WiserEarth Group Support

Good idea. It will make things clearer.

 

I would even suggest that the website to do this automatically when you enter the name of your organization, ressource, solution... or wwhatever. Then users will just have to check if the precedent entries matches with their own.

Great idea. I would agree with Bowo that this should be implemented site-wide. With only 50 Solutions at present the problem is more with other types of content - but at some point Solutions will suffer from duplicate entries.

Hi Bowo,

 

I agree with you that extending it to most/all entities makes sense.  In my experience, duplicate entries are common in systems like this.  Encouraging people to search to make sure they are not creating a duplicate entry is a great way to get around this - and of course the idea is to foster collaboration on the entities that exist, no to have lots of duplicate entries. 

 

I think the current copy below the field for adding a new  Resource (explaining that search should include keywords, author names, etc.) is good, but I think telling users to enter these keywords as part of the field title is important since, as I am sure you know, most people just do not read.  The way I would suggest that you do this is to add mention of keywords to the field label.  For example, instead of the label "Type the Resource Name:" I might suggest "Type the Resource Name, Author and Keywords:"  and to correspond with this, change the button label to "Check database" or "Check for existing Resource" (not "Ad / Check database") .  Just a thought.  This would definitely have the downfall of separating the functionality into two separate steps, one for checking the database and then a separate step for naming the new entity.  I know this adds a small step for the "Add an Organization" process (of entering the Organization name), but it seems it would work fine for the "Add a Resource" process.

 

I mention this because I was confused by this step when I first encountered it.  I think the searching for only name works well for Organizations since they have a proper name, but in the case of Resoures, Jobs and Events, and especially Solutions there can be a range of names which could be given to identity the entity.  If you want to use the same functionality for all entities, then I guess I would advocate giving in to adding the extra step to the "Create an Organization" feature, since the searching including keywords would be necessary for most of the other entities. My guess is that this "check for duplicates" feature started with the organizations and got extended to the resources.  Now thtat it is going to extended further, it seems like some refactoring is in order.

 

Let me close in saying that WiserEarth it is a fantastic site and resource.  I am just trying to help make it even better and keeping it nice, clean directory without a tremendous amount of moderation.

 

Cheers,

Stan