It’s tricky to create a relational database organized around taxonomies that can grow with user-proposed terms. But this always-growing taxonomy is the point. WonderCat is not about surveying people. It’s not about gathering data for statistical analysis. It’s about finding a way for scholarly expertise about literature to help real readers better understand their experiences with story (and find new things to read). And our way of doing this is to encourage users to tell us when they’ve had an experience with a story or identified a technology in a story that isn’t in WonderCat. My first effort to make this possible was facilitated by a field group created with ACF. I set things up so that users could choose from all of the terms in the taxonomy, but I set one term as “xxx-I need to enter something new” and, if users selected it, I used conditional logic to create fields where they could propose a term and offer a definition of that term. I started the name with “xxx” so it would appear at the bottom of the list (and I toyed with changing it to “Zoinks! I need to enter something new” because Scooby Doo is fun) but I think a little snippet of php can make a particular term appear at the bottom of the list.
This summer I’ve been thinking through a workflow for these submissions. When a user proposes a term, it will automatically be sent to one of our reviewers, who can make comments and send it along to another reviewer before the two reviewers make their editorial decision and respond to the user. I haven’t set this up yet and I expect it will be a little painful (I think I’ll do this with gravity flow), but this seems like a good strategy to manage (and keep records of) the review process for taxonomy terms.
Today I realized that this workflow might also make something else possible. I know from teaching students how to classify their experiences that it’s not an intuitive process, and I’ve always worried that this won’t work with users who aren’t in a class using WonderCat. It might just be too unfamiliar to do without guidance. But what if someone who is new to WonderCat and this whole task of classifying their experiences could share some information and ask for guidance? What if one of the options in the controlled vocabulary was “I’m not sure–can someone help?”
And if we did set that up and it was popular…how could we possibly answer all of those questions? Nice thoughts to ponder on a Friday.
