SL Conventions / Discussion

Important parts of this discussion are on these pages:

• White vs Black
• Difficulty
• Keywords
• Capitalization of the Go Noun
• Spelling at SL (became a Lively Debate on English)
• CamelCase
• Usefulness of Conventions at SL

December 10, 2006

Patrick Taylor: I hope this is the right place to suggest corrections. I think we should try to come up with a uniform practice for link creation. Clearly, some terms deserve their own pages, but I also think there are many terms which become undefined pages when they do not need to be. I propose the following:

1. A term needs a definition if its meaning is not readily apprent from context.
2. If the definition requires more than one diagram to explain or deserves its own discussion, it should be made into a page.
3. If the term can be defined by a quick explanation, the text should be made into a footnote.
4. Some terms could eventually require their own pages (eg. professional players). In this case, the page should be created with content.

I think that these changes should make pages easier to read. There's no reason a reader should have to navigate away from the page he is reading in order to read a two-line definition. However, this does create redundancy for terms that show up on multiple pages. These, too, could be possibly made into a page to prevent the same text from showing up on many different pages.

May 19, 2003

Charles I suppose the conventions business is always going to be evolutionary; but keeping score seems of some interest. As far as I can see there may be these four categories in which to classify:

Generally accepted

1. Oriental names with family name first
2. Chinese names romanised with Pinyin (even for Taiwanese players)
3. Korean names romanised with McCune-Reischauer
4. For Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese players in Japan, use Japanese reading (e.g. Rin Kaiho, Ryu Shikun)
5. Home pages to carry Home Page as as Page Type, editing to respect the space, such pages only to be created by the person in question
6. People keyword to indicate non-Home Page, freely created and editable

Recommended by some

1. Go terms in English as default
2. Names in game description in White-Black order
3. Titles labelled by term number (not year)
4. Japanese words written using Hepburn Romanization with wapuro long vowels (unless already commonly used in English with an Anglicized spelling; see Japanese Go pronunciations).

Deprecated by some

1. Overuse of Japanese words
2. Keywords on home pages
3. Attack & Defence keyword (now removed)
4. 6p/6d convention for pro/ama grades
5. Other keywords on humour pages

Deprecated by some and recommended by others

1. CamelCase
2. Capitalization of go/Go
3. Normal sentence capitalisation of page titles
4. Making this sort of list :)

Line Length

Anonymous: Please do not use lines with length greater than 80, it makes the ``diff'' unreadable in the Recent Changes.

Arno Hollosi: That is not always possible. E.g. list items have to be in one line. I have added a quick hack that tries to underline small changes in long lines (e.g. correction of a typo). It works quite well. I hope that solves the problem sufficiently.

Dashes

Arno Hollosi: I'd like to add that the "no more than four dashes" is questionable. Personally, I just hit '-' a couple of times (or press until auto-repeat sets in).

Self Links

SGBailey 2003-10-09: Some articles have self links. I could make one here: SLConventions/Discussion. Are these liked, disliked or forbidden? Personally I feel them to be slightly confusing since I perhaps want to click on it and won't go anywhere new.

Sebastian: Even worse are indirect self links: Links to alias pages that eventually link back to the original page. I delete them whenever fall in such a trap. Incidentally, I just did this on Big Eye Liberties.

unkx80: I believe one common reason why this happens is because of Wiki Master Editing, the Wiki Master Editor may copy some contents from page A (containing links to page B) into page B while forgetting to remove the links.

Mutual Appreciation

Sebastian: I'm really happy about the prompt and concise replies I get from many people here, above all from Bill and CharlesMatthews. I feel very much inclined to add "thanks" below each of them, but nobody else does this - and rightly so, because it would clutter up SL. Often I subliminate that urge and add another comment/question instead, which contributes to my recent changes addiction, because I have to see if someone responded again ... :-)

My question is: What's the best way to express thanks or should we simply forget about it?

Charles Well, thanks for that! This is a wiki, not a mutual appreciation society. Those who want to put something back into SL can do it in some way that suits them: maintain older pages, bring new questions.

Sebastian: Well, then, I won't publicly appreciate you.

A related question is: How to treat signed contributions in non-discussion pages? - See Document Mode vs Thread Mode.