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mysociety / whatdotheyknow-theme

The Alaveteli theme for WhatDoTheyKnow (UK)
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/
MIT License
31 stars 26 forks source link

Blog post on useful template phrases #1223

Open garethrees opened 2 years ago

garethrees commented 2 years ago

We've collected a nice number of snippets that could be helpful to our users now, before they're implemented in some kind of snippet library within Alaveteli (https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/6164).

#6164 suggests a help page, but a quicker option would be to publish in a blog post, with the aim of treating that as a first draft of the help page content.

FOIMonkey commented 2 years ago

+1 I like this idea a lot, and it might help to reduce the number of users adding the unnecessary Heather Brooke wording to requests - "I am writing to make an open government request for all the information to which I am entitled under the Freedom of Information Act 2000".

FOIMonkey commented 2 years ago

We could also add something to this about how to turn question into a valid request for info. @confirmordeny wrote something on this once that we could improve on: 2022-06-13

garethrees commented 2 years ago

how to turn question into a valid request for info

Oh, yes, this would be great!

RichardTaylor commented 2 years ago

I prefer a help page because it keeps users on the site, also any incoming links to the advice would come to WhatDoTheyKnow.

garethrees commented 2 years ago

I prefer a help page because…

Yeah, I get that, but a blog post is easier to get from idea to published. A help page becomes easier when there's existing content, so a blog post is a way of getting there. It's a tradeoff of getting something good now vs best later (perhaps much later).

FOIMonkey commented 2 years ago

See this response where the police pointed to our blog rather than our help pages: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/voi_and_other_2_wheel_scooters#incoming-1806964

A blog is a good start.