Other pub guides

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There are a number of seemingly competing online pub guides available which attempt to provide information about UK pubs.

Contents

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List of online pub guides

Starting from Wikipedia's 'Public House' entry, a list of online pub guides, from which we may single some out for review. There seems to be a new one started up almost every week!

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Pub histories

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Other

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ukcider discussion

Ukcider is currently discussing whether or not there is any value in providing links to any of the other pub guides, as is currently done in a few examples on the cider pub guide pages.

The discussion was provoked by activity on Cider_Pub_Guide_to_Gloucestershire_and_Bristol

is being developed on the talk page Talk:Cider_Pub_Guide_to_Gloucestershire_and_Bristol

and continues also on the mailing list. To join the email discussion see Ukcider:Community_Portal

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Richard's script

A possible solution for ukcider pub guide links, offered by Richard Fairhurst is demonstrated on the entry for Charlbury. Do try it out and see what you think:

The next step would be to create a template to minimise the amount of code required for each entry also to evaluate whether including this on many entries would be a good thing to have, and whether it would put the uninitiated off from adding in basic new pub information.

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Format of pub guides

Most if not all of the pub guides have separate pages for each pub, so that means they are working on more of a 'database' model as opposed to the more browsable, area by area type of directory which has evolved on ukcider. But it seems unlikely that people want to search for pubs in the same way that they may book an airline ticket or shop online for gadgets. Surely the location is where people will usually want to start, and then be able to see all the listed pubs at or near that location without having to click on each and every one of them to find out that they're not interesting? Scanning the page by eye is quicker and less frustrating than clickling and waiting for pages to refresh. When somebody creates a general pub guide which works in a similar way to the cider one, so you can see at a glance brief details about all of the pubs in one village, or part of town etc then all of the pub-per-page guides may be left behind.

Thinking about this, I would propose that the members of uk.food+drink.real-ale and/or grassroots CAMRA members take it upon themselves to go and organise the UK section of the recently created wikipubs.org. Category:United_Kingdom This uses the same software as here, with an integrated map service. By organising from an existing community they would be able to quickly replcate the success of the cider pub guide on a larger scale for no cost. The only snag would be if the existing small number of people already on wikipubs insisted on organising the whole world on a page-per-pub basis. But with sufficent numbers, not necessarily a large mob, "just do it" would win the day.

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Searching ukcider

The information on ukcider is really intended for browsing rather than searching, but there are two ways to search the contents.

  • The left hand side bar on every page has a search box which invokes the wiki software to search. How useful are these results?
  • On the external page at http://ukcider.co.uk there is a search box which uses Google to search through their cached pages from ukcider including most of the wiki. (set the tick box to ukcider rather than Web) How useful are these results?
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