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Meta Discussion 2001
    Keywords: SL description

This is an unedited archive of Meta Discussion for messages until 2001-Dec-31.


December 26, 2001

Dieter: I have turned the FrontPageDraft? into the FrontPage. There were no comments on the draft for 10 days, so .... The main purpose was to present the essentials in an essential way, remaining close to the former frontpage. A.o. I removed the hot topics for no one takes the effort to keep track of them: that's only logical since we RecentChangesJunkies ourselves use RecentChanges.

December 26, 2001

DaveSigaty: We are rapidly approaching the 1-year anniversery of SL going public. I think this is a nice opportunity to:

Various points have been raised. Most recently in the December 17th discussion just below on this page but also elsewhere thoughtout SL at various times during the last year. It might be good to try to consciously try to pull the ideas together. What do you think?

And BTW, thanks very much to Arno and Morten for a great idea that has been one of the big events of 2001 for me. Looking forward to 2002 with no end in sight! :-) Dave


December 17, 2001

Dieter: Yesterday the Belgian Federation held its annual meeting. Several people seemed to know of the existence of this site and named it in one breath with rgg, namely when the links on our federation's website were discussed. Those people were vaguely aware that I am a regular contributor but that didn't seem to be the motor behind their visiting this site (which is good). Now the general comment was that it contains a vast supply of interesting information but that it is very hard to get to it. That has to do with the entry pages. We have had this discussion before and I know I'm free to alter those pages, but I'm reluctant to do so as long as I don't feel there is a consenus about what they should look like. Moreover, my suggestion to include the ReferenceSection in the threefold RecentChanges-StartingPoints-About remained without follow-up. Frankly, I think 90% of our visitors couldn't care less what this is all about but just want to know what thickness is.

In my opinion, the entry points such as StartingPoints still contain too much "wiki"-related stuff, compared to "go"-related stuff. I have no idea about the ratio viewers/contributors but most likely the latter are a minority. It is however this minority which is most served with "wiki"-related stuff (how to actively use) whereas the viewers should naturally glide towards the page they are looking for.

Some opinions on this please, before I make changes that upset the rest of the librarians.

HolIgor: I agree that looking for interesting and useful information in SL is not an easy thing. At the same time I don't see any way to improve on it. Basically, the Library has all necessary look-up mechanisms, it is difficult to improve on that. Moreover, visitor's level and therefore his interests could be quite different. The library's content is good in tsume-go part. The pages about the L group and notchers are excellent. There is a lot of material on connections but it suffers, in my opinion, from the obvious lack of the opponent's stones. Too little about shape, some joseki pages are good but the topic is too vast and hardly 5% covered, so much more is needed. Much more is needed about tesuji, fuseki, yose. All that will be contributed with time, we need a lot more people sharing their grains of wisdom.

The library has little to offer to the dan level players, it won't teach beginners to win games, it could be useful for single digit players, but mainly it is useful to the contributors.

TakeNGive: One thing that might help is to give the FindPage searching tool more prominence/advertising on the main entry pages. But if Dieter wants to reorganize things so the Go material stands out more and is more "user-friendly", then that's fine with me. I would just ask that each page, probably somewhere near the bottom and maybe in the column on the left, have obvious links to information on how to start participating (for those motivated to read it).

ArnoHollosi: I agree that we (as regular visitors) find our way around SL. Casual visitors on the other hand might find it harder. I think that we can find a way to accomodate both sides. I don't mind if someone changes StartingPoints, FrontPage, or any of the similar pages. If you guys think it's beneficial then I will add the ReferenceSection to the prominent links on the left-hand side. I could remove the About link there as well.

Btw, it's easy to add those search-boxes found on FindPage to other pages as well. I've added one to the ReferenceSection (Fulltext goes like %Fullsearch%). Maybe we should add it to FrontPage as well?

Basically, I'm confident that any change you guys make is ok. Otherwise, I'm free to hit EditPage myself, no? ;o)

unkx80: I think it's a good idea to put the search box in FrontPage. :-)

Dieter tries it out at FrontPageDraft?. I won't use draft pages normally but simply alter the existing page. For the front page I make an exception.


Unfortunately, I am having problems while trying to edit MetaDiscussion. For some unknown reason I cannot insert any characters. Therefore, I open this page as a (temporary) second part and hope that someone who can actually edit part 1 corrects a typo spelling of my name. --RobertJasiek

What do I like about Sensei's Library? It is an open forum in between newsgroup, book, and webpage! What do I dislike? Sometimes it requires more time than one has available to promote factual contents in a way suitable also for newcomers of a topic. This leads us directly to meta discussion about scoring and counting.

Yes, these months I lack time for any extensive contributions to the library. Nevertheless, it had been necessary to launch a discussion about scoring and counting so that everybody understands that there is a difference and what it is and to edit page names and local links in a supporting manner. Fortunately, the discussion has had success: A distinction is maintained, can be accessed via the rules page, and explains both concepts scoring and counting. Although, I might slightly disagree about some presentation details (every editor has his own preferences...) and some pages or parts thereof (like that about basic rules) might need a wiki master editing in future, generally coverage about scoring and counting is rather reasonable these days.


6 October 2001 - 09:38 GMT+1__ I second the request for a recompilation of Pages by Distance. With over a 1000 pages, some parts of the library must be pretty far from the entrance by now.

--Stefan


2001-10-03, 12:20 GMT+1 DieterVerhofstadt:

I think the most important areas for improvement are still the number of contributors, the regularity of contributions and the number of high-level contributors. An increase in volume will then force some of us to restrict ourselves to the heavy task of master editing. Maybe some time in the future a user can choose between viewing the latest archived version (some kind of generally accepted master edit of the whole SL) and viewing and contributing to the latest version (which is the current practice). My wildest ideas include the master master team (Arno & Morten), the joseki master team, the life and death master team, etc, etc I know this is way off the original spirit of SL, but I think (as some of you probably do too) that the current practice suits only the RecentChangesJunkies. It would be interesting, for that matter, if Arno had the engine recompute PagesByDistance and MostPopular.

2001-10-03 We do indeed have a general problem (opportunity for improvement ;^) which is that the information within SL covers a very wide range, but is not always easily findable or browsable. For knowledgeable Go players there is more of an incentive to look more around, and they also often know what they're looking for, but for beginners, this is not often the case. Something like the beginners study section is a good idea, which will probably develop into something very useful to beginners over time.
On detailed subjects, there is quite a lot on some joseki, but what there is may not be at a level suitable for beginners. Maybe the About the opening pages (and their children) can be edited/expanded upon for this purpose - they were originally written for beginners.
--Morten

Morten has already come up with the idea of dynamically created HotTopics?, etc. I will implement them (maybe this weekend, but don't hold your breath). About the issue of not finding information in SL: well, create an index page of the topic you like, populate it with links to the relevant pages, and add your page to either StartingPoints, GuidedTours, ReferenceSection, or whichever other page seems suitable for it. I think wikis live from links, so the more index pages we have, the better. Maybe I'm trying to come up with a heuristic function to find "related pages". I don't know yet. Other wikis have some neat ideas for navigation. Or if you find a better format for the FrontPage, then go ahead and change it. --ArnoHollosi


2001-10-03 Stefan: Replying to HolIgor: You're right, it isn't complete. Probably never will be. Nor suitable for beginners. That's exactly my point! It should be, so let's make it more suitable for beginners. They are the visitors most likely to benefit from SL. They'll often not be a member of a club or federation, they won't have a lot of books or magazines, or indeed access to bookshops. And even if they see a list of books, they won't have a teacher or a clue what book to read first. And yet another argument: we currently have a wave of new talent in our club, and quite a few seem to have picked up go on the internet. So SL has a Responsibility towards the Global Go Community to "Hook" these Novices while there Wandering around, Thirsty for Information and Knowledge. (I love writing pompous sentences like that every once in a while...) Oh, and on the joseki thing: won't matter at all for beginners! :-)


2001-10-02 HolIgor: Replying to Stefan. While there is a bounty of interesting material in the library, it is not very suitable for beginners or a serious study. Material is scattered, sporadic and spontaneous. It is in the spirit of the library, though. Perhaps we need a guide to the library. Perhaps we need to look back at what has been done and then make a simple page for the beginners advising them what to look at.

  • Terms. The dictionary of Go terms in the library is very good. To be recommended.
  • Life and death. We have very good pages on L-shape, second line groups and notchers. To be recommended for anybody.

But we have almost nothing on joseki, fuseki and yose. At least the material is not systemized in any way. Presentation of shapes and connections has only begun.

We have a good section of questions and answers and a series of problems with solutions.

Arno: on josekis we have AndreEngels's excellent study of the LargeAvalanche, NadareJoseki and others. I wouldn't call that almost nothing.

HolIgor: I did not want to play down Andre's contribution. The quality of those pages is very high. But the coverage of the topic is not sufficient at the moment.


2001-10-02 (copied from Messages...)

I've spoken to some beginners who know this site, and they seemed too confused by the layout and organisation of SL to easily get to what they want. In general I think the average go player who comes here to look for something specific like, say, shape, will quickly find his way through ReferenceSection and the likes. But beginners typically "don't know what they don't know" and don't know where to start. To help meeting their needs I've added a direct shortcut to TeachingPaths very, very early, i.e. high on the FrontPage. I intend to link TeachingPaths to a lot of sections in the Library. Working through these pages, the beginners should then quickly be sufficiently familiar with SL to wander around more freely. Thoughts? Comments? Especially from beginners: do you comfortably find what you need here?

--Stefan

''note: this has evolved into BeginnerStudySection]'


August 25, 2001
It seems to me that Messages... has taken over the main role for chatting that I think was the original idea for CoffeeMachine. This page and Guineapigs... seem to overlap a fair amount. There is old material that can certainly be edited out, e.g. technical suggestions that Arno and Morten have built into SL in the mean time. However, there is a lot of material on longer term issues. Should some of that be put on separate pages and made easier to find?

BTW, I like the format of MessagesToPeopleCurrentlyPresentInTheLibrary the best with date stamps and newer items pushed onto the stack. Is that the better way to handle all these general discussion pages?

--DaveSigaty
P.S. Anyone who thinks that BillSpight's very kind remarks about some of us (higher up on this page) are ready to be "cleaned up" is going to be in

Big Trouble :-)

I have done a WikiMasterEdit of this page. The kind remarks are in MentioningGradesOrNot. So I hope I am only in a little trouble

--DieterVerhofstadt

Not everything is worth archiving, so it's not mandatory (but sometimes good) to move stuff to "OldXXX". OTOH you can always access older versions of the page by clicking on the page title. I guess I will add "VIEW" links to the diff links soon. --ArnoHollosi


SingingPraiseToTheLibrary. --HolIgor


i like this idea a lot. well implemented, too.

--adum


Jonathan Cano:

I think the anarchic quality of SL is a wonderful strength since I know of so few web sites (much less Go related web sites) that allow so much freedom.

Cheers and thanks for this great site!


DieterVerhofstadt:

A lot of names of contributors are spread through the article, whereas originally it was customary to put the list of authors at the back. I am not criticizing anyone, I am just curious to know the opinion of the people who took the initiative, and other contributors, about how we are evolving.

MortenPahle:

Arno and I have spent much discussions on this :-) We have not wanted to impose any structure and hence left the wiki as it is at the moment, letting any page belong to any 'type' and changing 'type' several times in its lifetime. I am very interested in all points of view on this issue, so please add your thoughts on this. (cf Dave's comments a while back on Future Use Of SL)


(Here used to be some comments, now fixed by the aliases. See WikiNews.)


It would be nice if there was an "intermediate" difficulty added to the list of page keywords... people are really hesitant to jump to "advanced" yet some things are clearly not beginner subjects.

(unknown)


JanDeWit writes: Out of curiosity, when did SL start? I figure it must be the beginning of November 2000 (digging around for the page which changed the longest time ago).

Do you know what (kind & amount of) people lurk here? It would be nice to lure them into contributing (both for theirs and the site's sake!)

MortenPahle: Hmm :-) For the records, I will try to put some things up on SLHistory.
About who goes here, that is a question we will never really know the answer to. You can see many of those who post here from their HomePages, but not all. In this respect, SL is even more anonymous than Usenet. We don't have a visible hitcounter, but server statistics show that there are around 600 pages served each day - last week around 300 distinct hosts were served. As noted before - the most popular page is by far the RecentChanges page - followed by StartingPoints and OngoingGame.
As for getting more people to contribute - that may come with time. There are times when even I don't feel like I have anything to contribute with...


One thing we were hoping for but which hasn't really happened was to attract some discussion like on rec.games.go here - that is what other wikis are full of. But it may happen in time.
Then again, OngoingGame was something we didn't foresee :-)
In short, SL will morph into whatever it becomes - SL 'belongs to' all of its contributors.
This is going a bit off-topic - add your thoughts to MetaDiscussion or FutureOfSL :-)


  • A non technical point that disturb me is the name LibraryLobby, the word Lobby is not a word with a good background... Could it be Library Discussion or Sensei Discussion

How about Sensei's Tavern? ;-)




This is a copy of the living page "Meta Discussion 2001" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.