search

mysociety / alaveteli

Provide a Freedom of Information request system for your jurisdiction
https://alaveteli.org
Other
387 stars 195 forks source link

Add ability to cite multiple requests via one link #5875

Open RichardTaylor opened 4 years ago

RichardTaylor commented 4 years ago

This is a request for a feature enabling linking to / referencing / citing a set of requests in one go.

Often a piece of research or journalism is based on a set of requests so this feature appears likely to be useful to serious and potentially impactful and professional users of the service.

We already have links to batch requests of the form:

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/info_request_batch/nnnnn

[I would say that's not a very pretty / human readable link and it might not be search engine friendly, and that feature doesn't help those who didn't make the requests they want to link to as part of a batch, or if they want to point to multiple batches of requests]

Admins can also manually add tags to requests.

If any user could tag their requests (as proposed at #2302) they would be able to create a list of requests they could reference. (This might not be ideal as others could add to that list by tagging their own, or other, requests with the same tag!).

A protected tag which only one user can use is an idea. This could be implemented perhaps as only allowing users to create tags involving their user's URL slug, or user:slug. eg. Only I should be able to tag requests eg. user:richard_taylor:highlights or user:richard_taylor:NHS_filming_protocols_2020

A great URL structure for linking to multiple items is used by the CycleStreets Photo-map. Users can create a URL by adding a comma separated list of photo IDs and that link then points to a gallery of photos eg.

https://www.cyclestreets.net/location/114933,114932,114930/

This could get unwieldy quickly with large sets of requests though. It might be appropriate for small sets though, and tags could be used for larger sets.

RichardTaylor commented 2 years ago

We have had a recent case of a piece of published research based on a review of a couple of hundred requests made via WhatDoTheyKnow.

Perhaps if each request was tagged with a key:value something like

cited:www.example.com/link-to-report

might a search / link like

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/search/tag:cited:www.example.com/link-to-report/all

work?

Having two colons in a URL . search term like that isn't very pretty.

Perhaps a tag based on the research, or just entering a URL as a tag would be preferable.

RichardTaylor commented 2 years ago

We've previously discussed the idea of protected tags .. tags only certain users can add.   My initial view was that sounds like excess complexity, but if we're linking to a fixed set of requests then adding requests to that set shouldn't be something that anyone can do.

See also

https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/2302