Have you ever written a diary about a hot-off-the-presses news event, clicked Publish now and then waited ... and waited ... and waited ... and nobody dropped by to read your piece? While waiting, you decide to pass the time by reading other people's diaries, so you click the menu to browse through the list ... and you find 11 other people wrote diaries about your hot news item while you were busy writing yours. No wonder yours got lost in the crowd.
I would like to suggest an addition to DK to remedy that problem, as well as assist diary writers in other ways. It's nothing more than a fairly simple list: a working topics list.
Here's how it might work. You read a news article elsewhere on the web about Bernie's surge in a new poll, or Hillary's inspiring speech at an important venue, or some unusually wacky gruntings by one of the Republiklowns and think your fellow Kossacks should know about it.
So, you click your sidebar menu for Diaries: New and open a fresh sheet of web parchment to scribe your masterpiece. Then you click a new menu item on the sidebar, Working topics, and a list drops down showing various topics and who has marked him/herself as working on a diary about each topic.
Should I write about the banana shortage or not?
If you see that Jane Doe is working on "your" topic, you might decide to forgo the effort because you love her work and know she'll do a great job on it. On the other hand, maybe you disagree with most everything she writes so you decide to do your own diary on the same subject anyway. Or maybe you don't know much about the others currently marked as writing diaries about it but since there are 11 of them, you figure at least one of them will get it right.
Of course, maybe your urgent news item isn't on the topic list at all. In that case, you could click New topic and enter a brief topic summary and then anyone interested will see your new working topic and your username. If they want to write a diary also about "your" topic, they can click the Add me button next to it and their username will show up in the list alongside of yours.
The system could clear every entry after 24 hours since a topic is not likely hot and fresh and being written up by everyone after that much time has elapsed; so it wouldn't be a long and out-of-date list of topics but would remain fresh and current.
Most diaries and diarists wouldn't utilize it much. If your diary is about your observations on your nature walk yesterday or your opinion about Hillary/Bernie/Trump/etc., that's not really news that others are likely to report here. This would be more for news items reported elsewhere (web, TV, radio, etc.) which diarists want to note and share with the DK community.
Yesterday, I wrote a diary about a very interesting news item, reported on various sites, about children misidentified as to gender due to a genetic anomaly. I sat on the story for almost 24 hours, checking the diary lists and thinking someone else would write about it. Because of its nature, I figured someone from our transgender community or one of our physicians, biologists, geneticists, or similar experts might do a diary and probably would write about it much better than I could.
Nothing showed up so I wrote mine. It was well received and I'm glad I did it. But what if I had assumed incorrectly that someone else would do the work and the story never reached DK? Not a tragedy but it would still be a shame if something interesting and educational passed us by.
How many stories do we miss because we believe someone else will take them on but it never happens? How many do we write and publish and then realize we just spent a lot of time essentially saying "me too!" with another half dozen nearly identical diaries published at almost the same time?
I'll admit it, I'm sometimes lazy and hope somebody else will do the work so I don't need to. I already spend many hours every week preparing my weekly installments of This Week in History, which covers 4 historical events every week and thus is like researching and writing 4 individual diaries. If someone else can do a better job on a topic than I can, I would be delighted.
This is not about censorship or someone deciding for anyone else what he or she can write about. It would be strictly voluntary, a tool to assist would-be diarists in their decision-making about a topic. Anyone would be free to write on any topic and adding oneself or one's topic to the Working topics list would be optional.
So, would this be a useful tool or not? It might not be easy to implement now in DK4 but as a database programmer, I know it's a relatively simple enhancement so it might be appropriate for DK5.