Add 'place' field for entry type Thesis (to distinguish University and Place)

mark

Some styles want only the university name for a dissertations; others want University (University of California) and Place (Berkeley, CA). At present, there is no field for Place in the Zotero item type 'Thesis'. So it is not possible to get the latter type of styles working.

mark

[edit: changed category. I guess it's a feature request]

I ran into this while working on the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistic Journals, but I'm sure there are other styles out there in need of this.

Rintze

but I'm sure there are other styles out there in need of this.

There are:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/339/additional-fields/?Focus=18612#Comment_18612
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/4497/thesis-problem/?Focus=19579#Comment_19579

mark

Okay, it seems the case is quite strong then. How difficult can it be to add this field?

Rintze

For the development team: could you elaborate a bit on how requests of this kind (adding fields to item types) are being handled? Will the fields for all item types be revised when you switch over to the BIBO model? Or are these requests just put on hold until 2.0 final is released?

Adding the Place field to the Thesis item type can't be very controversial, but the first requests for it were made over a year ago.

hmouro

I also vote for a 'place' field for newspapers. It's generally redundant in English because most refer to the place in the name: "New York Times", "Washington Post", etc. But in Spanish most names don't alude to the place where they are published, and there are countless newspapers named "La Nación", for example. For now, I'm writing "La Nación (Buenos Aires)" in the 'publication field but it's not very elegant.

fbennett

Another vote for a "place" field for the newspaper article type. The title and the place of publication need to be formatted separately, having the separate field would be great.

adamsmith

I second all requests in this thread, especially the one by Rintze regarding process.
Some things happen very quickly in Zotero as a response to user feedback, others take a long time or seem to vanish in the depth of the forum (sometimes to "suddenly" (form a user perspective) bin incorporated months later).
Generally it would help to understand what's going on behind the curtain a little more - not just to keep us happy (I for my part am quite happy with Zotero as it is and where it is going), but especially because people like Rintze, fbennett, noksagt, me and some others write a lot of answers to questions - the more info we have, the better answers we write.

fbennett

In the short term, would it be possible to just add a "Field requests" category to the forums? Requests are often followed by significant discussion, and having that material spread across multiple areas of the forum does make things hard to follow.

I realize that giving these requests their own category might lead to an increase in bolshie lobbying for this or that extension to the database schema, but it would improve communication over this important area of user-developer interaction. For users, it would make it easier to see what the priorities look like going forward, and to gauge the status of a particular request. For developers, it would make it easier to judge the level of demand behind a particular request, because users with a field-related issue would be more likely to land in the relevant thread.

mark

I agree with the previous posters that it is often difficult to find out whether a suggestion in the forums has been been considered, discussed, added to Trac, already implemented, or never will be implemented.

One interface for user-suggested ideas that I like is WordPress ideas. It is a system that needs sustained attention of moderators (/faithful users) to weed out duplicate ideas, but if properly tended, it's a great tool for developers to get a clear idea of what the userbase considers to be high priority issues. It's not only a great way to centralize discussion of features, but the rating system gives voice to many users that might not feel like placing a comment otherwise.

Since the system has been implemented for WordPress, user satisfaction has arguably increased and everyone is happy — the devs because they are more in touch with the demand, and the users because they have a clear sense of being listened to. It is those dynamics that we're missing here.

migugg

+1
zotero is fantastically helpful and responsive, but it is frustrating to see that some issues, even some absolutely central ones are just not dealt with, even if multiple requests pour in and from a user standpoint it is absolutely not clear why. In my view, the most glaring of these is the problem of detect duplicates and find and replace function, not to mention the problem of a missing style generator. Though I am not a developer, both of these seem to be simple and minor tweaks (almost every other program has them, so why is it difficult to implement them?), but they are just not dealt with.

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/42/duplicate-detection/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/928/find-replace-function/

Moreover, the lack of these features generates a tremendous amount of traffic in the forums and work for both users and developpers.

Also, it is often not clear whether the developpers welcome lobbying for certain features or deem them to be a nuisance that clutters the forums.

An alternative could be to have a one time survey of user needs (with a web-based survey tool).

mark

A survey would be a reasonable start — though two inherent disadvantages of surveys as opposed to a dynamic 'Ideas' system as described above are (1) that someone (presumably a developer) has to preselect a finite list of issues, thereby already imposing some kind of filter and potentially missing things that users find very important; and (2) that a survey is only a snapshot, whereas an 'Ideas' system would be continually evolving (and hence continually of use as a way to gauge community wishes).

See http://wordpress.org/development/2007/01/ideas-and-kvetch/ for some background on the WP Ideas feature.

migugg

agreed, ideas and kvetch is much nicer, though I have no idea how difficult to implement.

mark

Any news on this?

alexuw

Agree something like Ideas would be great. Unfortunately it looks like Ideas itself is not open source.

In another thread somebody suggested Dell's http://www.ideastorm.com/ - which looks pretty much like a blog with a ranking system. That could be a quick-and-dirty way: blog entry per feature, people add comments, each has a ranking/survey. Lots of other crap for free: categories, tag clouds, popularity rankings. Big question: who gets to add entries?

This old thread has some comments on how the zotero team is (or was) thinking about this.

mark

Ah, I missed that earlier thread, which is very informative.

The blog+ranking setup for Ideas is a good one. It's easy enough to build such a system with WordPress, too. Pick a good ranking plugin, use the TDO Forms plugin for various types/levels of submissions, and you're good to go. One issue, though, is user management. (Not just for authors, also for commenters.) We don't want to duplicate user databases I imagine.

Big question: who gets to add entries?

This could be an informally vetted group of 'friends of zotero' (fbennett's term I think), who at the same time would have the function of weeding out duplicates, referring people to the relevant ideas, etc.

alexuw

I would help out with something like that. I consider myself as a FoZ. :-)

mark is right it would be easy to set up, and I think enormously beneficial for all if everyone bought in (and even if not everyone bought in, but I'll hold off on that idea for now).

Next question: has anyone noticed this sleepy thread with a misleading title?

adamsmith

yes -
and if your working assumption is that Dan is aware of any active thread on the forum I have found that you're right almost all the time.

alexuw

FWIW I believe the OP can change the the title of a thread. Speaking hypothetically, he or she could change it to something transgressive and attention-grabbing.

Being in a transgressive mood myself I'll follow up on a parenthetical comment in my previous post. I expect Zotero will in time become a larger ecosystem, in which related projects might be run somewhat independently. The CSL processor project is one model, but there may be others. This can happen not just with software proper but with e.g. documentation and user communities.

migugg

this thread fell asleep unfortunately and I do not even know whether the zotero team took notice of it. What is the way to go? Shall the foz set up this outside of zotero? Is zotero working on it, even aware of it?

dstillman

We're aware of it. There are a bunch of schema updates that need to be made, and this will happen at the same time (largely because, at the moment, there's no good way to make these sorts of type/field changes without shutting off syncing access to old clients, which makes the changes non-trivial). We'll try to get it into 2.0 Final.

migugg

My comment did not refer to "add place" but to the suggestion to have a ranking/voting system for feature requests. Maybe this theme needs its own thread...

sean

FYI, place is now in thesis.