CoffeeMachine/OldCoffee2012-2016

May 2016

Bonobo: Hey everybody :-) As I find myself editing more and more pages here I find that I’d like some forum or chat or something where I can talk to other librarians a little more easily than here (notifications, threads and all that) — is there something like that? Do we have a self-help group? If not, would it make sense to create something? I’d even be happy if there was a board for this on L19 but then again it may be better to have it separate … talk to me on FB, G+, L19 (“Bonobo”), OGS (“trohde”), on r/baduk I am rarely (as “somebodytookmynick”).

• And BTW, this is such a wonderful site, thanks to everybody who ever contributed, and of course much thanks to Arno and Morten.
• Is there a Group Hug Button anywhere?
• Are there as many murder plots here as allegedly are among Wikipedians?

tapir: Coffee machine and message board are your best guess. We could make a "forum" type page here just as well (just change page type), but likely more ppl watch this than any new page. It is not overly crowded after all. And: SL is not Wikipedia.

Bobobo?: Dankeschön, tapir, muchly appreciated! SL is not Wikipedia and SL Conventions I already have open in tabs, will check out Message Board, have also found Quick Questions. So much to read, so much to learn … I’m a compulsive reader of “Readme” files :-D

Another question:

• Is it known how many regularly active librarians there are?

tapir: Librarians are here what is called admin elsewhere. We are few, not sure this is your question, though.

Bonobo: Oh … okay, thanks again, tapir … yes, I am still not familiar with the terminology here … I think I meant Deshi resp. Recent Changes Junkie … anyway: the more I’m here, the more I’m hooked. And I find that I want to give to SL the best I have to give, but/and I don't yet know what that would be :-S I’ll keep on watching.

And:

• Is there some page with pixel/vector graphics requests here? I’m a “media/preprint guy” and I have all the usual professional tools at hands for print, layout, imaging, and I mostly know how to use them, so if there’s any need, such a task may be one of the easiest things for me to do.

April 2016

Uberdude: Sensei's calls 이세돌 Yi Se-tol as the page name, and my edits on the titles statistics page with links calling him Lee Sedol were "corrected" to Yi Se-tol, whilst most other people (notably himself in his books translated to English, and all the recent AlphaGo press, and also a lot of the body text on SL) call him Lee Sedol. Why don't we just call him Lee Sedol as the preferred rendering of his name?

Tokumoto: Agree. Kim Myeong-wan is called Myungwan Kim now. Language evolves, the beauty of Go does not.

tapir: This has nothing to do with evolving language, but different transliterations/romanizations and consistency, the Korean names have not changed at all. SL followed the guidance of JF / GoGoD and used a somewhat modified McCune-Reischauer for Korean names at one point (which was/is close to the official romanization afaik), but lacks contributors / competence to keep up. Names written in a different alphabet are often mutilated beyond recognition if one does not follow a standard for romanization to the point people take up new names for the benefit of foreigner recognition (instead of having their names mispronounced every time). In the current state of SL I don't see us taking up a new romanization (who even speaks Korean here, let alone has a background in translation), so basically we would ditch the only standard we sort of used to follow the lead of newspapers on a few words and terms and write everything else like we want?

OscarBear?: It is a difficult issue to manage the multiplicity of available names for one person. I think it is better to reflect popular usage. If everyone else is using Lee Sedol, then SL should use Lee Sedol. We are not familiar with McCune-Reischauer, we are familiar with the popular usage. It takes time to update the library for a name change though. :(

Tokumoto: I see some value in having a standard, but if making exceptions improves the value of the article to the readers, shouldn't it be considered at least? I do agree consistency improves value to the readers in general through easier search, and I do recognize resource constraints (I speak Japanese and have background in translation, but not in Korean). But I would consider changing Yi Se-tol and Kim Myeong-wan article names is better for the readers and for SL. Wiki is messy by design, and so are life and the world we live in.

tapir: If you search Lee Sedol here, you find the article just as well. Don't see how readers profit from a different page name with a popular, non-standard romanization other than it guarantees that they will mispronounce the name.

Tokumoto: I raised the search aspect in defense of consistency, not of my view on this subject, and I do understand the opinion that it might promote a different pronunciation to the ones you consider to be correct. However, I found McCune-Reischauer was ditched by the (South) Korean government over 15 years ago, and millions of Korean speakers, including 이세돌 and Korea Baduk Association ( http://english.baduk.or.kr/sub03_02.htm), seem to consider 'Lee Sedol' to be a better alternative now. It is not our place to make judgments and impose a minority view onto the readers outside of Go subjects, even if the view might have some academic merit. SL aspires to Zen ideals, which finds beauty in the imperfect and ephemeral.

Uberdude: tapir, whilst Yi Se-tol might be more accurate to the Korean pronunciation, I think the fact he himself calls himself Lee Sedol in English should carry a lot of weight. It's courteous to call people by the name they wish, even if it's technically 'incorrect' (c.f. transgender people). Here is a list of some place that call him Lee Sedol:

• His English books of commented games
• KBA page
• His English Facebook page
• Gogameguru (run by An Younggil, a Korean), though if you listen to his audio commentaries you can hear it closer to Yi than Lee.
• Hajin Lee in her videos, ditto pronunciation (she is on SL as LeeHajin)
• Google Deepmind's site on the AlphaGo match
• All the Western press on AlphaGo
• Wikipedia
• Wbaduk (which is an offical supported by KBA/KABA/Ministry of Culture) English news pages
• http://igokisen.web.fc2.com/news.html
• Tygem/Wbaduk when broadcasting his games.

I think there is a time when it's better to go with the flow, rather than clinging to some possibly technically correct but minority viewpoint. The wikipedia page on the surname Lee says: "National Institute of the Korean Language ... recommended that people who bore this surname should spell it Yi in the Roman alphabet. The overwhelming majority of South Koreans with this surname ignored this recommendation and continue to spell it as Lee. In a study based on 2007 application data for South Korean passports, it was found that 98.5% of people with this surname spelled it in Latin letters as Lee in their passports, while only 1.0% spelled it Yi.".

tapir: When Zen and Google command it, who am I to resist.

One parting question: How will we write hundreds of Korean names and terms not written about in press releases these days?

Uberdude: I don't understand your snarkiness tapir, as I said the #1 reason I favour Lee is that is how he refers to himself. Google Deepmind's press releases are relatively minor (and we can see various Deepmind folks mispronouncing his name in videos). All those Korean sources spelling it Lee (including the info about how Koreans with that surname romanize it on their passports) are far more persuasive to me.

OscarBear?: I don't find Tapir's question so snarky. To answer Tapir, I think that we should just accept that we should update player by player, and not go crazy and do an unnecessary mass update. We can live with some imperfection, don't we always?

tapir: I had no part in writing the pages. I recalled how SL ended with the page names it has now. I read this discussion as an argument to ditch what "standard" we may have 1) argued on individual cases 2) without putting any different guidance in its place. This is something I disagree with and I believe "popularity" is too vague to serve as a substitute. A lot of places that agree on "Lee Sedol" will disagree on other names. It probably is more convenient for the celebrities (and generates no awkward nitpick grammar edits), but it leaves anyone guessing how to write all the other names. There are romanization tools online, but I do not know how useful they are without language knowledge.

Uberdude: go4go.net (which is the DB for goratings.org) has a big list of romanized Asian pro names (they go for Lee Sedol, Park Yeonghun (GoGameGuru uses Younghun)).

OscarBear?: Maybe we should propose a copy go4go policy?

Uberdude: I wouldn't be so forward, after all John Fairbairn (who I think was/is a big influence on SL essentially following McCune-Reischauer) is a better linguist than Ning Li who runs go4go. BTW just found this thread with comments from a Korean, JF and others on this very issue: http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7190. But with Lee Sedol I see it as a pragmatic rather than academic decision.

Anonymous: I agree with tapir, it's more important for a dictionary/encyclopedia/reference website to have naming standards, and there are no other Korean-English naming standards that are as consistent and accurate to the Korean phonetics as McCune-Reischauer. Regardless of the fact that SL does allow personal pages, blogs and discussions, it does attempt to maintain some degree of formalism on all its other pages (whether there are always enough people to maintain this or not).

Hyperpape: I'm rather torn. I was going to say that we should go with Lee Sedol, but looking at John's post from 2012, it seems we'd inevitably be stuck with making a handful of exceptions to the standardized romanization. For less well-known players, romanization is pretty chaotic.

Sam: I don't feel strongly enough either way to take a side in this debate, but I wanted to commend you all for your dedication to making SL a better place. And as this page seems to be for sharing whatever's on your mind, here's an off-topic link to a cool YT video showing the history of the world's best Go players.

Tokumoto: I feel a lot in what Anonymous stated is in the heart of this issue. Please notice nobody initially suggested a mass change operation. "If we change it to Lee Sedol, what do we do with other Korean names?" is a well-intended question, but please read SL is not Wikipedia that states "Wikipedia is intended to be an encyclopedia. It aims to be objective, reliable and consistent. It operates according to strict guidelines. Sensei's Library is intended to be a library". That is where my Zen reference comes from. SL is NOT meant to be an encyclopedia, and that well-intended question, in my mind, is mis-directed. I am so glad that it seems we have succeeded in reviving Coffee Machine :)

Tokumoto: As there have been no response, I created a draft page with my proposal Korean Name/Romanization DRAFT Once this is agreed, or go uncontested, the intention is for that page to be used as a reference from the "Discuss page" of the changed articles. Opinions?

Anonymous: Just because someone makes a page saying something doesn't suddenly make it true. SL is not Wikipedia is a true title and statement, but most of the content on that page is either incorrect, outdated and/or overly generalized, among other things. Hopefully the problems on that page will be clear to most readers. (If not, feel free to make a discussion asking why.)

tapir: I am utterly confused. Wikipedia has the articles listed as Lee Sedol (in the language versions I checked), but we should change it to Lee Sedol because SL is not Wikipedia? What is the draft even meant to be: a one-sided summary of this discussion, a policy denying to be a policy? Why is Zen and SL is not Wikipedia mobilised instead of answering the one question: if we ditch the "standard" what will replace it? Why is this not addressed at all, but answered with "encyclopedias and libraries"? Not being Wikipedia meant for me that we have to set our own rules (instead of suffering wikipedia policies bleeding over into this place). Or is it that SL is considered dead for good, so there is no need for policies and the odd article name can be changed without consideration for the rest?

Tokumoto: Thank you for the response. If you feel I'm the one with a wrong idea about the nature of SL in terms of its intrinsic level of requirement for standards and consistency, please explain or point me to the reasons why. You have been an editor for SL for a long time tapir (which I respect a lot), and you may well be right if my understanding is off on this point for some valid reasons. I pointed out SL is not Wikipedia as one of the reasons for my argument. I am not arguing for ditching any standard. I am arguing for changing two article names and the way these two names are spelled on SL, and saying "alternative standard must be found and implemented" may be a valid argument against what I'm proposing for an encyclopedia, but not for SL as a library full of rich content in variety of styles, standards and formats.

September 2015

Is the coffee machine broken? I've never seen a place with a working one this empty... ;)

Do you guys not visit Recent Changes as often or is it there less interest in Tsumego in this format lately here (Or Tsumego From Games in particular)? There are quite a few unsolved/ unattempted problems... Maybe it'd be interesting to add a single (rotating) unsolved problem thumbnail to the homepage or something similar? - Reuven

tapir: Virtual coffee, meh. There is very little editing as you see in recent changes. Not only the general decline in organised Go at least in the English speaking world, also new players still referring to, but not using SL and instead write blogs, reddit or whatever. People, who spot changes are old recent change junkies looking for changes out of habit. L19 contributions decline as well, afaik. You are basically free to do, what you can maintain, but don't expect much help or response. Personally, I came to think of unsolved problems as a feature, you can't look up the solution, you see.

What about new recent change junkies? Though most of the time I cruise random pages while waiting for things to compile at work. I must admit I spend a hundred times more hours "studying" than I do playing. Once in a rare while I try answering DDK-level problems. I have been finding that this place holds the weight of a decade of old unfinished teaching games, personal pages and local go clubs that are long defunct, and dead links that ought to at least be marked somehow. - Sowelu?

tapir: We all have been too shy to remove pages, that are welcome as discussion, friendly banter ... when new, but of no lasting merit a decade later. If you stumble on one add {{remove}} or {{remove|This is my reason for requesting removal.}} to the page, which will list it in Page Delete Requests, where it will be noticed. For dead links, just remove them.

April 2014

Anonymous: A couple of image hosting servers have gone down (such as http://go.yenching.edu.hk/go_web.files) breaking some images (such as Honinbo Dosaku). If you happen upon broken images, please consider updating their links.

tapir: Made Image Workshop a while ago for notifications of this character. Hope some people take up the task.

November 2013

tapir: I feel my Go skill collapsed over the last year. And very often it is due to choices made under the influence of insecure or outright wrong reading. I never was part of the "reading is everything" school, but without reading everything else is nothing.

July 2013

tapir: Spotted a crypto SL quotation here (Interesting review of Xie Yimin vs. Li He). With professional players apparently reading SL I would like to know what they would propose to make it better :)

Logan: I've seen several of my player bios from SL and Wikipedia quoted or paraphrased on websites such as GGG and BadukMovies. It's certainly a nice feeling.

tapir: Yes, but if it includes attribution it would be even better. On another note: Could someone Canadian please take a look at Snakes and Lattes, Go Lounge, Castle Board Game Cafe, UTea - to me they look like unabashed advertisement with little to no relation to Go. I don't mean to be culturally insensitive, but I am used to being allowed to play Go almost everywhere but wouldn't list all those cafes, bars here if nobody is actually meeting there. Go Lounge is a particularly interesting case - despite the name you find no actual indication that Go is played there on their page, the page here explicitly says chess is forbidden, but there homepage features chess pieces prominently. A Toronto entrepreneur milking SL for google spice or a genuine Canadian Go place? Comments requested.

Blake: Has there been any discussion of pruning old home pages? I'm using Random Page to find things that I might not otherwise, and it seems that the vast majority of my hits are going to homepages of people who haven't touched it since 2008 or before. Another thought I've had is replacing some of the multitudinous stubby pro pages with a table on a single page... but I guess we'd still need aliases to point to that table.

tapir: No, there hasn't been any discussion on pruning old homepages. It never was a space problem or anything. I am on record (but quite alone) with my proposal for turning homepages to temporary pages that remove themselves say 5 years after the last edit. (We or I do delete emptied homepages - assuming this is done by the former owner. Occasionally I removed homepages that contained nothing but a long broken link to a KGS rank graph too.) Several people are on record that they don't want to edit their homepages so often.

What would be the point in reducing professional player pages to tables? Faster travel with random pages? This would completely defeat the point of hypertext (as it is harder to expand, you would still need aliases) and wiki (as you would have to limit yourself to structured data due to rigid tables). I would opt for a completist approach to professional players, numbers are limited and a page per player w/ the basic information - name in original and romanized, date of birth, achievements, affiliation, link to profile on the page of the professional association - for instant expansion when something more about the player emerges - should be attainable with a few dedicated editors preferably with some knowledge of the language. SL is quite good on Taiwan and Nihon Ki-in - considerably less so for China, Korea and Kansai Ki-in.

Anon.: Two pages on Qing period of China: 1. http://senseis.xmp.net/?Qing, 2. http://senseis.xmp.net/?QingDynasty. Consolidation and removal of one seems appropriate.

tapir: thanks, turned qing dynasty to alias for the older qing page.

May 2013

tapir: I moved the discussion about page removal policy in general, humour pages, temporary pages, etc. from Shodan Quick to Go Humour. So those who didn't realize may check there, not sure it is the best place for the discussion. The discussion is somewhat spread out, we have more next to the Coffee Machine back in December 2012. Earlier talk about similar topics are spread all over the library. (If 172.xxx reads this: Please use the templates with e.g. {{remove|this is a good reason for removal.}})

Okay, sorry! At a certain point you linked me to RemoveTemplate, and I've been copying the template they have on that page rather than using the tag. Viel dank!

172: Can anyone make a working example of a CubicSeki ? I think the concept is cogent, but I'm not sure that any examples exist. I've checked all the examples constructed for that page, and none of them is a seki - the first mover always gains. (By sacrificing a smaller group, you win a bigger one.) As a follow-up, assuming no such thing exists, should we delete the page or leave a description of what a cubic seki would be, if such a thing existed?

tapir: It is a nice situation even if it turns out not to be a seki. Of course it should be possible in principle to construct an example were the have the same size, no?

Yes, it would be interesting, but a cool sacrifice-play semeai problem we should separate from the cubic seki page. The cubic seki should work with groups of equal size, but in ten minutes I couldn't find one -- it would be interesting to prove that they are impossible too, ofc.

tapir: Yes. It is always possible to rename, rewrite, delist pages from paths as well, or to take the idea and make a nice problem with it. I just wanted to avoid binary thinking (keep/delete), there are other options.

172: Okay, agreed! I was primarily asking to make sure that there was not some easy issue I was missing. The co-authors of the page were already dan-level German players a decade ago, so I didn't want to overrule their "discovery" lightly.

tapir: Did you have a look at Strange Sekis? Some related problems are there.

tapir: Are the eyes in a two-headed dragons real eyes or false eyes? I see both meaning used in SL. I would say they are false eyes but it is alive in false-eye life. (This keeps the false eye definition simple.) Some people like to point out these are real eyes despite looking like false ones. (This keeps the "definition" of life as two eyes intact.)

Hyperpape: I am not inclined to think of them as false eyes. I could be wrong, but it seems like opinions are sharply and irrevocably divided--does that seem accurate?

It's a semantic distinction. In general when teaching beginners what a "false eye" is, I mean a point surrounded on four sides but with two diagonals taken (or one diagonal, against the edge). Then it's clear that if the tail of a group is connected to the rest by a false eye, the false eye will have to be filled in, and the usual life and death consequences follow from this. In this case, the two-headed dragon is a rare case of life without real eyes, and this is the use I prefer. But if you want to make "false eye" integral to the definition of life and death, you can say that groups need to two real eyes to live and the 2hd is a rare example of a real eye with two diagonals stolen. Very many go terms are used ambiguously like this (ko threat and sente come to mind) and we should be clear about this on the definition page but not worry about policing one usage across the entire wiki. ~172

tapir: Yes, I am interested in how people use the term, I never thought about this before and wondered while editing some pages. Do people prefer "alive despite false eyes" (my preference), "false eyes become real eyes" (most likely because they have "two real eyes = life" in mind).

Hyperpape: To me, the relevant thought is something like "if it's a false eye, your opponent can force you to fill it." So the eyes in question are real. I can see the other point of view, but I don't think that way.

tapir: Apparently, Cho Hye-yeon started writing her weblog again. It turns out that she reads Sensei's Library (enough at least to value some pages as teaching material for her English language go class with the US Forces in Korea).

tapir: Should I be flattered by the fact that my homepage was targeted by spam?

April 2013

172: Ugh. Just... ugh. There isn't anyway to turn the Bing caches back into wiki mark up, is there?

tapir: Arno put a tool for the transformation here: http://senseis.xmp.net/tools/html2sl.php

Thanks! I guess I should learn to rtfm.

tapir: You remember which other pages you worked on in March?

172: Not all of them... Arno has restored some small stubs that I had forgotten making. Arno and you also restored some beginner material. You and I were going to re-work LinkCollection anyway, so losing the re-written blurbs about each link is no great loss. I had responded to the call to wikify nearly-orphaned pages by making some notes on the notcher groups, but I don't remember which notes, exactly. There was recent progress on Efficiency and Work, although not all from me. I made a few notes on ko, ko threats, and bulge ko after read C. Matthew's articles at Go Base. I made some incisive comments on "The Bible and Go", but I won't bother restoring this if Dieter plans to destroy the page again. ----- By the way, the html2sl doesn't save the diagrams, does it? I wasn't able to get that functionality earlier.

tapir: Your "incisive" comments on Bible and Go could have been a timely reminder that advice derived from God's word shouldn't be mistaken for the revelation itself, but as there was apparently no prospect for collective work on the article I guess restoring them is pointless. I moved the article to a subpage again as it was before. Imho the problem isn't that the advice was derived from the bible but the strength of the interpreter and as you demonstrated you can derive wrong advice just as easily. There is a book by Ma Xiaochun on the 36 stratagems. You could derive bad advice from the 36 stratagems as well. The difference is whether the discussion is done by one of the strongest players of his time or by a not-so-strong amateur who mistakes his own interpretation for the original. If - say - Cho Hye Yeon would write a book about biblical sayings and Go, I am quite sure it would offer a lot of good and non-trivial Go advice.

tapir: Didn't you edit contradictory information as well? One of the pages for which I couldn't find a cached version.

Eh geez, I did. I basically rewrote the page, and it took quite a while. Fortunately it is on Bing. Generally whenever I search "sensei's library #page name#" I can find the page I want. We're damn lucky though, that the page was cached on 3-30 and hasn't been re-cached since then. Pretty soon Bing's going to start caching the post-disaster pages, and then everything will be lost. (Or has Arno turned off robots?) --- By the way, when you restored "Introductory Rules" and so on, did you just redo all the diagrams by hand, or did you find a shortcut?

Good catch, I restored it. If you seem to recall any others I might have changed, post them here.

2013

Dieter: I just watched this amazing video by our friend Kyle Blocher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbgQ9jvhZS0. In 40 minutes I understood everything about miai counting, temperature, sente gains nothing, ambiguous plays and the rest of the combinatorial game theory stuff will probably be just as easy. But then WHY ON EARTH are the SL pages about these topics so freakingly long and obscure? Is it just me? Did I need a video with a good teacher to understand? Or have we made a mess of miai counting at SL?

2012 Dec

Dieter: can we remove the abandoned projects? UGS, Tesuji Go Server?, ... It's not that they confuse the reader, unless they go for a random page, but they obscure the library work.

axd: yes for UGS. but before wrapping up, maybe UGS people ought to summarize (into a surviving page) why the project went down the drain (eg expecting too much, not enough vision, time, resources...), so that maybe future projects have a chance not making the same mistakes. Or at least we need a way to warn future projects to think twice before taking off, because I'm 100% sure this will become more and more the case.

tapir: You usually won't get people once involved in a long abandoned project to write summaries. I believe some information on abandoned projects can be useful - for general information or in some cases as warning sign. I would leave at least one page about abandoned projects that had some traction before being abandoned, e.g. the defunct KGS clan system doesn't need clan pages anymore but the room and what it was should still be mentioned somewhere, or for an abandoned SL project take SystematicJoseki - I left some pages to show the approach that was tried. Likely many abandoned projects aren't even marked yet as abandoned, but even without leaving a single page for information for most of them I would doubt that they will be missed.

axd: the day the clan stuff gets condensed, I hope to have a chance to add my earlier objections to that condensate... never gave the idea any chance to survive.

Dieter: surely exposure of defunct clans on SL will not promote the clan activity on KGS? I think it is fair we trim down the pages to the overall idea. Like, what it was.
@axd by tapir: I removed a number of clans already half a year (or so?) ago - those that were defunct even when the clans where still active and which had no other content on SL. Before I asked in the KGS battlefield room whether there is still activity and the homepage was already carrying the notice that the clan system is defunct (Unlike all the deshis here I met bucko who was the last maintainer of the clan homepage in person - I wouldn't have removed anything if it were still active.) At the moment I can't even reach the homepage anymore. You don't have to wait to some ominous date to add your thought on the clans to the relevant pages. Unlike you, I don't believe it had no chance to survive - if the sponsorship would have went to the clans nobody would play in the ASR leagues now. (You could see this when temporarily the ASR leagues were collapsing because external maintenance and sponsorship broke down and ASR room people were trying to self organize a league without goodies to win.)

As we are at it, what are opinions on some types of temporary pages. Say humour pages that aren't edited for 1 or 2 years are expiring, say homepages that aren't edited for 5 years are expiring too. This wouldn't apply to other pages or wouldn't impede adding the very same page again, but it would make homepages more likely to represent active people and limit humour pages to things people still laugh about.

Dieter: I agree that it is best to keep the parent page of an abandoned project and mention why it was discontinued. In itself, SL runs the risk of being an abandoned project on its own, but at least a lot has been accomplished :). As for humour: I agree there is lots of stupid stuff in that section, but I don't know if anyone can make the call on what's funny. Actually, most of the jokes I know become lame after a while, especially when reading them over and over again :).

tapir: That is why temporary pages might be a good idea. Nobody is deciding but everybody is involved and still jokes nobody repeats anymore retire at one point.

tapir: One of my sins in SL is all the "was first played by" information I added, in fact it is probably wrong 99% of the time and the first played by is just the first game feat. a move in the database - but databases will never have full coverage and recorded games might well be the less experimental ones.

Well, that's for someone to correct when it turns out factually wrong. When you come across it again, you can add a note about the likelihood of the call.

P.S. What do you say, is consolidating message board and coffee machine in one place a good idea? It is not that we really use both at the same time.

There used to be a difference but I agree that the message board is now almost sticking on the coffee machine. Dieter

Dieter: long time since I did some library work here and I remember why ... My goodness, how careless people can be with public property.

tapir: Yes, yes.

Bob McGuigan: I wonder about the proposal for deletion of home pages that haven't been edited in some time. I haven't edited my own page in quite a while but I have edited other pages. Was it meant that home pages of people who haven't edited anything for five years would be deleted?

Did we propose such a thing? I don't see that much harm in home pages actually. As long as they have been tagged appropriately, they don't look like articles. There is however the occasional homepage of someone who left the library two seconds after entering and never returning, unlinked from any page and linking to none. I have no hard feelings removing those.

tapir: I did propose sth. like that (and am testing waters for such a change since some years). It is not that it would be impossible to flag homepages as /to keep/ regardless of edits on the page (the intention is not to force anyone to make a pointless edit once in a time). What I am looking for is a way to reduce the amount of homepages of long forgotten KGS accounts, jokes nobody is laughing at anymore etc. without impeding the openness to all kinds of stuff, for which I love SL and without anyone actually going around and deciding what humour page to keep or delete, which only would produce bad blood (one shouldn't police jokes imho). I already initiated sth. similar for complaints pages, see Day of Amnes(t)y - to keep SL open for people complaining while reducing the heaps of old complaints about KGS admins (esp. when there was controversy about some private chatlogs posted here). While this was done manually, the proposal here is to make "expiry date" a feature that is tied to certain types of pages automatically and maybe can be set for others voluntarily (e.g. your tournament announcement). This second part was requested some years ago, and I liked the idea. P.S. Bob edited his homepage in 2011, I am convinced he might edit it again before 2016. Obviously when an account is tied to a homepage and that account was active in the meantime inactivity on the homepage shouldn't lead to removal, in fact even homepages of once active accounts should always stay (they will have many pages linking to them). I would love to get feedback on the general (sketchy) idea - it is nowhere close to happening now.

togo: I think we should have a sencha machine instead of a coffee machine :) Or should that be a more general tea machine? Or a beverage machine? *deep contemplation sets in*

tapir: Who would want tea from a machine? Blasphemy.

tapir: I realized that it is impossible to play mirror go in Sunjang Baduk, because the setup is identical for Black and White with a 90° rotation.

2012 Nov

togo: Do we have a discussion page about problem levels somewhere? I know Page difficulty discussion, but the problem range obviously is different from the page range. Also there are a more considerations, like what to do with linking when reclassifying problems, for example.

tapir: Searching for godiscussions.com gives about 150 hits. Most of the time this is a link, which is long gone.

togo: There seems to exist an archive of godiscussions.com (See chapter Replacement by Life in 19x19.com in article GoDiscussions.com). So not all hope is lost to redirect the links to some future reinstallment. Also the WayBackMachine might be a solution.

tapir: I asked about this on L19 today. Yes, they have the dumps, but no, there isn't access to the public until now. Not sure, I really want to go search through web.archive.org one by one, when just removing the references is so much easier. :( P.S. As I see you editing the BeginnerExercises, where there are mistakes in an exercise / solution feel free to redo the exercise / solution completely instead of just adding a comment.

RueLue: some info I found while looking around: robots.txt of godiscussions.com didn't allow to go into subdirectory "forum". "Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt" and in robots.txt: "User-agent: *" + "Disallow: /forum/". And the database dump of gd is defect. They (at l.i.19x19) were searching for someone to repair or recover files/entries from it, but seemingly they had no success. Sad story.

togo: I had the same sobering experience. Maybe web-links should be checked for reachability already in edit-preview?

togo: Regarding the Exercises: Thanks for the hint. Indeed I felt a bit unsure of how to proceed best there.

togo: Well, I am still a bit unsure :) How do I handle the "attributing the original contributors" thing (which I think about anyway, but which is also mentioned on Wiki Master Editor)? Mentioning everybody who gave an answer? A surviving answer? The questioners, too? Where and how?

tapir: Don't attribute original contributors, these are beginner exercises and necessary corrections not WME. WME is applicable when cleaning up (potentially controversal) content pages or turning discussions into content pages. Here a corrected version and solution are enough. Don't be timid.

togo: Good advice, there is a complete history anyway. Somehow I thought only the last revision would be generally accessible.

tapir: SL has to worry about link integrity big time. It isn't only godiscussions, but all those links made in 2003-2006, guess how many of the pages are still around? This is probably a task big enough for automated help to be useful.

togo: I thought about this problem already some years ago, and decided that simply removing the links is a bad idea: The information would be lost where the stuff around that link came from. That would be especially bad where the link is necessary for understanding. IMHO the only really useful solution would be to maybe (automatically) mark and list dead links and look into the pages in a case-by-case manner: In some of them the link can simply be removed, some pages have to be edited, and some cannot be made useful without the link.

tapir:I agree on automatic marking and case-by-case handling as the optimal solution, but I don't see it happen any time soon. Wikipedia has this policy to prefer internal links and restrict external links. I don't like it, somehow Wikipedia lives by choice a parasitic existence on other content, which is extracted and paraphrased for Wikipedia and then people - on average - don't go back to read the original. Regarding maintenance, however, it would be much more manageable than the current situation. Imo, it is about ageing - back in 2002, 2003, 2004 requirements were growth, openness etc. - 20k pages later it is necessary to make maintenance the priority over growth (doesn't happen anyway) while keeping the openness. I believe it would be interesting to organize a wiki around periodically wiping out all written content - like a beach that looks pristine again the next day after all traces of yesterdays sand castles are washed away. While this isn't a proposal for SL, I am amazed that over the years I deleted hundreds of pages from SL, which seemingly were not missed at all after they were gone. However, I did initiate sth. like this for complaints pages (which were in fact only half a dozen pages about KGS admins), and I believe it would work just fine with several other types of content: forum posts (1 yr. after thread falls inactive), humour (those things people still laugh about will be re-added anyway) or non-people homepages (5 yr. after last edit) are obvious candidates.

togo: I am bit sceptical about deletions. Sure, if resources are scarce, but otherwise I would prefer consolidation and guidance by structuring of the content, maybe relocation to a dump of interesting things. Search should always prefer popular hits.
For example, here in SL I am missing the click-trough fuseki pages a bit. They always were very incomplete, but better than nothing - I am still using them on an old local copy. And regarding the homepages I can imagine a youth who will stop playing Go after school, but coming back when retiring. I was away three years myself.
On the other hand, I agree that stuff can be completely superfluous. I would classify Swedish True Story as such. Still I am cautious, maybe its relevant somewhere, but I am de-referencing it from Stories.

tapir: Imo, wiki without deletions is like a pub that keeps tapes of all evenings available to customers. It becomes rapidly an interesting visual history collection but I certainly would not frequent it to drink a beer. P.S. Nobody stops you from recreating it - the removal was not a policy decision on this kind of approach - although the approach to make one page per move is clearly unsustainable for anything approaching even 1% coverage, if you ask me. But if you try again and harder maybe some other good pages will come from it.

togo: You are right, one page per move would be no good. I am thinking more in the direction how it is done with joseki: The most interesting first four moves are 1024 by number (all possible combinations of hoshi, sansan and komoku). These then would link to apropriate other fuseki pages. I could produce this with the help of some shell magic, but uploading would be tedious; also I am not decided about the best naming scheme, which should be easily expandable.

tapir: But why the arbitrary limitation to four moves? (To keep numbers low, I know. But how you can learn anything at all from it without looking further?) dave sigaty (ez4u) had recently on Lifein19x19 a series about statistical trends in fuseki - how professionals responded then and now, main focus were early opening moves. Insights from those analysis lifted into a written article or pages like side patterns etc. are much more advisable imho. In the end you can not magically create the content for the pages - if you have nothing to write on the page what good does automated diagram creation?

togo: The four moves weren't planned as limitation, expansion should be possible - therefore the thinking about the naming scheme for the pages. Of course it should not be limited to hoshi, sansan and komoku either.
The 1024 pages are important, because they are not only complete in regard to the three corner plays; they are also complete for nearly every game, because most plays can be reordered into four of these corner plays + joseki (or non-joseki). This also is interesting in itself, because if you think that reordering does not make sense, you are onto something.
The main purpose would be to have easy navigation to the other pages and to have easy navigation from move to move. Page linking is the ideal way to have this navigation, because navigation essentially is a network of links between moves.
Playing percentages would be ideal additional content for these navigation pages; that would have to be included manually. Linking to joseki pages (corner and side) would also be very good (with a different color directly in the diagram, if possible); sed would be helpful for this, again. Deeper discussion, about chinese fuseki for example, is better on dedicated pages, because that comprises comparison between different moves, I would say.
I have big hopes for such a device: It should bring people to not always play chinese fuseki; chinese fuseki is already very boring :)

tapir: Which content are you linking to when you have 1024 pages with all variations of a limited set of corner moves (at least 3-5 is played regularly as well, and not always is the fourth move in the fourth corner)? Expansion is possible is an illusion, while I don't actually understand the math that lets you expect 1024 pages, page requirements will increase exponentially with each expansion. Wouldn't it be great to have the pages you want people to see, i.e. the other opening ideas, patterns etc. before you start to produce a 1024 page signalling system? And if this is the idea wouldn't be another way to lead people there more effective? (E.g. reviving article of the week and featuring some of the interesting opening patterns seen less often.) And wouldn't it be easier to put playing percentage and trend analysis on a single page instead of spreading it over literally a thousand? People would be able to get the gist of it by reading it at once instead of browsing it for a week. (Have you seen ez4u posts about it in L19? Great threat.) P.S. I don't play chinese fuseki, I play two starpoints and an approach move as Black these days.

2012 Aug

Reuven: Ah, completely forgot about it and missed your reply, tapir, sorry... :/ I was wondering about the possibility of a (several?) daily problem on the front page. It could probably be automated? (And I'd actually have a reason to visit it, rather then checking the recent edits ;)

tapir: The Article of the Week ended not because of a lack of articles, but those nominated needed some work and nobody was willing or able to do it. When Herman stopped actively doing the AotW mainly I continued a while but then activity faded out. You can surely do a problem of the day or week if you like to do so.

But when you just automatically push them on the frontpage you will have the same problem, some of them might not be particularly well designed or whatever. Imo one of the main benefits (next to a changing frontpage) should be the work done in polishing the pages featured there. And we are currently down in active editors to a dangerously low level. (I myself can hardly count as very active.) But we probably have enough (classic) problems to last several years even with a daily problem.

Hyperpape: Well, this discussion is somewhat old, but it's a good idea. I think it would help drive traffic to senseis if this could be done and publicized.

2012 May

Hyperpape: Obvious question: what fuseki was Rin discussing?

Anon: I think it is the opening in general. I.e., "The opening follows the changing fashions..."

Hyperpape: Of course! I somehow read "this" for "the" at the beginning.

Reuven: Has there been any recent discussion about Article Of The Week? Have you guys decided to drop it, or is it just waiting for somebody to pick it up again?

tapir: No decision, I just removed it from the starting page when nobody was updating (nothing is worse than non-updated news) and I felt I can't keep up as well - as the articles I wanted to feature needed a slight touch before being ready and... I would be happy if someone picks it up.

tapir: "The basis of a moyo's effectiveness is its scale; solidity is a problem of secondary importance." If it were from any different source I would be rather surprised. Still I have trouble to really and practically understand and apply this sentence. (It is from the Dictionary of Basic Tesuji, vol. III)

togo: I would say, a moyo is basically a miai where you might lose part or all of it. It is also a device of influence, aiming at the inside and the outside simultaneously. The main purpose is, to bring parts of the board under control. Solidifying it might solidify the part you will lose. Also solidifaction makes stones heavy, if they are not outright alive. This even can reduce influence, when you cannot afford to lose that part of the moyo anymore. If not that, than there is the danger of overconcentration. Anyway, solidifying will generally not increase the area of control. Solification plays generally are the medium plays, moyo extension plays the big ones.