The Unofficial Guide

http://unofficial.stanford.edu/index.htm

Description

The Unofficial Guide is a website put together by the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) to correspond with the paperback book that they distribute to every room on campus at the beginning of the year. It covers many of the same areas that this site is intending to, including information about housing and meal plans, and the material is divided into categories such as "Daily Life", "Breaking the Bubble", and "Wining and Dining". Under those titles are several subcategories, and the information presented in those ranges from many paragraphs of text to a few short lines.

Advantages

The ASSU is the student government of Stanford University, and as such its members regularly work with the administration. With such familiarity, the group can potentially access more information than individual students. The group also has similar experience with groups outside of the Stanford community, which is helpful in their case in terms of, for example, which restaurants are good for students. Furthermore, because the ASSU is so large, there is a wealth of individual information that can be drawn upon in the making of the site.

Disadvantages

While there certainly are many students in the ASSU, not all of them contribute to the site; there is untimately a team, or maybe even a single person, in charge of what material gets put online. These people are in no way representative of the entire community, and there is always the possibility that people not in the ASSU know something that it would be helpful for more people to know. Additionally, the presentation of the material -- whether it's fact or opinion -- is unclear. For instance, while dorm layout information (how many rooms, what kind) is hard to distort, the claim that Gavilan has a historically disproporationate amount of attractive girls can hardly be validated. In another case, the site endorses kissing the Tree at Full Moon on the Quad for good luck, but it fails to warn students that those who do so are more likely to get mononucleosis since the Tree kisses so many other people.