thought about it more it does seem to make better sense to have them in the headings...
* Links to the show notes, podcast and forum: Great idea to move them to the wiki box. In that vein, how about moving the skeptical rogues to the box as well? And I've been thinking we should have a separate section, "Guests" and "Guest Rogues" for people who have those statuses to distinguish them from the regularly appearing Skeptical Rogues.
There's also the possibility of developing one of those footer things with, say previous/next episode to link the transcripts together in a sequence. We also haven't used any Categories yet... I guess we're just getting started with learning the whole wiki thing...
Edit: What are your opinions on transcribing sentence fillers? I miss out the "um"s and the like, but I've been including the "you know"s and similar. We could transcribe the episodes accurately, or just what's necessary. That's not to say I think we should miss out things like (laughter), or should we?
I tend to only transcribe them if I feel like they add some meaning to the sentence, using my feeling at the time. I think what we should go for is trying to make what we see as the original meaning as clear as possible. I tend to leave out the "um"s, and "you knows" most of the time, but leave in "like" as in "they were like" (to mean "they said") or when it's used in its literal sense. I do the same for interjections; there's often a quiet "yeah" from someone in the background when someone else is talking, I tend to leave those out (usually Evan). But if they're loud or I want to make sure that it's clear that everyone is agreeing with something then I transcribe them. I do the same for laughter, because it's important in understanding that something isn't to be read literally as there is often a lot of sarcasm in the humour that they use. I also do my best to transcribe overlapping speech as it's often when people are most animated. It can often be hard to understand people, so I put (inaudible) when I can't understand someone.
Edit2: To add to this, I choose to rewrite what they said if they stumble their words so it makes a proper sentence. If I wrote word-for-word what was said, there would occasionally be a nonsensical sentence.
I use a very light-on approach to rewording. I think it's important to be careful about overly "interpreting" what they say, I think I'd prefer to be literal and let the reader draw their own conclusions about what they meant. I find that you can often add commas where they've respoken or whatever, which helps a lot with understanding. Of course, this really isn't super-critical as the podcast is the canonical source. So really I'm pretty relaxed about this too.
I think what I really want to emphasise is that I'd like to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible. The last thing we should do is burden people with scary rules or lots of required wiki markup. If someone wants to just paste in unformatted text without any wiki markup at all I think we should encourage that. Because the real work here is in getting even a first-pass transcription done. There is just so much material to get through that we need all the help we can get. It's much, much easier and faster to go in and do a proof-read of an existing transcript (it could be done at full-speed, even) than it is to do the original transcript. Adding wiki-markup and timestamps, wiki boxes, all of that is likewise very easy to do after we have a basic transcript.
Now... what about US English vs International...?
