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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:


2004-10-01, wikipedia idea.

jfc: Over there in wikipedia, folks sign contributions with '~~~~' and wikipedia replaces this with the current time and username (or ip address) of the person signing. I find the time stamp quite helpful in seeing what order a discussion occurred in.

On the otherhand, I much prefer the SL convention of prepending signatures (i.e. like reading a play) rather than appending them.


2004-09-13, wiki spam

jfc: Typing in a change summary when fixing a dozen vandalisms is tedious. It would be nice to streamline the process. Here are some ideas:

Morten: You could just use the copy & paste facility your OS gives you...

  • provide a mechanism for viewing all recent changes by a particular IP address on one page and a way to revert all (or some subset) of these changes in just a few mouse clicks.

PatG revive does most of this. I agree that it would be nice to be able to undo several pages at once but the exisiting process requires human oversight which prevents any false positives.

Morten: SL can track users by changes / IP number. As mentioned, reviving pages then does the rest.

  • provide a special revert vandalism button that automatically fills in the change summary.

PatG perhaps "page revived" could be automatically added to the change summary field when revive is selected. It could be prepended to the summary box so that additional information could be added as needed.

  • create an SL bot that monitors for spam behavior and reports suspicious changes to a "spam watch" page.

PatG Recent Changes Junkies pretty much do this and have the advantage of using fuzzy logic.

I'm sure y'all can improve on these ideas.

axd: suggested rules (TBD, values in ""):

  • identical number of changed lines in "several" pages within a "short" timespan (or even: identical change, result of repeated pasting)
  • delta of suspicious pages contains "several" .com URLs
  • change made by IP numbers increases likelihood of vandalism

How about vandals doing several small changes? Am I right when I think I can screw up things badly by applying several big delta's one after the other (a page can be revived once only?)

Morten: admins & librarians can revive older pages than the last one, so your multiple small changes would not pose any problem.

axd I know that: but it takes more energy to get the "specialists" (admins, librarians) involved (there are less of them); I assume that a significant part of "revivals" are done by casual users (such as me, for example), relieving the specialists of this.

BTW - how about a SL Wishlist? This would centralise requests and avoid having the same suggestions pop up every eon...

Morten: Looking at WikiVandal, assuming that this is a complete list, the frequency of vandalism is quite low - but it does seem to be increasing, so it might be a worthwile task to remove the dependence on RCjunkies. The easiest heuristic would be applied only at page save (i.e. without checking for a 'pattern' across pages). The easy way to spot recent attempts would be to look at the amount of links in the added text - as opposed to normal users who add normal text. But should breaking the rule lead to blocking the user or just ignoring the edit?

axd: IMO, the edit should be listed in a separate RecentChanges page, so humans can decide on blocking the edit or the user; or the delta should receive an additional symbol in the RecentChanges denoting it is suspicious.

Charles Vandals are mostly attention-seeking; and the correct way usually is just to give them a minimum of attention?

jfc: your SL experience no doubt exceeds mine but all the vandalism I've come across and reverted has been of the wiki spambot ([ext] google wacking comes to mind) variety. Consequently my remarks above are aimed at making the task of undoing wiki spam less tedious. All in all though, it is not a critical problem.

Bob McGuigan: I agree with Charles's approach and consequently I've been deleting vandalism when I've found it as minor edits. If the vandalism is particularly egregious I would flag it on the wiki vandal page.


2004-09-09

Dave: Recently we seem to have started to use the "Discussion" page for analysis/solutions (e.g. BQM182/Discussion which was renamed from "solution"). Is this what we actually want to do? I would prefer to see the the "Discussion" page be used for discussion. Although we might consider much of what has appeared on "attempts" to be discussion, I think that it would be preferable to continue to use "attempts" for these and "solution" for the final summarized version. What do others think?

Charles Does it really matter so much whether ProblemX/Discussion is used for discussion of the problem or discussion of the problem's variations? Isn't this more of the kind of pickiness about minor verbal matters that is the bane of life on SL? Much more important, I'd say, is that people feel free to use sub-pages to structure and restructure the talk in to something readable. (Not, by the way, into some sort of SGF-file tree-traversal, for my preference.)

By the way there are tools available to store SL pages as SGF.

rubilia: Charles, would you mind mentioning one or two of those tools? If they're full-matured, they could help to get around the readability restrictions of SL-notated game discussions in a practically better way than movewise linking currently can (which appears to be deterringly laborious - e. g. Tsumego From Games41/Attempts has hardly been edited anymore since the day the design was completed).

On the other hand, I wonder if it wouldn't be a nice improvement to SL to make use of interactive move linking more often. However, that doesn't seem feasible without having the structural syntax part done automatically (where wanted). Although the interactive structure is rather easy, it's tiresome to be written by hand, so people don't bother.

Bill: In traversing SL, it helps to have guideposts and customary practice. There do not need to be hard and fast rules, but it helps to know what to expect. We already have a custom that uses Solution and Attempts pages, and I think that that is what Dave is talking about. Since Jonathan originally named the page Solution, I think his intent is in line with those customary expectations.

I agree with Charles that nitpicking anything as broad as Discussion does not make much sense, but I do not think that is what Dave is doing.

Dave: In this particular case I was thinking along the lines that Bill outlined above. I believe there is a considerable body of practice on SL that more or less standardizes the use of "attempts" and "solution". I think this is helpful and intuitive when users are studying. At the same time I have to confess that I have another, ulterior motive as well. I have felt for some time that SL is lacking a community desire or at least process to improve the contents of pages. I am thinking that the Discussion page is the most natural page to discuss the page itself. Naturally, as I write this it finally occurs to me that we could equally standardize on any alternative subpage name to the same effect :-) Does anyone else see this need or have any suggestions?

Charles I don't mind conventions - it is a help to write them down somewhere; and it is not a help to bite any newbie who is in ignorance of them. Perhaps experience of sub-pages has been sufficient for some draft of guidelines to be produced.

In that context, it would be easy to standardise on something like Page/Talk or perhaps Page/Meta for everyone to use for What do you like / don't like about Page. I doubt that in itself will do much to change the inertia about upgrading pages, which AFAICS has been institutional here for as long as I've been a deshi. I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

Dieter: On the sub-pages issue, I have always seen the "discussion" page as a debate on the validity or relevancy of the posted material.

jfc: this is the wikipedia convention. the discussion page is used for editorial discussions i.e.

  • "is blah blah blah NPOV or not",
  • "should topic x be put on it's own page"

here at SL, we don't seem to have nearly as much editorial discussion since we don't have NPOV and other policies to enforce so it isn't clear that we should follow the wikipedia convention. On second thought, if folks are interested in refactoring pages to improve their value (e.g. easier to understand, more organized presentation) then adopting the wikipedia discussion convention is appropriate as refactoring work requires a significant amount of editorial discussion.

I find it hard to consider a technical analysis with diagrams as a mere discussion, especially if the principal page has a flavour of problem/exercise/question. For this purpose, we have created attempts and solutions sub-pages. For joseki pages or other pages on the edge between set patterns and game situations, diagrams can be part of the initial page until a WME comes up. Only for discussion of Go terms, where a diagram can clarify one's doubts, I may prefer it to be on the discussion sub-page.

On the issue of inertia about upgrading, I agree with Charles. There have been initiatives to structure joseki pages, I think also of the BQM task force which never took off ground. It is easier to reinvent hot water than turn hot water into a nice bowl of soup. The biggest difference with the Wikipedia may be that who are we to improve a page if we have no clue about the truth. Also, with a relatively restricted number of contributors, it is easier to keep track of everything that happens and express your opinion on how it is done. In short, personalities can still balance the power of the masses that the idea of Wiki is based on.

jfc: with regards to SL style guide lines like "what should and should not go on discussion pages" I'm more interested that a decision be reached, the documented guideline is easy to find and I can easily understand the policy.

BTW, I noticed the other day the SL is listed as the [ext] nineth largest wiki. Considering how specialized the topic SL covers is, this is quite an accomplishment! My congratulations to the SL community at large and to Arno and Morten in particular! We must be doing something right here...

Charles Yes, SL is a good example of a wiki; it is also not a typical example of a wiki, but more something sui generis. Wikipedia doesn't provide all the answers - as soon as you have signed contributions everything is different. BTW the Wikipedia convention is that PageX has Talk:PageX as its automatically created discussion page. There is also Wiktionary, for articles purely about dictionary content. If this is reminiscent of a three-to-one structure I was proposing for SL a while ago, there are probably good reasons.


2004-07-17

rubilia: Hi unkx80, apparently your comment on page renaming (also) applies to what I did to KGSUsersMap. I've never considered to become a librarian, and I didn't even know there is a page like PageNameChangeRequests. However, I wanted to clean that up immediately - before it gets worse and people start linking to the wrong pages.

unkx80: <rant> Yes, my comment applies to what you did to KGS Users Map. It is a funny thing that people don't read the first line of the message board, and barely one or two days ago, I made a similar message in the message board itself (see July 16 heading). </rant>

There is nothing I can do right now, except to enter the pages to delete into wiki orphans and wait for an admin (either Arno or Morten) to delete them.

However, there is one thing I need to say, is that I appreciate your efforts in restructuring the KGS Users Map. Every bit of effort for improving SL counts. =)

rubilia: To be honest, I've hardly ever seen a reason for looking at the message board upto now. I didn't know what it is, and was not particularly interested to find it out. Now, that you have recommended to me to have a look there, I probably will do so, from time to time.

However, I can't imagine I am the first and only one falling into that "page renaming trap". The KGSUsersMap pages/subpages started to become puzzled. (Supposedly, the author did not know how, or did not pay attention to create a consistent structure.) So I checked if there is something like a KGSUsers parent page - there wasn't. Then I searched for each single pagename to make sure not to miss any links or dependencies. Finally, I created new pages with systematic names and moved the content to there.

Actually, I thought I'd done a tolerably good job, but that turns out to be wrong. Now I see that I could've done it in a better way, but it feels odd to me (and somewhat discouraging, too), if information which is apparently of big importance to SL is hidden somewhere deep inside, instead of being present where affected (that is in this case, linked from the editing page).

unkx80: The message board is for "remarks of which the validity or relevance expires soon after postage". It used to be messages to people currently present in the library.

I think that rubilia's request above is a valid one. What do the others think?

Dave: I think the idea of better linking on the edit page is very reasonable and also timely as we see so many new people come on to SL. Slightly off the main topic, I also think that message board is not as "eye-catching" a name as the old messages to people currently present in the library. Although I understand the reason (the old name was a little confusing), the new name just does not stand out in recent changes the way the old one does. What do others think?

Hu: Maybe some pages like Message Board and Meta Discussion should be automatically "watched" by default.

2004-07-14

Anonymous: I have just been reading the Recent Changes page and noticed, that there are so many pages unrelated to Go itself. It might be funny to add pages like [ext] 23, but do we really want to litter SL like this? Looking at the Recent Changes page, I only see very few pages that are interesting, and a lot of (sorry) trash.

ilan: I am sorry that you were not fully entertained here. I suggest that you write up a page listing the topics you do find interesting, and we will do our best to fulfill your requirements.

Anonymous: Ilan, I am trying to seriously discuss this topic. If you like to make fun of it, please go ahead - but please understand that I will ignore comments like this. Do you think a page like the mentioned example is really needed? I am using SL on my Palm Pilot and trash like this slows it down and consumes memory. The page is not even funny.

ilan: So I wasn't funny either? Sorry again for failing to

live up to your Olympian standards. Oh, and in case you didn't get my point, here is the direct version: Instead of criticizing the failure of others to write interesting text, why don't you show us the way by contributing something relevant and consistent with the guidelines you propose.

jfc: I'm guessing that [ext] 23 was a sandbox style wiki experiment. Nothing wrong with those. There is also nothing wrong with occasionally sweeping up wiki litter and throwing it in the trash bin.

Anonymous: Ilan: I already have. If somebody does have no interesting text, why post unrelated stuff? Just to have the satisfaction to add a page?

jfc, you are right. As long as it is a wiki orphan the page will be deleted sometimes in the future. Nothing wrong with experiments of fun pages either, I have just noticed a lot of those in the past weeks. Losing focus maybe a problem of this wiki. Where do you stop adding unrelated material? So the main problem may be the term "occasionally".

ilan: Sorry, I forgot about all the pages you have contributed to, Anonymous.

Anonymous: Ilan, it's great to meet the author of "Get Strong at Sarcasm" here. There is a new book for you, I really recommend it: "Make friends by not bashing people". Have a nice day.

unkx80: Maybe you would like to suggest something we can work on? I think the deshis here cannot always think of new topics to contribute to, after contributing to so many topics already. But this does not mean that the contents are perfect. If you can suggest something concrete, such as some inadequacy of the material here, then we can work on it together.

2004-06-24

Bob McGuigan: Having seen the discussion sub-pages in place for a while I wonder who modifies the non-discussion page and when. When the sub-pages were first proposed I thought that the main page might be modified after significant discussion took place but the question arises of who decides when that is appropriate. Comments below seem to indicate that some people are sensitive about modifications to a "content" page. Is this like the issue of master edits?

Bill: I think we are still in transition. As we get more used to the discussion pages, people will get more of a sense what belongs there and what belongs on the main page. There will still be gray areas, OC.

However, it is disconcerting to post something on a page and the next time you look, it seems to have disappeared. Let's show some consideration for each other.

Charles: SL will have to find its own way on this. The structure is now parallel to Wikipedia's; and the WP way is 'be bold' (to edit in the first instance), plus speedy recourse to discussion if there are objections.

ilanpi: It seems to me that simply asking someone before changing their stuff is the simplest course. One global request per ordered pair of users does not seem like too much of a burden.

Charles: I've always been against that. I argue that it has led to a culture where people are afraid to edit. That is not what a wiki is about.

Hu: People are already complaining about an excessive amount of traffic in the Recent Changes. If every change required an additional request and an additional OK, then it would triple the volume because they would have to be not Minor Edits so that requestor and requestee would see the raised flag. Impractical. In the case at hand, both the extraction and from the main page and the insertion into the Discussion page were flagged as major edits, so that they were easily visible. One of the participants in the discussion saw those edits and moved it back, objecting strenuously in the process. This kind of objection is the exception and not the rule, especially under the circumstances. The vast majority of edits here are handled without "asking permission" and proceed smoothly and in an orderly fashion with the aid of the Recent Changes and Full Recent Changes pages. Furthermore, beyond Home pages and closely related pages, nobody owns pages here.

Bob: Random deletions amount to vandalism, and that is not what is being discussed. Vandalized pages can and should be restored. All edited pages can be restored, but usually edits, including deletions, are done for a reason, and deletions and restorations have to take that into account. Something might be moved to the discussion page because it looks like discussion but the contributor might not have intended it to be discussion. If that is the case it seems that a rewording of the contribution would take care of the problem.

Harpreet: Contributors also need to look at the site and consider its purpose which is not compatible with people clinging to their contributions. Too many pages are littered with "I think this" etc. type comments. For example I looked at the Segoe/Go Tesuji book page recently and clearly we can come to some consensus about the utility of the book and a description of its contents without having something that requires reference to a single person's viewpoint. I think the tilt away from encyclopedia of Go to discussion board is unfortunate. It would be much more useful and a more pleasant read if a user could come here and look something up in they way it can be done on Wikipedia. On Wikipedia articles aren't littered with: Harpreet: "These are my very special thoughts, please ask permission before you change them" On Wikipedia people edit and contribute and make something better than what was there. On SL we have stagnant pages of material where contributors names and thoughts are more important than the content. This results in weak material with little room to change things without hurting someone's feelings. It's not much of a Wiki actually, people are too concerned with attributions.

Charles Signed contributions are welcomed, because with the best will in the world a 4 kyu and a 4 dan have different clout. Wikipedia is something I can speak about with much more authority than six months ago, as I have been very active over there (while SL came to its senses, about the obvious bad trend in the statistics on additions). Now, Wikipedia is around 50 times the size of SL; so beware of facile comparisons. What seems to me worth saying, is that the rough-edged culture of WP, compared to the remarkably polite place SL has been, is somewhat misleading. Obviously there is also a village/city thing going on, given the scale. But WP gets through an immense amount of sheer editorial grind, too; and they know, through experience, how to do 'encyclopedic'. The 'too posh to edit' tendency on SL has bugged me for a long time; which is why I'll defend stoutly the rights of those whose thing editing is, against needless harassment and discouragement.

Bill: Harpreet, could you say more about the Segoe Tesuji Dictionary page? I just looked at it and it seems to me to be full of discussion and presentation of personal opinion. Not really like an encyclopedia article. (Not that I am saying that it should be. But now, with discussion pages standard, I would think that a lot of the discussion could be moved there.) Thanks. :-)

Also, most of the people in the SL community are not experts. Even the expertise of the high dan players is limited, as we all well know. ;-) Given that, I wonder about this idea of making SL a kind of go encyclopedia. Who among us is qualified to contribute at that level? Who among us is qualified to edit at that level? Robert Jasiek, a rules expert, has complained that editing has reduced material here on SL from 5-dan level to 5-kyu level. I do not think so, myself, but I understand the feeling. Editing can help, but it can also do harm. I have seen both here.

I think of SL not so much as a reference, but as a resource, where amateurs help amateurs. That requires dialogue and discussion.

Harpreet: I realize that the writer's skill is an issue for the contributions but (especially) with the discussion pages it seems to me that we can collectively edit what we see as mistakes in analysis by perhaps first bringing them up in discussion, determining the merits of the disagreement (or pointing out the flaws), and then changing the article. I don't see where attribution on the original page is necessary. I think removing attributions (maybe not always) would reduce some of the ego bruising and also make more coherent pages that can be edited more quickly.

We might even see some sort of quick laddering up of the quality of the material to the skill level of the strongest contributors by successive edits. And if someone changes something that was good (by discussion consensus) we can just bring it back.

I may very well be wrong when it comes to the articles about playing knowledge but I feel like I'm not completely wrong for many of those pages and I have some confidence that I'm onto something when it comes to the pages that aren't about go skill (historical etc.).

Bill: I think that a good example of what I mean by amateurs helping amateurs is the Shape Problem 6/Discussion page and related pages. HolIgor, unkx80, Charles, and I collaboratively worked on the problem posed by HolIgor. I think that we have come up with some good stuff, even though none of us is a pro. I learned something from the process, and I think that other amateurs can learn something from our discussion. I do not think that we could have done so well by editing first and talking about it later.

Charles: It's horses for courses, mostly. What one could call 'branching thread mode', spreading out over a few subpages, is indeed an attractive way to explore variations such as came up with the interesting HolIgor problem; Bill and I can agree on this. No need there to rush to 'edit down'. The Robert Jasiek wish to provide more definitive rules texts indeed doesn't fit well with wiki procedures; the segregation into page+discussion page(s) might help, but, frankly, Robert's concerns are not those of ordinary players and there is a gulf to bridge (this came up on Wikipedia just a couple of days ago, too). I do think too much concern for the 'horses' aspect can lead to 'Augean stables', if you know what I mean.

Bill: WRT "branching thread mode": As I have said before, taking advantage of hypertext structures can reduce the need for editing in the first place. Most of us are still accustomed to writing in linear mode, however. But we're learning. :-)

Hu: Perhaps an index of "changedness" could be computed and set beside the entries in (Full) Recent Changes. It could be a multiple of the degree of change and the age of the text since the last change. Dan quality articles would presumably become well established for long periods after various flurries of dan editing. Thus even small kyu-ish changes to a dan quality article would get immediate careful scrutiny.

Perhaps in this way, the Recent Changes and Full Recent Changes could be merged, major/minor edit distinction dispensed with, and users could set their own levels for "watching" changes. Things like adding a dot to a popularity contest vote would fall below the radar of most users.

Perhaps users in their preferences could choose a percentage factor for favoring size of change versus favoring length of time since last edit.

Blake: Well, I'm not sure how practical this is. How do you determine "degree of changedness?" I mean, I find many discussions very interesting (and seldom contribute, myself), but I presume their "degree of changedness" would be fairly low. If they fall below my pre-set "changedness threshold," though, I'm liable not to realize that they're even going on until, some months down the road, someone WMEs the page and gets a five-star changedness rating. Right now I mainly ignore when something goes on, say, at a rules page (because technicalities don't interest me--apologies to Mr. Jasiek), but chances are those discussions and concerns would get a higher changedness rating than, say, one of HolIgor's collaborative game analyses.

Hu: Fortunately, help is already available. Simply make the page a watched page. New pages would automatically come in with the highest "changedness".

2004-06-23

Hu: My understanding of a wikiwiki is that statements and prohibitions such as the one on the Intro to Combinatorial Game Theory / Discussion? page ("do not delete or move anything I write without my permission") are contrary to the spirit of wikis and Sensei's Library. What do the deshis think of this in general and specifically of moving the discussion into the Discussion page in the first place and the subsequent transfer back?

Charles: General 'prohibitions' like that are non-wiki. Apart from home pages, where I think they are implicit, they have no place here. A personalised one suggests a dispute. There is almost no track record or precedent on SL for such a thing.

I think I'll just delete it. If the author wants to discuss here, let him do so. If he has some other kind of issue, he can email me, or Arno, or anything else that seems to fit. If it was just a question of making a point, it has been noted.

ilanpi: I didn't agree with Hu moving my comments, so I moved them back. My remark was meant to indicate that I would similarly restore any further such edits, which seems fair to me. Sorry if I made this point ungracefully.

Charles: Well, threatening an edit war might have been more graceful, but only on a scale of elephants on roller-skates. If you don't agree with a particular edit, best just to give a particular justification for going back.

Hu: For the record, I did not move a single user's remarks. I moved a discussion between writers (plural) to the Discussion page.

unkx80: Isn't what the discussion pages are for? To "hide" the discussions from people who stumbled onto the page for the first time so that they can see the contents of the page without having to wade through the discussions.

Charles: I think discussion pages are a big plus. Moving 'comment' away from 'content' actually can improve both, instantly. If it is contentious, why insist, though?

Bill: One thing that I am finding a need for is easy cross-referencing between a main page and its subpages, or between subpages. It is fine to move a comment to the discussion page, especially if it opens up a discussion. However, if there is no indication on the main page that there is a comment about something, perhaps even a debate, and how to find it, something may be lost.

Hu: Agreed, Bill. It would be great to have a "content" indicator. I am finding myself clicking on discussion pages sometimes just to see if anything is there. Maybe a number of lines indicator would work.

Charles: Support that, too.

axd: Interesting, yes; something similar to bookmarks (SL's "footnotes") could be a possibility. I'd like to re-iterate my suggestion to provide a true HTML-like bookmark capability so one can point into specific sections in (sub)pages. Look here: [ext] http://senseis.xmp.net/?diff=GuineaPigsFeedback&new=993&old=992, [ext] http://senseis.xmp.net/?diff=GuineaPigsFeedback&new=1053&old=1050; first, the latter URL could have been written as a bookmark reference; second: my contribution (the first URL) was "archived" away from present page, but other weren't - doesn't feel fair :-( ...)


2004-06-03

ab: Is it allowed to post (small) sgf file(s) on Sensei's?
A commenter can add some variations and replace the sgf file. To load the sgf file in winmgt for example you only have to mark the content and drag and drop it into the program's window.
Otherwise I propose a new feature for Sensei's:
pages that are (of type) .sgf-file, so they can be loaded by clicking on the link.

Dieter: It is allowed but not supported. You can download and use the WinMGT to SLF Converter tool to generate SL syntax text files from text files generated by WinMGT. I don't think SL was intended as a game database, which it would become if storing sgf were possible. We use SL format to discuss positions and I think it will stay that way for a while.

2004-06-01

axd: I still don't understand why discussions such as on KGSBugs (see the page history) cannot be kept on RGG. These kinds of discussions are of a temporary nature, the newsgroup is a perfect means to collect user feedback and requests for more detailed bug reports. SL is good to summarize user wishlists (if someone can manage the list it is even better...), maybe good to summarize existing bugs (but wms could also create some page on the kiseido web site to summarize known bugs, distilled from RGG), but discussions about bugs do not belong on SL (because RGG is excellent for that). That's just my impression.

MarkD: axd, there are so many pages on SL that are not related to Go at all. KGS provides a valuable (and free!) service to Go player around the world, so imho SL is a perfect place for discussions about features, bugs, etc. And that is just one page, if somebody does not like it: Ignore it.

2004-05-28

Neil: Referring to GGo/Discussion, is this how Discussion pages were intended to be used? Are Discussion pages there for meta-discussion of a particular page, topical discussion of the subject, or what?

Bill: IMX with online conferencing in the '80s, it was customary to create parallel discussions for many topics. This worked particularly well when the main topic was exposition, as much of SL is. The original expository material can remain focused and clear, without the clutter of back and forth discussion or digression. In the past on SL, pages often became a tangled mess. If discussion pages get tangled or cluttered, it doesn't matter so much.

dnerra: I would prefer to see the /Discussion subpages only be used for meta discussion on the page, maybe for discussions that will come to a resolution and then become obsolete ("Are you sure W3 in diagram 5 cannot be captured in a ladder?"), but not for topical discussion with archival value. I.e., I think both gGo/Discussion and GoPlayingPrograms/Discussion should have their content moved to the respective main page. (I don't care much about these particular pages, but somehow I feel we would lose s.th. at SL if we made a habit of hiding all past discussions like this.)

2004-05-25

Ellbur: The ToC feature was so recently introduced, and already a page has been designed arounds its own ToC. Professional is organized primarily with the use of bold headings, which dimminishes the actual content. Most discussion pages are better organized.

Charles Odd comment - the page history shows it is collaborative (the anon is almost certainly Robert Jasiek). This is a typical 'encyclopedia-style' article; not an essay or thread-mode piece. You might indeed wonder why it has taken so long to get a page together, on so basic a topic.

2004-05-25

Ellbur: Maybe I'm just not used to it, but I think that these new features like subpages, discussion pages, table of contents, will just be a distraction. It will help with those pages that have been covered with meaningless discussion, and may help organizing pages, but it has become harder to read pages with actual content. The style of formatting on this wiki does not fit the design with table of contents. It also makes things more complicated, and harder to understand.

Arno: I think you will get used to discussion and subpages. They work quite well on other wikis. About TOC: do you think another design (color, size, etc.) would be better? Or what does this "non-fitting" refer to?

Ellbur: I don't know; you're probably right: I'm just not used to the changes. I'll wait week or two and then see how I like them.

As for the ToC 'not fitting', it doesn't seem that the way ideas are organized on wiki pages, or the natural way to think about Go, conforms with a ToC. I'm just afraid that people will start designing pages around the ToC, and make them harder to understand. As for color etc., I don't think that I nor anyone else will care what color it is once we are used to it.

2004-05-21

Neil: Some figures to consider: In the last few months from one SL Snapshot to the next (a period which supposedly has a high proportion of offtopic stuff like KGS), diagrams have grown by 8.7% (from ~13800 to ~15000) and the number of new pages has grown by 7.3% (from ~8200 to ~8800). In the few months before that, the growth was by 7.8% and 6.4%.

If we assume that the KGS politics and other off-topic stuff will have fewer diagrams than normal SL content (so that a growth of off-topic stuff would show the number of pages growing relatively faster than the number of diagrams), these numbers suggest that the relative growth of offtopic pages is no greater than the growth of topical pages.

So if these numbers mean anything (and they might not for all I know), the only danger of all the KGS activity lies in the chance that the KGS Recent Changes "churn" will drown out the other stuff. Therefore making changes geared toward making Recent Changes more diverse, rather than segregating content, is the way to go.

Source for the figures: ArnoHollosi's diffs 47 and 48 on SLSnapshot.

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.


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(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.