84.193.245.24: Public SGF Repository - discussion, questions (2008-02-02 16:40) [#4244]

Hi,

I have been wondering for a time how it comes that I always have to scrabble all sorts of different sites on the net to find professional and historical games. I am surprised that there is a page on senseis library on Go Seigen for example, but not a page with a list of games by Go, downloadable in SGF format. The answer seems to be in this discussion: http://senseis.xmp.net/?SGFAtSLDiscussion

It states that it is preferred not to enable people to upload SGF files on senseis. This to me occurs like making a wiki on photography and not enabling people to upload pictures. Also it is suggested that:"If you like to provide gamerecords as SGF just put them on your site and link them from here."

I couldn't agree less. I do have some personal webspace and so do other people in the go community, but then next year i change my mind and start to play chess, or the url of my site changes, or person X uploads 12 random games by go seigen and 3 by Shusaku and then I decide to turn my site with go records into a site where you have to register an account (and/or pay) and can only download about 100 games per month, etc, etc, etc.... If we could only get over that once and for all.

That's not the way to create a structurally sound and reliable information source. That is just what makes things like wikis interesting. Imagine SL or wikipedia being spread out over peoples personal webspace, right it just wouldn't. On the other hand, nothing is for sure, as we have seen with the recent great adventures that www.imslp.org (which looked like a very stable and community supported site at first) is going trough.

This situation is to my dissatisfaction, and i'm prepared to put considerable effort in building up a public (=public forever) repository to fill this void. There is however one big question i would like to put into the community:

Where?

I didn't want to make a decision about this by myself since a good project like this would take the enthousiasm of more people.

• Senseis seems to be the obvious place but i don't know if the people steering it consider coming back to their earlier decision.
• Next i thought about wikipedia or wiki commons, but it is not even clear to me if that falls under the scope of either of these projects, nor if it is even allowed to upload .sgf as file format...
• As another possibility, project Gutenberg could be asked to host files maybe, as a solid (public) file storage could make the option to link sgf's from SL an viable option again...

So, what do other people think about this? Any great ideas?

ufotds