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Provide a Freedom of Information request system for your jurisdiction
https://alaveteli.org
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Encourage meaningful titles/subjects for requests #5365

Open RichardTaylor opened 5 years ago

RichardTaylor commented 5 years ago

Lots of requests have titles.subjects eg. "Request", it would be useful to catch these and encourage more meaningful titles, to assist those searching and browsing for information.

A review of common request subject/titles could lead to ideas for those we should be preventing from being used.

See also #478 which is also about restrictions on request subjects/titles.

WilliamWDTK commented 2 years ago

For example, on WDTK there is a request entitled "Freedom of Information" which has been given the URL https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/freedom_of_information_33365, which shows how common a title it is. It, coincidentally, isn't a valid FOI request, so it has been hidden, but https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/freedom_of_information_33363 is an example of a good request with a bad title.

Some users also prepend something similar, so they end up with a title like "Freedom of Information Request: Minutes of January 2022 Meeting".

RichardTaylor commented 2 years ago

The current advice/prompt which appears next to the subject/title element of the make a request form (on both Pro and the public service) is:

A one line summary of the information you are requesting, e.g. 'Crime statistics by ward level for Wales'

This isn't too bad, and we don't want to clutter the form. We do want to encourage people to be precise and informative.

Ideas: Help page section, occasional use of the site-wide banner encouraging better subjects/titles.

Maybe if a proposed title was only say two or three words the system could show a warning and encourage expanding it.

Alternatively a warning shown on requests where a title has been used more than say 10 times before:

"This subject/title has already been used on X requests on WhatDoTheyKnow - can you make it more precise"

We could try a prompt/warning in cases of apparently descriptive titles which explains the motivation for encouraging good titles eg.:

"Descriptive titles help those searching for information. Can you improve this summary of the information you are seeking?"