There is a business directory for the Los Angeles County area at http://groups.drupal.org/node/73063 that has a path alias that I'd like removed. There are now 8 Drupal user groups in Los Angeles County (Downtown Los Angeles, Santa Clarita Valley, Antelope Valley, LA Drupal, Inland Empire, High Desert and San Gabriel Valley) and the wiki page is not specific to any one of them. It could also be said that it's specific to all of them, but essentially the current path alias is incorrect and should be removed.

Comments

mike stewart’s picture

I disagree with this request. The other groups are free to maintain their own directories. This is a wiki in the LA group, titled Directory of Los Angeles-based Drupal businesses with the alias :: http://groups.drupal.org/la/business-directory

and seems totally appropriate

many of the groups used to support the argument are geographically dispersed and not at all confused with Los Angeles -- perhaps there would be confusion with Southern California

christefano’s picture

The wiki page is cross-posted to 8 groups that are in or overlap with Los Angeles County. The "LA Drupal" group is just one of those groups. I'd like to know why this wiki page has a path alias that effectively gives this wiki page to the "LA Drupal" group by eminent domain.

Meanwhile, I'm the person who created this directory and has invested the most time in consistently and objectively maintaining it. If I'm mistaken about the geography of any of those groups, please let me know.

mike stewart’s picture

The cross-posting is another issue with an easy remedy by any of the administrators in those groups. Meanwhile, this is an open source project and many people in the community have edited the document over the years.

The fact remains the content makes sense for the LA group and the URL path is logical and helpful to the community.

christefano’s picture

Mike, there is no single "LA" group. There are over half a dozen "LA" groups. I'm not compelled by your reasoning for commandeering a community resource that falls outside of the scope of your user group.

frob’s picture

Changing the url would have the potential of breaking links on other sites and in other places.

I would hope that it would take more than there being a "/la/" in the url to potentially break links on other sites.

Moreover all the listed groups are in the greater LA area and I don't see it being a problem having a page listing the businesses in LA having a URL with /la/ in it. I don't understand how the alias is incorrect.

sreynen’s picture

Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

/la/business-directory seems like a reasonable URL for a business directory within the group at the URL /la. If there's confusion with other LA groups, those groups are welcome to create separate business directories.

christefano’s picture

Status: Closed (won't fix) » Needs review

This issue isn't about preventing "confusion" — it's about how an inappropriate claim of ownership has been made to this wiki page and its content.

By leaving the path alias as it is now, the webmasters are agreeing that this content belongs to the LA Drupal user group. I strongly feel that this creates a worrisome precedent that can be used to claim eminent domain over anything "LA" and "Drupal". Marking this as won't fix is ignoring that aspect of this issue.

If broken links are an issue, just add a new 'node/73063' path alias to the wiki page. That would override the existing alias and leaves it intact so that old links and bookmarks still work. Reopening and marking needs review.

oseldman’s picture

Does this wiki page even need to have an alias at all?

Or couldn't this page have a path of g.d.o/los-angeles-business-directory (or similar) and be linked to from any of the local groups? This would allow updating a single resource, without it "belonging" to a specific (OG) group.

christefano’s picture

In case I'm not being explicit enough, here's some additional background that may help. If anything, it goes to the point of where some of the individuals are coming from regarding this issue.

If you look at the revision history, you'll see that I've made the vast majority of the edits and the rest are contributions from the local business community. The exception here is Mike, whose contributions consist almost entirely of either changing the name of his company or modifying my own text to downplay my company's service offerings and community initiatives.

Edit: changing "each of" to "some of". Sorry about that.

sreynen’s picture

Status: Needs review » Closed (won't fix)

Wikis are not owned by anyone. That's already pretty explicit with the notice at the top of every wiki, but if anyone remains confused about it, feel free to point them here. A URL alias does not grant ownership, nor do contributions.

christefano’s picture

Status: Closed (won't fix) » Closed (fixed)

To anyone who isn't aware, the "LA Drupal" group is really a small subset of the Los Angeles-area Drupal community. That's just a fact and it seems to me that it needs to be repeated.

While I'm not entirely satisfied by the decision here to do nothing, I am satisfied by the policy statement being given: "Wikis are not owned by anyone." I'll file a new issue if anyone remains confused about it. Thanks!

greggles’s picture

"LA Drupal" group is really a small subset of the Los Angeles-area Drupal community

By what measure?

It is the 9th largest group in terms of number of members that have ever joined (and the largest on the west coast of the USA)
It's the 11th largest in terms of new members in the last year (and, again, the largest on the west coast of the USA)
It's the 3rd largest in terms of nodes created all time (and, again...)
It's the 5th largest in terms of new nodes created in the last year (and, again...)

So, as far as I can tell it is not only not a small subset of anything, it is one of the biggest groups on the entire site ever (regardless of working group or regional group or whatever).

Full data and queries:

Users all time:

select count(1), n.nid, n.title from og_uid o inner join node n on o.nid = n.nid group by n.nid, n.title order by count(1) desc limit 20;
+----------+-------+--------------------------------+
| count(1) | nid | title |
+----------+-------+--------------------------------+
| 3063 | 2191 | Drupal Dojo |
| 2255 | 223 | High performance |
| 2198 | 332 | New York City |
| 2106 | 1684 | Social Networking Sites |
| 1879 | 2516 | Contributed Module Status |
| 1681 | 1722 | Drupal in Education |
| 1604 | 175 | Theme development |
| 1582 | 25 | Washington, DC Drupalers |
| 1514 | 3002 | LA Drupal (Los Angeles Drupal) |
| 1458 | 1994 | Newspapers on Drupal |
| 1386 | 28 | Consulting and Business |
| 1386 | 199 | Brasil |
| 1345 | 19774 | Design 4 Drupal |
| 1273 | 2 | Boston |
| 1252 | 90 | Views Developers |
| 1234 | 36 | SF Bay Area |
| 1166 | 68 | Australia |
| 1159 | 417 | Usability |
| 1132 | 303 | Location and Mapping |
| 1091 | 618 | Sweden |
+----------+-------+--------------------------------+

Users in the past year:

select count(1), n.nid, n.title from og_uid o inner join node n on o.nid = n.nid where o.created > (unix_timestamp() - 60*60*24*365) GROUP BY n.nid, n.title order by count(1) desc limit 20;
+----------+--------+--------------------------------------------------+
| count(1) | nid | title |
+----------+--------+--------------------------------------------------+
| 1052 | 207278 | Drupal Jobs |
| 530 | 121534 | Omega Framework |
| 467 | 182334 | DevOps |
| 408 | 223 | High performance |
| 400 | 332 | New York City |
| 341 | 25 | Washington, DC Drupalers |
| 306 | 197963 | Large Scale Drupal (LSD) - Projects and Plans |
| 302 | 28440 | HTML5 |
| 296 | 592 | Mobile |
| 282 | 2191 | Drupal Dojo |
| 279 | 180194 | jQuery Mobile |
| 271 | 175 | Theme development |
| 251 | 3002 | LA Drupal (Los Angeles Drupal) |
| 242 | 181249 | Drupal Commons |
| 237 | 417 | Usability |
| 235 | 531 | India |
| 230 | 185684 | Web Experience Management |
| 227 | 213563 | Drupal 8: Blocks & Layouts Everywhere Initiative |
| 219 | 62708 | Web Services and Context Core Initiative |
| 212 | 2 | Boston |
+----------+--------+--------------------------------------------------+

Nodes posted in the last year

select count(1), n.nid, n.title from og_ancestry o inner join node n on o.group_nid = n.nid inner join node n2 on o.nid = n2.nid where n2.created > (unix_timestamp() - 60*60*24*365) GROUP BY n.nid, n.title order by count(1) desc limit 20;
+----------+--------+----------------------------------+
| count(1) | nid | title |
+----------+--------+----------------------------------+
| 781 | 207278 | Drupal Jobs |
| 533 | 332 | New York City |
| 461 | 25 | Washington, DC Drupalers |
| 444 | 6707 | Spanish |
| 416 | 3002 | LA Drupal (Los Angeles Drupal) |
| 344 | 618 | Sweden |
| 331 | 415 | United Kingdom |
| 324 | 8614 | London |
| 292 | 68 | Australia |
| 288 | 2 | Boston |
| 277 | 741 | Florida |
| 273 | 36 | SF Bay Area |
| 232 | 390 | Portland (Oregon) |
| 215 | 20 | Denver / Boulder Colorado (DBUG) |
| 214 | 531 | India |
| 210 | 1988 | San Diego DUG |
| 186 | 1334 | Twin Cities |
| 172 | 18862 | New Jersey |
| 168 | 7828 | Maryland |
| 161 | 20937 | Brighton |
+----------+--------+----------------------------------+

Nodes posted all time

select count(1), n.nid, n.title from og_ancestry o inner join node n on o.group_nid = n.nid inner join node n2 on o.nid = n2.nid GROUP BY n.nid, n.title order by count(1) desc limit 20;
+----------+--------+----------------------------------+
| count(1) | nid | title |
+----------+--------+----------------------------------+
| 2739 | 618 | Sweden |
| 2446 | 332 | New York City |
| 1913 | 3002 | LA Drupal (Los Angeles Drupal) |
| 1574 | 25 | Washington, DC Drupalers |
| 1282 | 36 | SF Bay Area |
| 1246 | 2 | Boston |
| 1107 | 68 | Australia |
| 1058 | 390 | Portland (Oregon) |
| 940 | 33070 | OpenPublish |
| 923 | 2191 | Drupal Dojo |
| 916 | 6707 | Spanish |
| 902 | 223 | High performance |
| 886 | 741 | Florida |
| 886 | 8614 | London |
| 829 | 7 | Vancouver |
| 807 | 466 | Seattle |
| 786 | 207278 | Drupal Jobs |
| 771 | 20 | Denver / Boulder Colorado (DBUG) |
| 763 | 1722 | Drupal in Education |
| 728 | 1988 | San Diego DUG |
+----------+--------+----------------------------------+

christefano’s picture

Thanks, Greg. These are great numbers. I'd love to see this report generated again in a year from now.

At this point the "LA Drupal" group benefits from the Matthew Effect. Do you have any ideas for how to measure that? I wonder how many of the new posts and signups can be attributed in part because of the size of the group. So long as cross-posting is possible, I think the "LA Drupal" group will always be frequently used as a channel for reaching more readers.

The "all time" numbers are inflated due to both cross-posting and from how the Southern California group posts and members were merged in 2010. I'm not sure how useful or accurate those numbers are and am interested to hear how you might approach that.

Another way that the "LA Drupal" group is a small subset of Drupal activity in the larger Los Angeles area is that the group currently has 2 meetups a month. This is compared to the 5-6 meetups elsewhere in Los Angeles County:

  1. Frontend Drupal / D4D
  2. High Performance Drupal
  3. General Downtown Drupal
  4. San Gabriel Valley Drupal
  5. Intro to Drupal workshops
  6. Drupal Coworking Fridays

The meetups mentioned above are certainly being cross-posted and act to increase the apparent size and activity of the groups they're cross-posted to. Truthfully, I'm not as interested in these numbers as I am in the attendance at the events. In September, 2012, the combined in-person attendance at these "non-LA Drupal" events was over 100 people.

frob’s picture

If you are worried about the numbers being inflated artificially due to cross posting, then stop cross posting.

christefano’s picture

No, I'm not worried about inflated numbers. I apologize if that's how it came across.

What I'm worried about (and what this issue is about) is how some people in the "LA Drupal" group believe that all Drupal activity in the Los Angeles area is under their sole jurisdiction.