#escis

So I guess I’m a very silent member of the Sims community on Tumblr. I follow a bunch of ‘Simblrs but since this is a secondary blog (my main blog is @flowerswrappedinbacon) I can’t follow anyone from this username and you wouldn’t know it’s me.

So. I’ve decided to publicly show some love to simblrs because while yeah, I use this blog to post adorable sim toddler pictures from my Dynasty, I want to be part of the community too.

In no particular order, below are my favorite Simblrs:

@gh0ulishness - There’s nothing staged about their posts, and I really appreciate that. Their posts are organic and fun to read (also, great CC recommendations.)

@escis - What can I say, I’m a sucker for gameplay photos, and these are quality. I dig everything about this simblr.  Also, there’s the occasional throwback post to the sims 2, and I miss the sims 2.

@pxelbox - The. Colors. On. This. Blog. I can’t. I love. I obsess.

@ohare-lane - First of all, I have no idea how they put their photos together but I’m super jealous. The blog is aesthetic goals. Also, again with the colors.

@4thesims - They add dialogue to their posts in short, quippy detail. I dig it. Also, the screenshots are absurdly well done. They must spend a lot of time making sure every picture is perfect, and it shows.

@thosefuckingsims - First off, I love swearing so this is right up my alley. Second, sim gifs! Like, what?

This evening, I've been doing something very community-spirited: uploading photos to Wikimedia Commons of local buildings. To be one of those neurotic completionist types who includes as much possible detail as possible with these images, I've been Googling various things, and doing a lot of Street View to work out exactly which street an image was taken on (no more! My new camera has GPS!).

Anyway, I took a photo of the Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, a Roman Catholic church in Mayfield, East Sussex. For quite a lot of search queries in Google related to said church the top result is this page from a website called ESCIS, the East Sussex Community Information Service, a database maintained by the county's Library and Information Service. What can I say? The Catholic Church in Britain have pretty crappy SEO.

ESCIS, then, is basically a database of Scout troops and WIs and church hall coffee mornings and so on (and some slightly less Middle England things like queer reading groups in Brighton). That's pretty handy.

When looking at this page I saw those magic words: "Edit the entry". My mind starts reeling.

Oh my. My local council have turned their database of community groups into a damn wiki?! That's pretty cool! I might be able to put my nice photo from Commons up on the ESCIS website too! Maybe we can cross-fertilize this data back in to other projects like Wikipedia or Open Plaques or whatever. A local council wiki for community groups would be pretty awesome!

So I hit edit.

And I'm told I need to register. No big deal. They aren't going to let me just IP edit, right? This is the county council. If someone had suggested doing the full Wikipedia treatment, that would never have happened. So I tap my e-mail address in and choose a password.

A few minutes later I get my login:

Hello

We have sent you this email to let you know that you now have a login to MyEscis.

You are now able to store your favourite categories, entries and searches, change the look of the website, and add and edit your entry(s) on ESCIS.

Your login email is: [sniptastic] Your password is: [snippety snip snip]

Please find further instructions on how to use MyEscis here: http://www.escis.org.uk/myescis/

Please remember that it may take up to two weeks for any changes to be saved to your entry(s) to be reviewed and updated on ESCIS.

Many thanks for helping us keep ESCIS up-to-date!

If you have any problems or queries, please contact the Escis team on tel: 01273 481754 or email: [email protected]

Yours faithfully,

ESCIS Team

I also get an e-mail from someone at the council: an Out of Office AutoReply. Uh oh.

Subject: Out of Office AutoReply: Request to update entry

Thank you for your email. I am on leave, returning to the office on Monday 21st February I will answer your email upon my return.

Then, about 20 minutes later, I get another e-mail:

Hello

We have sent you this email to let you know that you have now been approved to update your organisation(s) on ESCIS.

Your login email is: [snip snip snip] and your password is: [snipped]

The entry(ies) you are registered to update is/are:

Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Mayfield - Approved

Please remember that it may take up to two weeks for any changes to be saved to your entry(ies) to be reviewed and updated on ESCIS.

Many thanks for helping us keep ESCIS up-to-date!

If you have any problems or queries, please contact the Escis team on tel: 01273 481754 or email: [email protected]

Yours faithfully, Escis Team

So, I'm registered to edit a particular page. But this isn't a wiki, damnit! That "Edit this entry" thing looked so inviting! I still might be able to upload a pretty picture of the church and so I'd get that nice feeling of being a friendly wikicitizen.

I go back, log in, go to the page about the church, and hit edit. I now have a big form where I can update anything about the church. If I was one of those nasty wiki vandal types, I could go change the name of the priest to Father McFarty Pants or something equally juvenile. But I don't want to. I just want to put up a photo. I mean, it sort of looks like a wiki, right?

I scan down the form and eventually realise that I have to tick a box confirming that I am an authorized representative of the organisation in question.

All my hopes are shattered. My local county council doesn't really have a wiki. Man, that sucks. Me, Nic Ferrier and the Brighton crowd could have had revert wars over some arbitrary bit of local minutiae.

But, you know, East Sussex County Council: why not make ESCIS into a wiki? It'd be fun! You could reuse photographs from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. And local people could keep it up to date. The government and all their 'Big Society' bullshit probably want us to run the libraries, so we may as well be able to edit the wiki. So why not a wiki?

You could still have librarians going through and checking it all. Plonk Pending Changes on it and give all the librarians admin rights and trusted local people with reviewer rights on pages with pending changes. Plonk something like Semantic MediaWiki on there and you too could be publishing Linked Data like the government and Tim Berners-Lee and all that want. Again, what's stopping you? Come on. Let's do this.