Trim Leading and Trailing Whitespace - major issue with lessons about openrefine-ecology-lesson

[sheshan93]

Just my two cents--if this is now the default, would it perhaps make more sense to alter the affected portions of the lesson? I would think that for novices, it's easier to teach within the system default, unless there is a compelling reason the rest can't be changed. It seems more likely that people uploading data and using OpenRefine for the first time will just leave the trimming of white space as the default, as that is easier. For example, if it were me, I'd think "Great, that's one less step I have to take when I get in to digging with my data." Students may be confused/not understand why we're including a "trim leading and trailing whitespaces" section in the lesson if it's something that can be done automatically at the beginning of the process.

[drsjford]

We had the same issue in sessions over the last two weeks, made more complicated by the delegates believing the dataset was incorrect.

[debpaul]

Hm.

• I wonder if this means one could make the point in the spreadsheet lesson. Then refer back to that issue, when moving to this Open Refine step.
• Also, is there any reason ever? why you would Not want to remove / trim leading and trailing whitespaces? Can anyone think of a use case for this?
  • if not, perhaps then just change the lesson as @sheshan93 suggests, adding a step to the lesson that explicitly notes this on the upload step of data into Refine.

[villanueval]

Duplicate of #245. Please follow discussion there.