Croydon In The 2010s - Differences between Version 10 and Version 2 of FAQ

Version 10 Version 2
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==== What is this website for? ====
==== What's this guide for? ====
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It originated as an up-to-date, searchable, and categorised directory of the businesses and services available in Croydon. It's now primarily a historical record of central Croydon retail and other businesses during the 2010s, though it also includes some information about earlier decades.
Our aim is to create an up-to-date, searchable, and categorised directory of the businesses and services available in Croydon. We're doing this mainly for our own enjoyment and convenience. We live in Croydon, we like gathering data, and we like to shop in small local shops rather than from huge megastores.
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==== What does it cover? ====
==== What's the connection between this guide and the <a href="http://london.randomness.org.uk/">Randomness Guide to London</a>? ====
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Businesses and services that had a physical (shopfront) presence within our geographical area of interest (see [http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/boundaries-of-the-completists-guide-to-croydon_157082 map]). We don't have any information on businesses that were run from people's homes or that worked only via house calls, via post, or via the internet.
The Completists' Guide to Croydon (CGC) is a sister project to the Randomness Guide to London (RGL). It's run by some of the same people, and it uses the same software, but it is a separate project.
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==== Is it still being updated? ====
CGC is a completists' guide. We aim to document every business within our area of interest, whether we've used its services or not. For this reason, we include only factual data, and not our own opinions.
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No information about changes happening to Croydon after December 2019 will be added. However, if we find out new information about things that happened earlier, we may well add it.
RGL, on the other hand, focuses on providing in-depth information and opinions on places in London that we have actually been to ourselves. The intention is not to cover every pub/restaurant/etc in London, but to only write up a place if we have something original to say about it.
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==== Why the cut-off in December 2019? ====
==== If this is a wiki, why can't I edit it? ====
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When we launched the Completists’ Guide to Croydon back in August 2012, we planned to keep it running indefinitely &#8212; making sure the information stayed up to date, reporting openings and closures, and keeping everything carefully categorised. However, after [http://www.earth.li/~kake/ Kake] accidentally turned into [http://london-road-croydon.org/history/ a local historian], we found that the work of keeping things up to date was interfering with our other projects, so we decided to wind the site down at the end of 2019.
We don't have the resources to put into moderating user submissions; we would rather spend that time out and about looking for new things in Croydon. If you would like to join our team of contributors, do get in touch, but please note that we are unlikely to be interested unless you already have a proven track record of providing reliable data (i.e. we should probably have already heard of you in a London/online context).
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==== Why did you start doing this in the first place? Why not just rely on Google Maps? ====
==== Why can't I leave a comment? ====
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Mainly for our own enjoyment and convenience. We live in Croydon, we like gathering data, and we like to shop in small local shops rather than from huge megastores. Google Maps is a global site, and some of its local data is years out of date &#8212; and aside from Street View, which does give the date when the photos were taken, there's no indication of when the information was last verified.

We wanted to have a reliable, complete, and easily navigable source of data about the businesses operating in Croydon, and we made it publically available on the internet, rather than keeping it to ourselves, because we hoped that other people would find it useful too.

==== Where did you get all this information? ====

Most of it comes from walking around Croydon, looking at things, and asking people questions.

==== I would like to talk to you about something! Can we talk on the phone? ====

No, we don't do phones, but you can talk to us over email or in person. We like email conversations! But if you'd like to talk to us in person,
[[Contact Us|send us an email]] and let us know &#8212; we can meet for a chat in a local pub or cafe some time.

==== Why don't
you have any information on things like market stalls and popups? ====

We decided from the beginning not
to cover the individual market stalls on Surrey Street because they weren't all there every day, so it would be hard for us to keep the data up to date &#8212; if a stall was absent on a particular day, this could have been because they'd ceased trading or simply because they didn't plan to come that day. With permanently-located shops, this sort of thing is a lot easier to check out.

==== I would like to resurrect this guide and start making updates again! Can I do that? ====

All our data is available under Creative Commons, and [http://openguides.org/ the code that runs the site] is open source.
We'd be happy for someone else to start it up again (as long as you don't aim to monetise it, since this is prohibited by our chosen Creative Commons licence), but please don't underestimate how much work it takes to keep the data up to date. If you've never done anything like this before, you should think very carefully about whether you have enough time available for it.

==== What's a completist? Why is the guide called "The Completists' Guide to Croydon"? ====

The Oxford English Dictionary gives two definitions for the term "completist": "an obsessive (and often indiscriminate) collector", and "intent
on completeness or comprehensiveness". These seem to sum up our aim pretty well.

==== What's
the connection between this guide and the [http://london.randomness.org.uk/ Randomness Guide to London]? ====

The Completists' Guide to Croydon (CGC) is a sister project to the Randomness Guide to London (RGL). It's run by some of the same people
, and it uses the same software, but it is a separate project.

CGC is a completists' guide. We aimed to document every business within our area of interest, whether we'd used its services or not. For this reason, we include only factual data, and not our own opinions.

RGL, on the other hand, focuses on providing in-depth information and opinions on places in London that we have actually been to ourselves. The intention is not to cover every pub/restaurant/etc in London, but to only write up a place if we have something original to say about it
.
Because [[Kake]] has not yet written a thing that will let you email comments directly to us. We don't plan to have user comments displayed automatically on the site, for the reasons given above.
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major_change='0'

What's this guide for?

Our aim is to create an up-to-date, searchable, and categorised directory of the businesses and services available in Croydon. We're doing this mainly for our own enjoyment and convenience. We live in Croydon, we like gathering data, and we like to shop in small local shops rather than from huge megastores.

What's the connection between this guide and the Randomness Guide to London?

The Completists' Guide to Croydon (CGC) is a sister project to the Randomness Guide to London (RGL). It's run by some of the same people, and it uses the same software, but it is a separate project.

CGC is a completists' guide. We aim to document every business within our area of interest, whether we've used its services or not. For this reason, we include only factual data, and not our own opinions.

RGL, on the other hand, focuses on providing in-depth information and opinions on places in London that we have actually been to ourselves. The intention is not to cover every pub/restaurant/etc in London, but to only write up a place if we have something original to say about it.

If this is a wiki, why can't I edit it?

We don't have the resources to put into moderating user submissions; we would rather spend that time out and about looking for new things in Croydon. If you would like to join our team of contributors, do get in touch, but please note that we are unlikely to be interested unless you already have a proven track record of providing reliable data (i.e. we should probably have already heard of you in a London/online context).

Why can't I leave a comment?

Because Kake has not yet written a thing that will let you email comments directly to us. We don't plan to have user comments displayed automatically on the site, for the reasons given above.


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