Collecting detailed info on individual stores with Bluepages

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reschultzed
Member
Posts: 8
Joined: 31 Jan 2020 01:46

Collecting detailed info on individual stores with Bluepages

Post by reschultzed »

Hi there, please let me know if I'm posting this in the wrong place. I'm the administrator of Bluepages, a collaborative project with the goal of allowing people to build up historical information about all kinds of places. (https://www.bluepageswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page) As you already know, retail is a crucial part of any community's history, but is often neglected and forgotten. Bluepages offers a new format for collecting this kind of information, similar to Wikipedia. I have collected basic information on hundreds of thousands of retail locations, many of which are supermarkets and grocery stores, and organized them by chain, which you can see here: https://www.bluepageswiki.org/wiki/Special:CargoTables. My hope is that, with many like-minded people working together, we can create a comprehensive historical directory of the whole world, and the whole site could look something like this: https://www.bluepageswiki.org/wiki/Perr ... Wisconsin).

I also want to be clear that this is a non-profit site with no advertising, and I intend to keep it that way. I make no money from you clicking these links. This post is not an advertisement, just a request for help in accomplishing a common goal. I'm also happy to take suggestions on how this goal might be accomplished a little differently than I would have expected. Thanks!
pseudo3d
Veteran
Posts: 394
Joined: 24 Sep 2012 00:04

Re: Collecting detailed info on individual stores with Bluepages

Post by pseudo3d »

It's a cool concept. At the same time, I've given up on simply contributing to wikis (used to be a big fan of Wikimapia, though even that hasn't seen much activity lately) because information gets replicated, changed, you have to deal with trolls and psycho moderators, and continues to actively harm smaller home-grown websites.

Furthermore, many of the best stories and sources come from non-official sources. A newspaper or phone directory (if one even is easily accessible) may have only have fleeting references to places, if at all (a forum thread or blog is traceable, a wiki is not). I say this as an independent researcher who has created (over the course of a decade) about 200 entries, each entry covering an individual building, or some cases, a sub-divided piece of land, complete with photos and ads where applicable. I take pride in it (along with my similar projects) that I have 100% creative control over it and it can't be modified or deleted without my approval.
BatteryMill
Contributor
Posts: 96
Joined: 23 Sep 2019 20:29

Re: Collecting detailed info on individual stores with Bluepages

Post by BatteryMill »

Awesome concept! It'll definitely be some time before it's very well filled out, but I hope we'll see wonderful contributions and make advancements by letting people know of histories of retail locations to a greater extent.
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