Topic: SGU Transcripts Project

[Jay_One]

I admit in my spelling and punctuation I've been sticking to British English. The people on the podcast are American, though, and it shouldn't be too difficult for me to try and write in US English if that's what is wanted.

[Neko-chan]

so many points I wanna address! Should we set up separate talk pages/sections or something for discussing transcription guidelines, formatting, problems etc.? I don't know what's conventional, but it's probably going to get messy pretty quickly otherwise.
in lieu of that, sorry for the long post.

I also thrive on rules and regulations, and I think it's important we lay down a set now, nice and early.

I agree, especially as it's a community project, so we can keep some uniformity to the pages.
However,  I also completely agree with rwh 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.

We obviously don't need to be too strict, and I agree we definitely don't want to put potential contributors off.
At worst, if people have problems, I'd support them submitting a transcript and flagging it for someone else to add markup/formatting etc., including the Bob/Jay distinction. I would help with this where possible. If we could also encourage people to include comments with timestamps for particular problems, that would save a lot of time.

Links
So far I have used links liberally with the thinking that I can easily remove them if we decide against them. But it's way more difficult to go back through and enter them afterwards. Generally, I've included them for:

• Technical jargon that I'm looking up the spelling for anyway
• Other key concepts that may not be immediately obvious (e.g. argumentum ad hominem)
• Podcast references to particular people
• Podcast references to a website or particular article (when it can be found easily)
• on this note, I've not found how to use reference footnotes - general wiki refs don't work. They would be good for links that don't directly correspond to single words in the transcript (e.g. articles, press releases, Neurologica blog posts).

Timestamps
I think that these should be easily viewable from a first-glance.
As the segment headings are already in the contents list, including timestamps within these headings is probably the cleanest way to do this so far. Unless there are any other ideas?

Wiki boxes (example)

- 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.

• I agree, they should be short and to the point.
• I agree that putting segment headings in these is redundant, I was just playing around with how to include the timestamps
• I think that it would be nice to use the episode pics if possible as the pages are otherwise very dry, also, they sometimes reference these directly in the podcast
• keeping the SGU links (notes, podcast, forum) here is nice and neat
• agree it's a good place for Rogue list
• I agree we should have a uniform way to distinguish between regulars and guests/interviewees

If anyone has experience making wiki box templates, please let us know, as this will make entering them much easier/cleaner.

Site-specific links

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 like the idea of a sequence - previous/next links
• Categories is also a very good idea, I'm guessing you mean nanotechnology, archaeology, alternative <li>medicine etc?

Transcription conventions

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've been trying to keep as faithful to the podcast as possible

• I omit "er" and "um", but generally include other fillers (e.g. like, you know)
• For sentences that are incomplete, and/or are then re-worded, I've transcribed all words and used a hyphen or comma to indicate these.
• Sometimes these don't make complete sense, but I agree with rwh that the person reading them should come to their own conclusions and that we, as transcribers, should avoid interpretation.

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,

I agree with this

Now... what about US English vs International...?

I'm British, but I've been using American spelling - it's the default for most spell-checkers I've used anyway, plus, I hope to move to Chicago in the near future, so it's good practice for me - even if it makes me stumble. However, I'll go with what's popular.

Lastly, any other ideas/feedback on including fact summaries?
(example)
if we're going to include them, the section needs a name.

oh, and do we know what happened to the last transcription project? that might be a good thing to know

Right, I think that's all for now. phew!
(aka Teleuteskitty)

[Jay_One]

I think the idea of flagging a submission for review will help keep uniformity across pages, and help those who have a problem with the Jay/Bob distinction. I think that the main thing is encouraging people to submit.

[rwh]

• Podcast references to a website or particular article (when it can be found easily)
• on this note, I've not found how to use reference footnotes - general wiki refs don't work. They would be good for links that don't directly correspond to single words in the transcript (e.g. articles, press releases, Neurologica blog posts).

I just installed the Cite extension to mediawiki, which provides the footnote functionality in wikipedia, so it should be possible to do this now.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite/Cite.php

[Neko-chan]

I just installed the Cite extension to mediawiki, which provides the footnote functionality in wikipedia, so it should be possible to do this now.

Great, thanks.
Do we need anything like this for making infobox templates? cos I've tried making a draft infobox template and can't figure out why it won't work. There could well be other reasons tho 

(aka Teleuteskitty)

[rwh]

Do we need anything like this for making infobox templates? cos I've tried making a draft infobox template and can't figure out why it won't work. There could well be other reasons tho 

As far as I could tell from googling, we need the ParserFunctions extension for infoboxes.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions

So it's installed now.  Let me know if it still doesn't work for you.

Cheers,

Rob

[Neko-chan]

So it's installed now.  Let me know if it still doesn't work for you.

It's working, cheers!

[Neko-chan]

  We also haven't used any Categories yet... I guess we're just getting started with learning the whole wiki thing...

How about using the ones defined on http://theness.com/roguesgallery/?
That also means that if we're unsure about a topic, it might already have been blogged about and categorised by them there.

Maybe add 'interviews', 'guests' and recurring items too?

[rwh]

Sure, that sounds like a good plan.

[WC]

Okay. I'm off the forums, but free time is raining down on me. I'll see you guys over at SGUTranscripts. Love SGU and want to show it. Hate the toxicity of some of the SGUFers and the general vibe went to shit yesterday or the day before. Yikes.

Transcripts 

[Skeptress]

Sorry I didn't see this sooner.  I transcribe for a different podcast and would be happy to help with this one as well. 

[Neko-chan]

Great to see some more interest in SGUTranscripts.org!

We've got about 24 full episodes done, and 17 5X5 episodes so far, so there's plenty left to do.

There's a 'Getting Started' page that covers the basics, but even if you want to contribute a text-only episode or segment, that's great, someone else can edit it up for you. We also need proof-readers and other contributions, I'm working on a page now to set that all out clearly.

We appreciate any help, big or small, to help us cover the archives and make it an interesting site for SGU referencing and accessibility.

Thanks!
(aka teleuteskitty)

[av8rmike]

I thought I would give this thread a bump to post an update and as a general "call for volunteers". rwh, Neko-chan and I have been adding a few episodes here and there and are working on expanding the "support structure", as it were, namely topic categories, templates, and general wiki documentation. We're up to about 30 SGU episodes in various states of completion and... well, the same 17 5x5 episodes. So, we can still use plenty of help.

The "How to Contribute" page that Neko-chan mentioned in the previous post is just about finished and covers more than just how to edit pages on a wiki; it also breaks down other starting points for volunteers, such as linking to episode pages that need proof-reading, formatting, references and links, etc. So if the idea of actual transcription seems a little daunting, don't worry! There are other ways to help out. Or, for instance, if you just want to transcribe all the "Randi Speaks" segments, or only segments where Bob talks about nanotechnology, that's fine too! Every little bit helps.  Don't hesitate to ask questions, either here or on one of the Discussion pages on the wiki.

Thanks!

[PsyStat]

Four quick comments/questions, as an SGU fan but an outsider to the SGU Transcripts Project:

1. IMHO, it's freakin' awesome that all y'all are tackling this.  For several years I've lamented that SGU wasn't as readily text-searchable as, say, Skeptoid or various skeptical blogs.  Not having this rich source of material available for research, linking, etc. would be a damn shame.  I naively assumed no one would take on the daunting task of textifying hundreds of hours of content, but, happily, I was wrong!  This could be an excellent resource for journalists, educators, skeptics fighting woo, and many others.

2. Is there a way to donate money to this project?  These days I can't afford to spend time transcribing, but I'd gladly contribute funds to help support the folks who put in transcription time and effort.  I suspect I'm not the only one who'd pitch in some cash to see this project succeed, especially if there were a way to donate securely and see how the money's used.

3. It seems unfortunate that this project is under the radar for many SGU listeners, though I'm admittedly not sure how widely it's known about.  I don't think I've ever heard about it on SGU, but I'm behind on SGU episodes (I've listened through #362), and it's existence isn't immediately apparent on the SGU website.  (Maybe because it's not officially sanctioned by SGU?)  I suspect the transcripts would get much more traffic if they were easier to find by interested netizens who aren't already immersed in the SGU community.

4. I think the categories/tags for topics are quite useful.  A worthwhile side project might be to develop this into a more formal, elaborate, and articulated system, such as a thesaurus or other controlled vocabulary, ontology, taxonomy, etc.  This could be a collaborative effort, and the end product could itself be valuable for people interested in skepticism -- especially newcomers who don't have a good sense of what the major topics are and how they relate to each other.

Thanks for all your work on this so far, and keep up the great work!

[Neko-chan]

Hi PsyStat, thanks for the recognition. It's great to hear that others see the potential in this project too.

We haven't promoted it much yet because we've been getting the foundations up and running. I first heard about it in episode 352, just a quick nod from Jay, but hopefully we can get the word out in a couple of weeks and get some more contributers and users to the site.

Thanks for the offer of a donation, I don't know what costs rwh incurs, so I can't speak to that. However, our How to contribute page covers a number of other ways to add to the site, from proof-reading and adding links to picking out your favourite quotes from the Rogues and helping with fact lists - a summary of interesting points from each episode.

I like the idea of extending the topics into a more comprehensive reference tool, perhaps some kind of linking index? I'll look into what our options are. I also thought about including areas for adding updates and further references on certain topics, perhaps these ideas could be combined to allow a branching out and interconnection of information stemming from the episodes. Hmm...
Might be hard to moderate tho.

Thanks again, and feel free to leave any other suggestions/feedback either here or on our 'community portal', it all helps.

(aka Teleuteskitty)