Coffee Machine / Old Coffee 2018 - 2022

August 2022

Bamboomy: (being less than 24h ahead, I hope no one minds ;)

I wonder: I'm working on a go-variant (on a hexagonal board), and I don't know whether I can add it to the library (as go variant?)

Any thoughts are welcome :)

yuzukitea: I really enjoy discussing joseki... Oddly enough, of all places the Massachusetts Go Association discord has been my go-to place in recent weeks. Aesalon (one of the maintainers of the OGS Joseki Explorer) is active there, and it's been really fun getting their perspective because they spend a lot of time looking at professional games and pattern search engines.

I think I am kind of shy. Ideally, perhaps it would be best to post on reddit every time I am working on a joseki page, because the feedback would probably be strongest. However, the atmosphere on reddit kind of intimidates me. The conversational environment on discord makes it seem easier to ask questions.

May 2022

CD: This thing dead?

DudleyMoore: Not if you take it with milk.

Dieter: there's not too many people active on SL so there's little chance to find each other at the coffee machine. But hey, here we are!

CD / CDavis7M: Is there a longer version of the "recent changes" page? I'd like to see what happened over a week or month or more.

• WarEagle: I asked the same at the Full Recent Changes Discuss Page, here https://senseis.xmp.net/?topic=12331

bugcat: I know it's not exactly what you're looking for, but there is the history of Most Popular. It uses the Internet Archive to see what pages had been created and were popular every 6 to 12 months or so.

CD: Thanks for sharing that. Not what I was looking for but this page is better to review than the "random article." But how would I be able to know that this page exists if you didn't tell me?

September 2021

bugcat: I just read the news in the AGA E-Journal that Katayama Yasuo has been promoted to 9p:

To 9-dan: Katayama Yasuo (200 wins; as of Sept. 17). ... He was born on July 28, 1964 and became 1-dan in 1981. His career score is 491 wins to 471 losses, 11 jigo and 1 no-contest.

Sounds like a professional who has been fairly strong and active for a long time.

Does he really not have an article?

I checked with Go4Go to confirm that the spelling of his name is accurate. They list the name but with only 17 games, which is odd. Waltheri only has 12, though. He's featured in the list of Japanese names.

By the way, I often have cause to chuckle at a comment I recently read here that it was "unlikely that SL is missing a 9p" when I've added multiple, as well as updates from players who have been promoted up to 9p from the low ranks.

DuEm6: It's as you said. He was just recently promoted. Most people probably don't care about some random old 8p. Go4Go is not reliable. Nihon Ki-in's website says he played 976 official matches, winning about half of them.

August 2021

bugcat: Should rank updates be made as minor edits? I understood minor edits to be more correcting typos and fixing links. I've been mainly correcting ranks with the major edit, but is that bad form?

tapir: Not a question I have ever thought about. Fine either way, i would do major edit if I want attention to page and edit, minor edit when I don't care about that.

July 2021

"Masaki" and "Masaaki"

bugcat: We currently have articles with both spellings. Masaki is more prevalent, and Takemiya's page says Masaki. Should Masaaki become Masaki? Perhaps a macron would be useful.

DuEm6: I don't speak Japanese. But:

1. The Kanji for Masaki in Takemiya Masaki and other Masaaki's (double a) are different.
2. Masaaki's in List of Japanese professionals are the accepted romanization used in Nihon Ki-in's website and other websites/databases. Including SL.

I know it's confusing. There's probably a good reason why we shorten the long vowels oo,ou to o, uu to u, but not ii to i, or aa to a in these Masaaki's. No idea.

hnishy: They are different names. Masaki is Masa+Ki, for example 正樹 in Takemiya Masaki. Masaaki is Masa+Aki, like 正明 in Fukui Masaaki. More kanji combinations are possible.

Removals + communication

tapir: I was so glad to have some easy deletions lined up that I mindlessly ran over kmr in SGF2PDF delete request. Sorry for that, it looked unproblematic to me. Would appreciate removing the request if you are hammering out a keepable page.

Typo errata pages

bugcat: Real errata pages, eg. about important informations like misplaced or incorrect diagrams, or factual errors, are useful. But why do we have pages like this one that merely list typos? How is that meant to inform the reader? Do we want to maintain these pages or get rid of them?

Malcolm: Maybe they could be useful if ever a publisher wanted to do a second edition. I would vote to just leave such pages alone; if ever someone notices a bigger error that isn't just a typo or a copy-edit then that could be added to the existing page.

Romanisation and Typos Lounge

bugcat: Japanese, Chinese, and Korean names are all subject to competing Romanisation systems. I'm finding this especially relevant as I input Korean professionals, not always sure that they don't already have an article under a different spelling. I exercise due diligence, but it'd be nice to have a page on which we can discuss specific issues. So, I suggest a Romanisation and Typos Lounge?.

DuEm6: (2021-07-22) I don't speak any of these languages. But I guess you meant Romanization/Discussion? According to that page, Japanese: use "wapuro" style that ignores long vowels and diacritics, Chinese: use Pinyin. For Korean, I guess you need to know/google the alternative romanization. Like the Yi Huiseong page you made. Either you figure out Lee Heesung is a reasonable alternative romanization. Or you try to convert it to Hangul, and work backwards. Hangul converters, google translate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_given_names, https://www.goratings.org/ and KBA website can help.

tapir: Just for historical interest: If I recall correctly, SL used some semblance of McCune?-Reischauer due to many Korean people pages being lifted (partly?) from the work of John Fairbairn and T Mark Hall. I personally never felt competent enough to change that to newspaper romanisation (however many people requested that), but also not competent enough to really enforce the local romanisation when Koreans put out different romanisations all the time, and I suspect other non-speakers of Korean among the librarians felt similarly. I believe, you should just do as you see fit and keep talking to each other so no one feels left out by the emerging practice.

DuEm6: I don't think I'm alone in this. But I prefer the familiar but less-standardized/accurate romanization. Not RR or MR. Lee instead of I/Yi. Oo instead of u. Park instead of Bak/Pak. And so on. It's best to just include the Hangul/Hanja and KBA's profile link, so people can google/edit/fix the names or make aliases later.

edit: (2021-07-23) I've been checking romanization libraries for SL pages I created.

For Chinese, pinyin works just fine. They are different to the romanization used in Taiwan, but not a big problem. Like Zeng vs Tseng.

For Japanese, I think Hepburn and editing out long vowels probably would work most of the time.

For Korean, most libraries convert Hangul to RR or MR. I could only find one inactive library called hangul-names on pypi that seems to do what I want.

Malcolm: (2021-07-30) DuEm?, for Chinese, some characters have multiple readings - so there are multiple pinyin. This could make a difference and be a source of errors in some cases.

DuEm6: (2021-07-30) Thanks for the info, Malcolm. Since you understand Chinese, I got a question. Am I right that all of the websites for Chinese Weiqi Association are down? I was looking for some official list of professionals in their association. The Nihon Ki-in, Kansai Ki-in, Hankuk Kiwon, and Taiwan Qiyuan provide such list.

Malcolm: (2021-07-30) DuEm?, my Chinese is still fairly limited. And I'm not at all familiar with the websites for the Chinese Weiqi Association. Not sure I can help much with this at the moment, sorry. (Still, I'll try to look into it a bit this weekend.)

DuEm6: Thanks for the answer, Malcolm.

Is there a notability threshold for professionals?

Lately I've been seeing a lot of young professionals who aren't mentioned on SL. My instinct is to make them all pages, even though those pages are going to be stubs. The way I see it, if it's felt later that the pages are clutter then they can simply be deleted, or else transformed into subsections of larger articles.

(Not to mention the cynical argument that I could always make them subpages under my own name :P) -- bugcat

DuEm6: (21-07-2021) I think you need to update List of Korean names, List of Chinese names, and List of Japanese names pages too. It seems all past profile pages were linked to these pages. For what purpose, I don't know. There's a claim that we need those 3 pages because SL search function doesn't accept Asian characters. Doesn't make sense imo.

bugcat Good point. Though I think I've only added a single Korean professional. What I'd really like to do is tag all the pages I created with the People category, but either I never became proficient enough to understand the menuing or I never received the requisite privs.

DuEm6: (22-07-2021) Btw what source did you use? It seems they have mistakes, like in ranks and dates. Some names have weird romanizations. Not sure if they are typos. For the typos you noticed, perhaps Remove Template could be useful. edit: My bad. I misunderstood.

bugcat I'm transcribing them from Go4Go. Certainly there'll be mistakes in names and dates, and have some odd romanisations. My aim is just to get some information out there and later recircle with more detail. Note that when I say "Professional; 3p in 2016" I don't mean to state that they are still 3p. They were just 3p in a game of theirs from 2016, and the article text is a placeholder for a more detailed overview to come later. For the moment it tells the reader that there is a professional of that name who has reached at least 3p.

Consider the original text as the lowest grade of information. An association profile or news item should absolutely override it. By the way, I've realised that "Qualified by --" is a better phrasing than "Qualified in --" for this, as said, low-quality data, since it doesn't preclude the individual from having qualified earlier than that date.

You're absolutely right about RemoveTemplate. I don't have very good technical knowledge so I took an easy but lazy option.

tapir: There are no notability thresholds on SL whatsoever. You can make a page and play a correspondence game with some friends if you wish so. It has been open to a wide variety of content. I personally would prefer to remove a lot of old stuff that has no value as resource (while remaining open to a wide variety of new content), but a complete database of all professional players is something even I would happily include. We just did not manage to build it with the collapse of activity in recent years. Add all professional player bios you want and even better with a link to their biographical blurb on the pages of the professional association in question.

Should we consider HTTP image links dead?

2021-07-10 PJT I note that DuEm6 has become very active, and has removed several dead links, which is useful when they are truly dead or hijacked. In the case of their edit to Cho Hun-hyeon's Lectures on Go Techniques (from Yutopian) on 2021-06-27, however, it is not so clear cut. There they removed links to images of the covers that work fine for me. The links are http://www.yutopian.com/yut/images/prod/PAY20.jpg , PAY48.jpg & PAY51.jpg . I suspect that DuEm6’s problem with these links is that they use HTTP rather than the more secure HTTPS. I tried https://www.yutopian.com/yut/images/prod/PAY20.jpg, but that only worked (on 2021-07-10) in Firefox if one allowed it to ignore the problem that the site certificate was only valid for bizland.com. I have just written to info@yutopian.com and compliance@bizland-inc.com (which may not be the ideal address) asking them to fix this, but I do not know how likely they are to do so.

What should we be doing with such links?

DuEm6: Oops, my bad. I'll restore them today. And for other books too. 2021-07-11. edit: Ok, so I checked the links I removed again. Personally, I remember they didn't load for me last time when I removed them, but they work again now. I don't really care what happened with Yutopian websites, so I'll just revert the changes. edit2: Slate and Shell image links are truly down though.

2021-07-11 PJT Thanks. I have had no reaction so far from Yutopian or Bizland. Sham about Slate & Shell!

tapir: Imo, remove bad links without hesitation. We have too many of them (we did not have the sense of wikipedia to enforce a limit on outside links) and now a few years down the road we are littered with them. (Still have gogameguru links, I believe.) You can remove a hundred more in the time you otherwise spend on futile correspondence. If you feel like starting with a blank page again, I would very much clear / delete all the old link lists to online resources that are hopelessly out of date.

February 2021

Sensei’s certificate problems

On 2021-02-03, in Firefox I get a security warning that the certificate for the website is out of date. --robert jasiek

On 2021-02-03, in Safari I also get a security warning that the certificate for the website is out of date. --robert jasiek

Herman: I had this a few days ago, but right now it works. The current certificate is shown as provided by LetsEncrypt? and valid until April 2nd 2021. Could your browser or provider be caching things?

Herman: Now I'm sporadically getting certificate errors, like it's sometimes serving the old one, sometimes the new one.

PeterHB: I'm having intermittent certificate errors in Windows chrome too.

RobertJasiek, 2021-02-04 6:30 UCT: Right now in Firefox with the setting "When a server requests your personal certificate | Ask you every time" and cookies cleared on closing browser, I do not get an error message.

Reuven: Saw the same cert expiring on feb 1st, approx 23pm uct 2021-feb-04 but now, some 29 mins later seeing one expiring on apr 3rd.

November 2020

Dubious addition to Chinese players

Malcolm the edits "version 166 modified on October 31, 2020 - 00:22 by 98.13.1.17" for seem to me to be wrong and worthy of an "undo". Not sure if it should be called vandalism - it just seems incoherent to me! I'll probably do a manual "undo" later on at some point.

Patrick Traill That edit added two entries, neither in correct alphabetical order, one of which (Chen Dea ࢨ뷯晐) was wrongly formatted but otherwise not implausible at first sight, the other (Coyi bang 縙ꁹ) where it struck me as a little odd that a 9 dan should not be wiki-linked. Searching for the Chinese characters did not bring up primarily Go-related pages in either case, so I suspect it is advertising spam or juvenile vandalism – but I could be wrong! Perhaps someone familiar with the Chinese scene can help.

Malcolm Hi Patrick, I have intermediate knowledge of Chinese and the "Chen Dea" entry looks highly implausible to me. The first character doesn't seem to be Chinese; I think it looks like it's Arabic. Also Dea and Co are not valid Pinyin (Pinyin = the standard romanisation scheme used in mainland China). Do you have a "revert" button, or does it have to be a manual edit?

Patrick Traill 2020-11-12: I have erased that version, so it is no longer visible.

October 2020

Go page on travel guide wiki

Wikivoyage recently added https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Go which mainly covers places to play or to buy equipment when travelling. Like any wiki page, it needs contributions. (Pashley)

August 2019

Personal vandalism

Robert Jasiek (2019-08-29): Yesterday, vandalism attacking my homepage was thankfully quickly undone by Herman Hiddema. It was much more than wiki vandalism: personal, insulting attack criminal under the ordinary law with a possible sentence up to two years of prison. The temporary page tag "humour" does not change the nature of the contents.

Wiki Etiquette or Zarathustra's wisdom (do not do to others what you do not want being done to yourself) help. Contributors to Sensei's Library should also reflect the impact of their contributions to the overall development of go and this wiki. Personal attacks never help but might even endanger the existence of the wiki because the site owners might also be liable to some extent if attacks should not be noticed and removed soon. (It is not my intention to let them be liable, but third persons might decide such.)

It is possible to discuss or criticise persons or their actions but such must be done without personal attacks. There is also space for humour, if it is free of personal attacks. Even so, homepages should be, and have been, respected.

Patrick Traill (2019-08-30): I have since removed the version in question, as I saw no reason for it to be visible even via the page history. It was offensive, destructive and perhaps cowardly.

Robert Jasiek: Good, this is appropriate, thanks!

May 2019

Category template

Patrick Traill (2019-05-22): I observe that a number of pages try to use a Category Template? that no longer exists:

Pagename	Last modified	PageType	Difficulty	Keywords
Curtis Tang	2012-09-02 by 96.41.1.246	none	n/a	People
Dae Hyuk Ko	2011-11-30 by 69.68.182.121	none	n/a	People
Eric Lui	2017-11-13 by bugcat	none	n/a	People
Feng Yun	2018-10-19 by Raye	none	n/a	People
Francis Meyer	2014-08-13 by tapir	none	n/a	People
Jiang Mingjiu	2015-06-02 by Iepur	none	n/a	People
Jie Li	2011-11-30 by 69.68.182.121	none	n/a	People
Joey Hung	2011-11-30 by 69.68.182.121	none	n/a	People
John Lee	2016-12-15 by OscarBear?	none	n/a	People
Liang, Jie	2011-11-30 by 69.68.182.121	none	n/a
Liu Zhi Yuan	2017-09-22 by DudleyMoore	none	n/a	People
Thomas Hsiang	2014-10-06 by 128.151.162.24	none	n/a	People
Yang Yilun	2012-12-10 by Dieter	none	n/a	People
Zhaonian Chen	2012-05-30 by 209.135.35.83	none	n/a	People

It evidently did exist, as these changes can be found by a search of recent changes:

Pagename	Diff	Username	MinorEdit	Version	Last modified
CategoryTemplate?	diff	Dieter* (194.78.35.195)	1	0	2019-05-15 12:58
CategoryTemplate?	diff	Dieter* (194.78.35.195)	0	3	2014-06-20 15:24
CategoryTemplate?	diff	Dieter* (194.78.35.195)	0	0	2014-06-20 12:07
CategoryTemplate?/List	diff	Dieter* (194.78.35.195)	0	0	2014-06-20 12:06
CategoryTemplate?/List	diff	tapir*  (87.102.154.35)	1	3	2011-12-15 21:21
CategoryTemplate?	diff	tapir*  (131.152.145.240)	1	6	2011-11-28 13:18
CategoryTemplate?/List	diff	tapir*  (131.152.145.240)	0	2	2011-11-28 13:17
CategoryTemplate?	diff	tapir*  (131.152.145.240)	0	0	2011-11-28 13:12
CategoryTemplate?	diff	tapir*  (87.102.154.35)	1	5	2011-11-27 14:02

It looks a bit as though it was deleted in error: does anyone know more?

tapir: If memory serves correctly this was once tried in a few rare cases (your examples are all America based professionals / top players) to have sth. more akin to categories in the wikipedia world. I am not sure when and how it was removed or whether data loss intervened to produce the inconsistencies. There was no real content on the category template page involved, just an attempts to use the default mechanics of templates to auto-generate lists.

PJT (2019-09-27): Indeed, I see that a few samples (those now linked) all contain the invocation {{category|name=topamericanplayer}}. I often wonder whether the effort put into categorising on Wikipedia really pays off! Should we remove these invocations, or is there any chance of them becoming useful?

tapir: I would remove it, mainly because I now find the autogenerated lists a gimmick that makes editing harder (need to learn about templates and autogenerated lists), not really saves work (unless you have a flurry of lists you maintain this way), auto-generated lists have a bunch of issues due to browser cache (or even weird interactions I learned about post data loss event, where I ended up making empty edits to pages to get them listed again), you can't even properly format said lists. At wikipedia a lot of busywork is done that contributes nothing, some of it may be necessary for access, navigation ... but in the articles I wrote I often saw 50-100 busywork edits over the years while the original content still stands as good or bad as it was back then. Having editcount as some sort of credential of course does not help.

tapir: And I did remove them.

December 2018

Rogue ko

Patrick Traill (2018-12-24): I have added a provisional definition to Rogue ko, based on my reading of the available material. It would be helpful if Bill Spight or someone similar (but is there anyone similar?!) could check it and tidy up as appropriate.

September 2018

Forcing text below diagrams: for mobile phones?

Patrick Traill (2018-09-02): I have recently noticed several edits such as https://senseis.xmp.net/?diff=MakingGoodShape&old=53 which mainly just add ‘%%%%’ after loads of diagrams to force the following text below rather than to the right of the diagram. Sometimes this is desirable, as the text has little or nothing more to do with the diagram, but in cases such as the edit above that is not so (though it does also add useful content). If anything, I have the impression that the intent is to make the article fit onto a narrow (e.g. mobile phone) screen, as the text is indeed a commentary on the diagram. While I can see that is helpful on a mobile, I find it a shame on a larger screen. While the ideal situation would be (as on Wikipedia) pages that adapt to the user’s device, I do not think we have the resources for that. What does anyone feel?

May 2018

Attacks on “Art of 9×9 Go”

Patrick Traill: I see a bunch of edits by 210.246.245.8 blanking The Art of 9x9 Go, a reference to it and Art of 9x9 — do we care?

Patrick Traill: I have added an instruction (with caveat) at the top for where to post, but is it right?

VanMorrison - Given the hubris of ArtOfGo? I don't care.

tapir: It is a wiki. You can just revert. For an ebook I find it surprising that no way for purchase or download was ever mentioned, none of the postimg images shows as well. Or as the author writes: "My ebook, The Art of 9x9 Go: How to Beat Dan Players at GoQuest, will be the best 9x9 ebook by 2027, and helps some kyu players breakthrough to shodan." - Polite way would be to move the whole thing to a subpage of the author, but as it has subpages as well that won't do.

tapir: I revived for now. This should be a subpage or deleted imo, but not by blanking the page and leaving the subpages in the limbo. Opinions welcome. See also: Page Delete Requests

Patrick Traill (2018-09-02): I agree that the material around The Art of 9x9 Go should really be tolerated as sub-pages of the author (Monteo), but I see that even the author’s page has been blanked; whether by the author themself in a fit of modesty I cannot tell. I fear that SL lacks the tools to deal with this sort of problem, and after looking at the stuff I do not care much either.

tapir: I feel page rename and page delete are sufficient tools to deal with it in principle. Just as a librarian it feels very lonely to make the decisions since feedback on library work is completely gone. Since Monteo is gone, delete seems appropriate to me.

April 2018

Image hosts

bugcat: The site postimg.org, which hosts some of our images such as the one on Karigane Junichi's page, has been down for a few days. It is looking increasingly likely that as a website, it is gone for good. So I wanted to provide a place for discussion over how to replace the affected images, what images need replacing, and whether or not in the future we should host important images actually on the SL server.

Affected images:

In Karigane Junichi: "Tamura, Shuei, Karigane", http://s24.postimg.org/h4twe5q3p/1367230207_317235436_m.jpg
In Honinbo Shuei: "Honinbo Shuei (本因坊秀栄)", http://s27.postimg.org/tko3kzh6b/syuei.jpg
In Jowa: "Honinbo Jowa (本因坊丈和)", http://s27.postimg.org/ygo8i4cdv/Honinbo_Jowa.png
In Go Seigen: "Go Seigen (吳清源)", http://s16.postimg.org/glcn181h1/14cz8m9.jpg
In Kitani Minoru: "Kitani Minoru (木谷実)", http://s30.postimg.org/jhzdyu7z5/url.jpg

Other affected pages include Maeda Nobuaki, Hashimoto Utaro, and Sekiyama Riichi.

... Are in fact ALL of our major images hosted on postimg?

Patrick Traill: While, being fairly new here, I would not know what is hosted where, I was wondering whether we might do well to use WikiMedia Commons, e.g. Go Seigen at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Seigen#/media/File:Go_Seigen_01.jpg. I see that there is no image in the English article on Honinbo Shusai, but there is a (less than ideal) one in the Japanese article. Having looked, my impression is that there are currently not that many good images available on WikiMedia. It is perhaps conceivable that we might be able to improve WikiMedia, but perhaps it is risky to use images outside our control. Any thoughts?

Herman: All images on SL are hosted on a variety of outside services. That has risks, as the disappearance of postimg shows. Ideally, it would be great if SL had its own file/image hosting, but that would add a large bandwidth cost to hosting it, as well as issues w.r.t. copyright and abuse. If we allow anyone to upload, which would be consistent with the spirit of a wiki, then you need to police the uploads constantly to avoid copyright infringement and to remove uploads unrelated to go. Wikimedia is a good source, as it is a large project which probably isn't going anywhere for a while, and because it already keeps track of copyright for images.

tapir: A good chunk of images are (current and legacy) player portraits. For them the best practice would imo be to write the major Go associations a polite letter, whether they are fine with their player portraits inlined here. A bit late ... and of course that means removing portraits when the answer is no.

bugcat: To Patrick Traill: I don't think that WikiMedia permits other sites to leech their images (that is, to display them on another website via link to WikiMedia.) In fact, I tried to use that very image of Go Seigen on the relevant page and it didn't show up.

PS. Could you sign your post please? Patrick Traill: Done, sorry! (Also corrected your spelling of my name!)

To tapir: I think perhaps that would be foolhardy if we can leech the images from their sites without forcing ourselves to ask permission, as we do with the Nihon Kiin for example. Better not to ask to be allowed if we don't have to.

Also: I've just realised that we can find at least some of the old images on archived pages of SL that are hosted on the Internet Archive?. For instance, I just found our old image of Jowa: . Perhaps this would be the best source of replacement images, to use the archived versions of the old ones.

Patrick Traill: If we cannot use the images stored in WikiMedia (which I have made an alias of Wikipedia, where I have added information), then it is a bit pointless; I wondered about copying from there if their terms permit it, but that does not solve much.

Bass: Stack Exchange hosts their users' images on Imgur. Imgur's policy is "The Imgur API is free for non-commercial usage. Your application is probably free if you don't plan on making any money with it, or if it's open source." Maybe we should integrate Imgur image uploading to the wiki?

Patrick Traill: Sounds promising!

tapir: Well, removing them (leeched player pics) if request is unanswered or answered w/ no is at least unambiguous, but of course I never felt entitled to write a letter on behalf of SL. Regardless of how we end up handling individual cases, we should have some way of keeping track of problems. E.g. currently plenty of photobucket images. I once added a page Image Workshop? to do so, but it got 0 traction so I abandoned (and deleted) it after a while.