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Meta Discussion
    Keywords: SL description

What do you like / don't like about Sensei's Library?

Write down your thoughts below.


Related pages:


2004-05-12

Arno: I have closed the vote on discussion pages - thanks to everyone who participated. Apparently the majority would like to see WikiPedia style discussion pages for every page. So I am going to implement it.

As I think that this will cause a noticable shift in the self-conception of SL and the way people contribute I will take this opportunity to introduce some other changes as well which I have been pondering since the vote opened.

  1. I will introduce sub-pages. Basically this is a normal page, having a '/' in its name and "belongs" to a parent page. I.e. "BeginnerExercise17/Solution". Sub-pages can be linked like "/Solution" from the main page or among siblings. Sub-pages will by default not show up in searches etc. They cannot be assigned keywords or pagetypes. This is especially handy for the mentioned problem/attempt/solution tryptichon, as well as e.g. for blogs like MyOwnBlog/May2004
  2. Discussion pages although having a special link will be a sub-page of each page with the canonical name "/Discussion".
  3. The pagetype OngoingGame will become a keyword. Page types should be reserved for special functions and it is unlikely that I will add special functions for ongoing games in the forseeable future.
  4. New keyword: "online go" will be introduced
  5. RecentChanges will allow filtering by keyword
  6. Layout will change slightly: I will introduce CSS styles so that a single '!' heading will look like bold text. Other heading styles may be adjusted as well. I may do a search and replace across all of SL for all-bold in a single line indicating a heading afterwards.
    • This can be used later on to allow "section edits" of pages like WikiPedia has.
  7. I will delete all HomePages which meet all of the following conditions:
    1. not linked from somewhere else
    2. older than 6 months
    3. not associated to an account
    4. have no or smallish content
  8. I will delete accounts which have not been used in the last 6 months
    • Maybe will not delete accounts that have been used to contribute so that noone else can "claim the work (or good name)" of someone else.
  9. I think we should take this opportunity to "clean" SL from other content as well. Several discussions or off-topic pages which are no longer of value come to mind (no, I'm not talking about KGS topics.)
  10. I am undecided on allowing a different list format as well, especially for nesting. Using space and indenting seems to be more natural. Still undecided on a good way of allowing multi-line list items (e.g. how to do a paragraph "inside" a list item). Maybe there is a better way.

That's it for now. Expect the new features in about 3 weeks.

Comments

Dieter: Awesome. Are the criteria for deletion of homepages necessary or sufficient?

Hu: Wow! You've set a big workload for yourself. Although I voted for leaving things the way they are, the Wikipedia parallel discussion page approach would have been my second choice, so I am comfortable with it, and I like that it may make SL more "encyclopedic", along the lines of the concept of distillation of knowledge (and of ways of explaining knowledge) that appeals to me.

Please make a user preference option to automatically include all pages in searches. Yes, best to not delete contributory accounts, as you suggest. "OnlineGo" keyword is a good idea in combination with keyword filtering of Recent Changes.

Best to make an SL snapshot before throwing the switch that implements the big changes. All in all, I think these changes are positive and will go a long way to address concerns expressed recently. Thanks Arno!

DrStraw: "Delete home pages which are older than 6 months". What exactly does this mean: created 6 months ago; last edited 6 months ago; last accessed 6 months ago? If you mean anything except that last of these you may be deleting pages which people still refer to, even though they may be static.

Arno: clarified above. When all conditions are met I don't think that the page should be on SL. Do you?

Joshual000: All proposed changes seem very positive and beneficial to the community here. Great work Arno - both listening and taking appropriate action! SL is such a great place.


Neil: Are accusations of mental illness such as that just added to Taiji acceptable here?

Rich: Firstly, it's not an accusation. Secondly, I believe the context was 'deluded' rather than mentally ill - I'm sure many native English speakers aren't really sure of the difference. Thirdly - as a wiki, you're free to edit whatever you like. FWIW, it seems a little harsh but hardly beyond the pale to me.

Neil: Well, accusing someone of having delusions of grandeur, paranoia, or other traits associated with mental illness is a serious thing, I think. Sure, the specific context here can be read in more than one way, but the target here is someone who's been ganged-up on lately, so I'm just being cautious.

Hu: Definitely poor taste at the least. If the person were not an anonymous coward, they would email. Probably best to leave it there for the time being so he can read it. After all, he has invited comments there and replied to the previous comment, which appears to be the same person.

Bill: Delusions may be part of a mental disorder, but many normal people also have delusions. Probably most people have, at some time or other. Who hasn't fooled himself from time to time? IMX, claims of delusion are not uncommon in robust debate.

2004-05-07

Blake: I noticed, while going through and doing some problems this morning, that it is essentially impossible to get a reliable, full listing of [ext] problems. (Note the error at the bottom of this page.) Similarly, there doesn't seem to be a central path which provides access to all of these problems--even the Problems page notes that it doesn't link to all of them. There are a couple of ideas that I had for dealing with this. We could consolidate many problems onto one page, so that (for instance) there might be one page with many Beginner Exercises on it, with links to a solution page (which could still be separate). This would cut down the number of pages by about half, not counting discussion/"attempts" pages. "Attempts" can be rolled back into the solution page, and, of course, if the discussion pages idea comes to fruition, then we could have ongoing discussion about solutions and attempts without clogging up the "Solution" page. Another idea would be to increase the search function's limitation when searching for PageType (this would mostly discourage abuse, I think), but I'm not sure how much more demanding this would be for Arno to deal with. Thoughts and comments are welcome.

unkx80: As the person who posted the majority of the beginner exercises problems, I do understand that the Attempts pages are clogging up SL. However, I make two comments: (1) most of the time, whenever I do not create the link for the Attempts pages, the person trying the problem will create it; (2) there are often interesting but slightly off-topic discussions on the Attempts pages that I find difficult to distil, afterall I would like to present concise solutions in the Solution pages. Especially difficult is when problems make implicit assumptions on the knowledge of the reader (e.g. the knowledge of how a ko fight works is assumed in many of the problems), and people start to ask things on the assumptions itself. Even though the assumed topics are often found elsewhere in SL, should we delete such discussions as applied to the problem? Yet, such discussions are often too redundant to be included in the Solution pages. Also, one might also want to consider the amount of work if everything has to be included in the Solution pages for every single problem. I rather spend the energy to discuss more problems.

By the way, I am guilty of constantly forgetting to set the page type in the problems I posted, and I apologise for that.

(If my message above do not make sense, it means that I should be sleeping when I am typing this message.)

Blake: The problem I was mostly addressing is the fact that it is pretty much impossible to find a good list of problems. Perhaps another option is making a ProblemSolution? keyword? I really think that after discussion pages are implemented the 'attempts' pages will no longer be an issue (the "discussion" part of the solution page can be used for that). It's just kind of bothersome that the "problem" keyword maxes out the search engine (and returns a very large number of "solution" and "attempt" pages. And, still, putting the problems on one page would help this situation. See the Beginner Exercises consolidated page.

Shaydwyrm: Another issue that the ProblemSolution? keyword would help with is getting a solution page when using the RandomPage? function. This is something that I find fairly annoying, since just getting a glimpse of the solution before I back up to the problem page is often enough to make it much less interesting to solve on my own.

Arno: Go to the AdvancedFindPage, enter "-attempt -solution -discussion" into the name field and add "problem" as keyword. Check "simple list" in the bottom right and voila: 618 hits of problem pages without the attempts.

2004-04-20

Dieter: Every once in a while I do a random run through the SL pages, mainly adding links (extension -> extension) or define undefined pages (Kishimoto? -> Kishimoto). I really encourage other frequent users to do the same.

Two things:

  • all the pages about scoring and counting still contain a lot of discussion where the beginning of the page promises stable content. This area (or should I say "territory"?) seems to be doomed to be discussed forever.
  • There are quite a few unreferenced homepages of - mostly - KGS players, stating no more than "I play on KGS". Their existence may be as harmless as their liquidation.

2004-04-15

moved to Wiki and HTML discussion

2004-03-28

Dieter: I think that we have a rather poor link collection for being one of the prime sources of Go information. If noone takes care of it, I may do so soon.

2004-03-24

Gareth: It would be nice to be able to type and paste international characters directly into the form when editing pages. For example: when I type "??" it would be nice if it came out as "囲碁".

The reason why this doesn't work is that Sensei's Library is stored and transmitted using the ISO-8859-1 (Western European) character set. To work with characters from many alphabets you need to store and transmit the Library in UTF-8.

There are two parts to making this work. Transmission is easy. Just change the Wiki program so that it puts

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

in the page header instead of

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Converting the page database is a bit harder. The Wiki page database contains some ISO-8859-1 characters with the high bit set (e.g., European accented letters) and these will need to be changed to the corresponding UTF-8 encodings. For example é (Latin small letter e with acute) is represented as the single byte, E9, in ISO-8859-1 but as two bytes, C3 A9, in UTF-8. So you'll have to run a converter over the whole page database to fix these characters. Google for [ext] ~convert ISO-8859-1 UTF-8 and you'll see plenty of techniques for doing this.

Other features (e.g., searching) shouldn't need any changing, assuming the Wiki scripts are executed by a recent-ish Perl.

(It would also be nice if more HTML character entity references were recognized: when I type "&ndash;" it would be nice if it came out as "–"; see [ext] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html.)

Arno: as part of transcoding the RSS feed to UTF-8 I checked if your suggestion is viable. Unfortunately, I don't think so. The problem ist not switching SL's code and data to UTF-8, but the browsers. Some browser do not understand UTF-8 and so charcters might get lost, encodings mixed up, etc. As English is the primary language of this wiki, I guess it is not too much of an inconvinience.

25 Feb 2004

axd: This is the text I wanted to append to the end of the Basic Kofight Example page, but finally decided not to, assuming it was too much negative. however, it tries to express a feeling I can't get rid of when wandering around in SL.

(...end of Basic Kofight Example page)

  • axd yes, please. I'm happy someone put this remark, because I was wondering if I had a problem, or the page has.

I wanted to understand more about Ko. So I took the path, and here I am now.

  • 1/ I don't consider myself a beginner; this page is labelled as 'beginner' but I don't really understand much about this, although the first lines sounded reassuring ("Here is an example of a simple ko fight...", but then things slowly go out of focus.)
  • 2/ with all respect, bill spight's remarks are confusing: I am asking myself the question: do I have to re-read the whole page because things changed? Reading this page feels like advancing two steps, then going back one, all the time. especially reading text and trying to understand the point, and then encountering the typical "yes, but..." makes the whole very difficult to digest. I think this is a major problem of SL, making it less accessible for beginners.
  • anyone putting remarks on a page should indent the remarks, so a casual reader could skip them if neccessary. A reader should never have to re-read a page twice, because someone's remark changed preceding text; discussions should be resumed and integrated (by the original author) in a page so the text becomes fluid again, and no trace is left of discussions.
  • in particular, I stumbled over this phrase "As can be seen from this sequence, White could not win this ko, since she had fewer ko-threats than Black." who says so? why? there is a logic behind this, but where is it explained? I guess there is some page out there that has the info, but that's not the point.

(Meanwhile, I also found about Document Mode vs Thread Mode)

Bill: I appreciate your remarks, axd. :-) I can see why my comments might have been confusing. Those were among my earliest contributions to SL. At that time, I think people just jumped in to make something available, even if they were not expert in the subject. That's not such a bad thing.

The example is not really simple, either, and too advanced for beginners.

One aspect of ko fights that gets overlooked, and that that example overlooks, is the ko exchange. I tried to give some sense of that in my comments.

Despite my critique, I did not feel like rewriting the whole page, and in general I do not take that approach, for a number of reasons. If I had done so, would it have made SL a better reference? Probably, at least for a time. Would it have made it a better community? I doubt it.

Anyway, I put my main contribution at the end. Just now I went back and did some cosmetic editing. Before, we did not have all the text features we have now. :-)

14 feb 2004

I see that on the introductory page about Go, the following statement is made: "(Go is...) a symbolic representation of the relationships between nations." Isn't this a highly debatable and in any case way specific thing to say in a page that is really just intended to give a quick intro? Go is an abstract game, and I think people should make up their own minds as to what the game symbolizes (or doesn't symbolize) to them... I dare someone to edit this away.

  --Simen

TJ: I did a change there, and the second one there to boot. We're a brave, brave wiki. I hope the change is liked, but the bit after my change...go is becoming popular "especially in asian, european, and american countries" or something like that seems a tad odd, upon reflection. So, everywhere but Australia, Africa, and Antartica then? I think it's probably better to just leave it at "worldwide", so I'm going back in to edit that bit too, revert what you will, but I WOULD wonder why the list of continents went back in if there's a revert!:)

mAsterdam I also noticed the strangeness of that remark - but I did not dare to edit it out.

unkx80: Please feel free to change whatever you see fit. Parts of the text was copied directly from my How To Play Go tutorial, which I wrote several years back, when I did not have much access to the Internet, and my perceived popularity of Go was limited to only certain places. Also, with the increasing globalization, the world is changing at an increasing pace, so even if that statement was valid then, it is no longer very accurate now.


2004-02-10

Bob Myers: Has there been any discussion on the past in better ways to manage terminology? The problem I see is that for any given term, information such as English term, J term in kanji, J term in romaji, K terms, C terms is variously given or not given and if available is scattered in various places such as page title, page content, multiple pages, term listing pages, etc...

What I'd suggest is perhaps to make a new PageType for "term", and provide dedicated input fields to the author to list all relevant terms and readings in all languages. These would then be displayed in a standard format at the top of the page when displayed. Hopefully, there could even be guidelines on romanization/transliteration which everyone would read carefully and follow. :-) All terms in all languages would automatically be aliases for the page.

Pages such as "Korean Go Terms" could now be generated automatically and sorted in different ways.

2004-02-22: To expand on the above, a brief phrasal definition of the term could also be made a standard part of the "term" input form, allowing it to be displayed in a special prominent format, and also eventually be retrieved by other programs using the "SL web services interface."


22 jan 2004

Dieter: While cleaning this page and while changing references to Tamsin as requested, both of which tasks proved to be tedious, I noticed that on a lot of pages, discussion just lingers on. It would be very nice if more Wiki Master Editors stood up. In retrospect, I second Charles' suggestion of discussion pages? where all discussion regarding a certain page can be held (instead of here).

Also, when discussing pages, it would be nice to state which version you mean when you say "current version". Months later, it requires work to see whether the comments are still valid on the page which has then become the current one.

Back to my first request: do a search on whatever keyword you are interested in, or go to a [ext] random page and clean it. Thanks !

Bill: Back in the '80s I was involved with some online conferencing software with about 1500 users. In that community it was the custom for topics (conferences) that were mainly exposition to have parallel discussion topics. So you would have "X" and "X Discussion". That kind of parallel structure worked quite well and works here as well.

As for keeping references straight, on SL we can use bookmarks and footnotes.

The more cleanly we organize our discussions and keep from cluttering up the original material with inline comments and digressions by making new pages or using footnotes and bookmarks, the less need we will have for WMEs. In addition, it will be easier when edits happen for the editor to keep things straight.


6 January, 2004

Bill: This morning I decided to make a Choshi page. I discovered that it is currently an alias for Inducing Move. I think that is a good example of choshi, but choshi is a more general term, I would say.

However, I was unable to edit the alias page and decouple it from Inducing Move. I have done such decoupling in the past, with beneficial effect, I believe. I can see an argument for making it difficult to edit an alias page, decoupling it. OTOH, it is so easy to make an alias, and that can also be detrimental.

So my request is to make it easy once more to un-alias a page, or make it difficult to make an alias page in the first place.

BTW, it would probably be a good idea to un-alias induce and induces, too, since they are more general, as regular English terms. It is certainly possible to say that move A induces move B without move A being an inducing move.

Arno: Bill, actually this was a bug. It is now fixed. Unaliasing can be done as easy as before (click on Alias link, then click edit page).

Bill: Much grass, Arno! :-)

Discussions on the following topics have now a separate page:


August 25, 2001: I have done a WikiMasterEdit of this page. See old version (v71). Unsolved issues and recent postings remained here. Technical stuff moved back to GuineaPigsFeedback. Created some new discussion pages on a clearly defined topic. --DieterVerhofstadt

2002-11-02: The 2001 contents of this page (from version 193) have been transferred to Meta Discussion 2001 -- Hu

2003-01-30: The January 2002 through December 4, 2002 contents of this page have been transferred to Meta Discussion 2002 -- Hu

2004-01-22

Moved contents to Meta Discussion 2003



This is a copy of the living page "Meta Discussion" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.