Patent Offices

Dear Mari:

Thank you for providing this additional information.

I would like to take this opportunity to share with you and PIUG wiki community what I think is a better way to update and improve the information on the PIUG wiki. For the most part, the wiki is not "moderated" and we all share in making sure that content is up-to-date and complete. I believe users should edit wiki pages such as this one directly rather than add comments. This is explained on the Editing Page Content Quick Reference Guide, item 3b as follows:

There are two types of "comments" that apply to wiki pages; comments added while editing pages and comments that are part of discussions. (a) The more obscure but equally important involves the comment box provided under the text edit box when one edits a wiki page. Users should always add a brief summary or explanation about the new content or changes on an edited page. These comments appear at the top of alerting email messages and in the page history. (b) Most people think of the comments that are "replies" made to a discussion forum topic or are appended to any wiki page. While such replies are "the discussion" in a forum, they are often less appropriate for knowledge or resource pages. In the latter case, the user should generally just edit the page content and update the information in the flow of the page rather than risking it being missed as an appendage to the main content. Similarly, users should generally edit their own words and not provide comments to themselves. Users may annotate the new content with a time and date stamp or other indication if necessary to distinguish original content from the new.

I invite you to add your link directly both this "Patent Offices" page and, equally relevant, General Patent Resources and Meta Sites. I'll add that I think http://www.irossco.com/patentsearching.htm would be even more useful it the information on it better organized. There is no indication of the author, when it was last updated, and how to provide feedback on the contents. There is another potentially useful page on that site on Patent Coverage, but it looks outdated. If it were maintained, a link to it on bottom of the PIUG wiki Patent Databases page might be relevant.

When you edit PIUG wiki pages, I strongly recommend you provide a comment of the sort described in point 3a (above) to explain the change in the alerting email message. You will have a choice of checking the "Minor change?" box which determines if a new alerting email message will be sent as a result of your edit. I was thinking that once you added your link to this page, I would remove both your comment and mine. However, this seems to be useful "discussion" to retain. In any event, I would wait until the weekend because removing each comment will generate an alerting email message, and there is no way at this time to prevent such email messages from going out.

All users may contact me directly with questions or comment further on this page.

Tom

piugwikimaster @ gmail.com