Meta Discussion
Demise of SL (JF leaving) [#140]
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(2005-09-28)
Charles Matthews: Well, if John Fairbairn is deciding to leave SL for good, that seems to be the end of this wiki as a class act. I've had my doubts for a time. I have taken a couple of half-year breaks. Nothing works: I'm just ever more convinced that SL is set in its ways, and the required attitudes (cf. Wikipedia) are not going to percolate up and revive the art of editing here.
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- DrStraw: Where does this peace of information come from?
- Velobici: Charles, can you help us understand the required attitudes that you mention?
- MaxPowa?: Note that Wikipedia has a large number of things done in order to create the 'right attitude'. Where SL is something of a noisy bazaar, with obvious edits, wikipedia articles are polished final things, with warnings on non-neutral, badly written etc articles. Wikipedia adds incentive through it's 'article of the day' front page, and its association with the encyclopedia style/authoritativeness. If you want SL to have a similar standard of objectivity and breadth, you have to modify the format in order to promote this. SL's problems are systemic, if you consider the current content value a problem. It would be nice for it to be a more useful and glowing record of Go, and maybe some thought should go into this. SL editors probably have the ability to write something fantastic, so there's plenty of hope of making sensei a real sensei and more fascinating site than it is. SL2 maybe a great idea, but real thought has to go into it, possibly taking into account the smaller number of potential editors compared to Wikipedia, and the fact that go is somewhat mysterious for most of them.
- Charles The persistence of thread mode, even on major topics, and signed edits, militates against good quality articles.
- Bill: Charles, why don't you come and present your ideas on To Sign or Not to Sign?
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Steve I agree that John's loss will be a blow to the SL community.
IanDavis: Is this a not enough Go problem? The last edit I saw from John was a response to my tiny edit on Tibetan Go. Not so tangentially I wonder if there is a case for starting to really seperate !SL into different sections: Hikaru, Online, Theory, Homepages, News, and have RC changes for each. One could argue it's becoming like a jumble sale these days, personally that doesn't bother me, I prefer to read RC All because I like seeing everything that's happened. Of course many people would go nuts if they had to sift through that, they prefer a much sleeker usage. Reads up ok totally wrong guess from me there then.
Bob McGuigan: John Fairbairn's editing was not prolific but it was pithy. I'm sorry to see him go. And Charles Matthews's reduction of activity is a loss too, for that matter.
For me the two most irritating things about SL are: (1) the tendency for people to create new pages whenever they have something to say rather than take the trouble to see whether a relevant page already exists on SL, and (2) disruptive edits and questions almost randomly inserted into well-crafted pages. Discussion pages have done something to preserve subject-matter pages from disruptive editting but there could be more use of the CoffeeMachine page and BigQuestionMark or QuickQuestions pages for getting questions answered.
IanDavis: Discussion Pages are rather good, but even they have their problems as we see here. The greater trouble is probably caused by the inappropriate/improportionate use of emotive language over a benign subject matter. Text based discussion all too often has the tendency to break down into flamebroth.
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nachtrabe: There are a few differences between SL and Wikipedia that make SL a more difficult format for a wiki:
- Experts vs. Peasants: Wikipedia has a strong emphasis on factual material and thus on citing outside sources, particularly for controversial pieces. An "expert's opinion" is irrelevant unless it can be cited and indexed. On SL we have very few "experts" and lots of "peasants" contributing to technical discussion without citation (this is the nature of the beast, there aren't many ways around it).
- Discussion vs. Articles: Articles on Wikipedia normally emphasize the factual presentation of information from a Neutral Point of View (NPOV). Here some pages that are not "Discussion" subpages still have heavy amounts of discussion on them by design, and there is no standard for how to handle that or flag to dispute someone's point of view. Discussion also has a tendency to take place "in-line" (i.e., the replies go to a specific paragraph or even sentence rather than being put after the entire post, this can break up the structure and make it very difficult to follow something).
- Every Little Thing Gets A Page: Every time someone has something to say they tend to produce another page for it and there is generally no going back if it is go related. Take "Occupy The Two-Two Point"--it's a specific piece of advice that involves a specific class of problems in L&D based on a double-shortage of liberties that has no bearing anywhere else. Next we're going to see pages like "Play on the Vital Point of the Bulky Five" or "Throw-in at the 1-1 point."
- Reasonable People Can Disagree, Unreasonable People Often Disagree: If reasonable people disagree on wikipedia, it can lead to an editing war (see whether a picture should go on the "Top Free" page, but the content of the principle page won't change much in most circumstances. Here, because "everyone is an authority" (and not just an editor), it can lead to directly contradicting information and a lot of extra pages for different views, even if there is an authority who's spoken on the issue (seeEvenAMoronConnectsAgainstAPeep, AmIReallyAMoronIfIDontConnectAgainstThePeep, SentePunishesThePeep, WhenNotToConnectAgainstAPeep; another example is AttackFromADistance, DontGetTooClose?, StayCloseEnough). Not to say that these aren't valuable or that they don't contain nuanced information, but chasing down a point in all of that can be confusing, particularly when the pages don't reference one another.
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Gronk: For what it is worth (and I don't think it is much), I feel that SL is full of a lot of uninteresting, unuseful content, some of which is not even serious go content, much of which is quite poorly organized and badly presented. There are very few pages I would miss if they got deleted. On what do I base this? I frequently click "Random Page" and count how many times it takes to find a page I think is worth reading. When I find one that looks worthwhile I read the page and judge whether the material is well presented. It is rare that I find a worthwhile page in fewer than five or so tries and very rare that the page I find is well crafted. Try this test for yourself sometime (results will vary of course).
Dieter: Interesting metric. I clicked ten times. Ironically, the kind of pages with the highest probability are names in go, created by Charles, based on John's GoGod. So if this is the kind of page labeled as uninteresting and badly presented, the critics of SL's current shape are each other's critics.
Five other pages contained Go related content, well presented in my opinion. One homepage and the badly in need of a WikiMasterEdit Caring for Go stones complete the list. Not a bad score on this attempt, if you ask me. Maybe we should make a separate page with all the attempts? #:-7
jfc: In havesting wheat, the farmer must separate the useful wheat from the chaff (inedible portions of the plant -- e.g. the stalk).
SL simply needs a better way to separate the wheat from the chaff.
SL could implement a page rating system (0 to 5 stars + "I haven't rated this page"). Netflix does some cool things with suggesting movies you haven't seen (i.e. rated) based on what you have said you liked compared with other people who gave things similar ratings.
To start with, SL could simply display an average page rating and you could select "random page of 3+ stars rating" if you want a better probability of hitting something interesting.
This way, my home page (and many others) could get an average rating of 0.1 stars and you would never see it on your "random page" exploration.
Also, SL's "random page" would not take you to a page you have already rated.
Random page metric not useful for measuring (content)-usefulness
Gronk's approach of disqualifying Senseis is
also (or only?) an indication of a wrong technique using it:
instead of looking at ![[ext]](images/extlink.gif)
Random Pages, one should better employ structured starting points (pages for Beginners, Beginner Study Section, ... or Reference Section, available from StartingPoints.
- The quality of Random Pages should only be measured by its randomness...
Comparably, a telephone book of a big city comprises zillions of irrelevant data, however, in need of - e.g. a plummer - good relevant ones (better to be found in the proper section). Indexes, registers, sources, literarture lists, footnotes etc. of books indicate their usefulness - not any random page.
(An extreme comparision could be made with DNA, comprising genes and much more 'junk'(?)-DNA. Recent thoughts are that most probably both are necessary. Would I judge the usefulness of DNA by a (randomly chosen) sequence in absolute terms (good or not) just because I have not yet found the protein it reads for or understand the evolution of it?;
All of this hinges of the object of usefulness -> to whom?
- the animal, bacteria etc., or
- or me, myself?
I guess here personal interest correlates quite much with individual usefulness for oneself.
Coming to a shorter - personal - conclusion:
- except for game retrieval sites, I do not see any, comparable, structured site which is as useful as Senseis.
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Gronk: As is common for me, I thought more about this after my initial post (above). Perhaps finding roughly 20% (as I do) of pages of potential interest is quite high! The more important thing is that while the topic may be of interest, the presentation is dreadful...a symptom of the format and editting style I think. Only solvable by some kind of moderator/editor type. Perhaps it can't be helped. If only navigation were slightly easier and more precise (better searching, pattern match searching) then a lot of what is not intereting could be more easily avoided.
I can think of one other wacky idea for improving presentation. It goes like this: (0) All authors must have a homepage. (1) New page is created by initial author "A". (2) Whenever anyone else other than "A" adds content, that content is shaded in different background color both on the main page and in the edit page (you'll see why in a moment). (3) Whenever anyonee else other than "A" adds content the page goes on "A"'s list of "pages to be editted" (new idea). This list is on "A"'s homepage and is visible to everyone. (4) It is then "A"'s job to clean up the page as best "A" can, asking for clarification from other authors when needed, etc. As part of the clean up edit, "A" has to check off (somehow) that he's done soemthing about all that color-coded text. This check-off constitutes the assertion that "A" has done his edit (possible to fake this by just checking the box yet doing nothing--this is a problem). (5) If "A" fails to do this job in reasonable time (e.g., 30 days?), then the page gets posted to another list of "Needing edits". If anyone else cares to edit it, they can pick it from this list and do it. (6) After another chunk of time (another 30 days?) if nobody does a master edit, the page is automatically deleted. Some other deletion warning systems could be in place. This whole thing could iterate so if after "A"'s first clean up someone adds new stuff, the page goes back to "A" (on his list), and so on. One is always responsible for the pages one creates this way...until one decides not to be, in which case the page may die if nobody else wants to do the job.
Advantages: all authors have home page and are accountable in some sense to edit the work they started; everyone can see if an author is deliquent in this responsibility; there would be a disincentive to create lots of "not serious" pages because of the work one would have to keep doing to keep them cleaned up; pages not cleaned up are automatically judged as not useful and deleted.
There are details to work out but this is a sketch.
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unkx80: Interesting ideas, but you are placing too much burden on the initial author. It does happen: an author writes some reasonable page, some newbie comes along and thinks he knows a lot and starts messing up the page, the author cleans it up, and then another one comes along and insert questions and discussions all over the page. And the cycle repeats. In the end the initial author gets really tired from all the cleaning up edits and call it quits. We had had newbies who are so edit happy that he left trails over several dozens of pages, leaving a very large amount of cleanup work to be done. Until now, this cleaning up work has not been 100% complete.
Gronk: The mechinism I described no doubt has tons of problems. But it can be viewed both as a way to increase maintenance, decrease nonsense, and also as a way for the community to implicitly indicate that a page is ready to be removed from "circulation." unkx80's point is good. Also, his interpretation places an emphasis on an expectation that the author keep doing the work. But, the author is free to abandon the page and let it die. In many cases this may be the best course. The utility of a page expires. Actually, the community lets it die since after the author gives up the community has a chance to take over. If nobody wants to maintain then how vaulable is it? Lastly, let's get creative. If the page dies, maybe it lives in some temporary state. Nobody can edit it unless they agree to take care of it. It is marked as "unmaintained and uneditable until someone wants to care for it." That way links to it still work but it can't stay an attractor for garbage unless somebody signs on to maintain it.
Later...yet more...another possibility is that if the author doesn't maintain in time, the maintenance owner becomes the last one to edit! So you think you're going to insert a little snide comment into that joseki page!? Ahha, 30 days later you become the one responsible for maintenance. (Which you can just not do of course...it is a question of whether a list of pages you are responsible for appearing on your home page is motiviation enough to do some work...can it be worse or better than the current state?)
Anyway, death of a page is not that tragic if it can always be revived somehow. The problem here is that pages hardly ever die!!! And while they live they're often in a sorry state.
Later still...Imagine an SL "Obituary Page" with a list of pages that will die if nobody take over as primary editor. There will be a section "20 days until death," another "10 days until death," and "1 day until death." Those interested could read over the obituaries and, when we're moved, rescue a page by giving it that heart transplant it desperately needed...even without the elaborate mechanism I described I think this would be an exciting way to spruce up SL. An obit list could be generated in any reasonable way (like based on traffic volume--the least popular come up for death first, and so on). Some bad pages will die this way, the rest will get cleaned up if someone thinks it worthwhile.
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kokiri I can see two concerns, related to new content and existing content. The former is, I think the key to the identity crises that the adolescent SL seems to be going through periodically - there's been a lot of hard work done in the past by others than myself compiling useful Joseki and proverb related meterial, but, whilst the BQMs and discussions remain both interesting and illuminating I think that at the moment there is no-one with a real vision of how the theory & reference material can be extended to cover, (as I believe Charles once suggested, cf. [Document Mode vs Thread Mode ] ) all the material necessary to get to 5-dan, say. It is far from obvious to me what subject matters are missing, but then the game of go is pretty foggy to me most of the time.
On the subject of existing content, I think that more is needed to discriminate between discussion and more stable reference material. On the whole (and I may not be in the main here) I think that people are too keen to avoid causing offense and so are not brutal enough. By all means preserve other people's contributions and do the work necessary to keep them sensical, but do it on sub-pages and keep the core page pert, concise and coherent. That said, i think it's a hard thing to do requiring effort and perserverence - I tried overhauling 33invasion and it took me about 2 months and i still wasn't really happy with the result - I ended up writing my own page.
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Arno: Gronk, I don't think that your system works. Take nachtrabe's example about connecting a peep. Why do you think noone took the time to masteredit the pages, make them coherent etc, i.e. make them more valuable than they are now? As Kokiri pointed out: it is hard work. And the SL folks apparently like scratching a new itch more than laboring away on existing pages. If you would stumble upon superb pages 75% of the time, then newbiews would be more careful. If noone interrupted other's comment in-line (but appended afterwards) and those instances (where someone does interrupt someone else) would be corrected timely, then in no time this would be the standard mode of discussion.
This wiki is largely guided by unwritten social rules, all of you have agreed upon or silently tolerated. It's up to each individual to change this. Technology helps only so much. For example, many pages are created as orphans by simly typing their name, then creating the page. I could supress this and require a link in order to create a page. The result would be that 90% of the new pages are created by linking from either the autor's homepage, LibraryLobby? or SandBox. Sensible linking cannot be enforced.
Implementing your system would basically result in 99% of newly created pages be deleted within 60 days or so. Of course, one could say this is a good thing ;o) I think nachtrabe had very good arguments why SL never will be like Wikipedia, but rather different. It's up to each and every one to make the best of it.
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Gronk: I'm not too attached to my ideas. Do what you will with them. I don't think it can be said that my suggestions "don't work" though. It depends what you want the site to be. Obviously I'm not that attached to any particular page, particularly if nobody is willing to care for it--and I include pages I myself have made or contributed to. If they all dissappeared with reasonable warning and opportunity for someone to step up and edit or master edit or review (or whatever) then I say they aren't worth keeping (by definition). But I am quite amazed at the attitude here, and lack of creativity. Most seem ready to try the "lets make teams and work hard and hope it gets better" approach again. How many times has this been tried and failed? (I confess I don't know.) There is so much resistance to any substantial automated structure that forces things a certain way (major exception of discussion pages--a very good start!). But if some of that structure had been in place from the start, that'd be the norm and we'd probably be fighting to keep it that way. We see what lack of any such structure has gotten us. Maybe we just like it this way? (That would be okay but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it must be this way.) I think some kind of automated death of pages (perhaps resurectable) keyed to some measure of lack of use is not so terrible. How much more trash will have to exist before this begins to seem quite sensible? As has been pointed out, editing trashy pages is a big chore. Why not have some of them just expire some way or another and save everyone some headache? If the content is so valuable it will reappear either by direct resurection (some kind of revert) or recreation in another form. I don't see a big problem with that personally. I'd go so far as to say that every page should be subject to this kind of trial at some point. Imagine pages die after some period of time, no matter what the use volume but there is some clear indication (by some clock on the page) what the date of death is. And it can be kept alive only by going through some review process. Of course that creates work for somebody. But if nobody wants to do it, then let it die. If we aren't willing to care for the page then how valuable is it? I'll say this much, if I stumbled across a page I found very vaulable and saw that it was to die soon and that I could take ownership of it to save it and to improve it, I'd do it. Would anyone else?
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Morten: Also, (sorry if this a negatively biased comment) - although we could (after discussion and agreement and within reason) possibly change the way things work from now on with respect to page structure/classification etc., most 'new' schemes would require a one-off adjustment of the existing pages. Of course, the longer we leave it the more difficult it gets, but that is already today a huge obstacle to overcome and which, unless this adjustment can be automated in a way, would probably doom the changeover.
Maybe valuable effort could be used on making the current material easier to find by extending teh use of index pages and/or the search facility - Arno - what's the hit rate for the serach function - is it used?... Often new pages are created because the creator is not aware that a closely related page already exists. The new page is then on RC (=visible) and will be edited, again without contributors being aware of the other page, until one day smeone replaces the first page with an alias to the second one... Maybe we should add some sort of automatic 'sanity check' before new pages are allowed to be created? (E.g. "These pages (insert list here) already exist which apear to be related to the new page name you have chosen. Are you sure you want to create a new page?")
In a similar vein, we could put 'warnings' on the top of the editpage for all non-discussion pages along the lines of "Please do not post questions to the main page, but use the discussion page (link). Please discuss major changes to the page on the discussion page before changing the main page."
However, SL has always been based on the assumption of reasonable behaviour of the contributors, and this may be unlikely to change - strict rules sometimes just encourages people to circumvent them :-)
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nachtrabe: Re: "This wiki is largely guided by unwritten social rules." Maybe it would be a good idea to codify those rules, or at least codify the ideal of what pages should strive for. Then when someone reverts or changes something, or moves it over to a discussion page, they at least will have something more concrete to go off of--an ideal or a standard. Another idea is to start "projects" to bring certain groups of pages up to a certain standard of content and editing. These require some organization, but at least then it would help get people organized and know where they can go and what they can do if they want to help (I think its a sign when the list of "what needs to be master edited" needs to be master edited).
IanDavis: Referring to WME above. I have only ever done one, McMahon Pairing, I am not an expert then, but I was struck by something Kokiri alluded to. In editing the 33 invasion, he gave me the impression he was doing it alone. Is it the case that on SL people are not acting together cohesively. If they were would they be able to complete larger more worthwhile projects? Also, I would agree that SL has a small proportion of experts and a large number of opinions.
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Bob Myers: In my opinion, many of the current issues stem from the fact that SL is attempting to use the Wiki format as a discussion site. SL needs a real forum module, now. It seems logical to have one forum per page. Niceties such as RSS feeds for each forum and ability to post via e-mail would be great. Of course, the forum needs to support go diagrams (hopefully even better ones).
Such discussion groups would, first, make life much easier and more fun for people whose main purpose in using SL is to, well, discuss. BQMs are a prime example. At the same time, forums would make it much easier to have (informed, one hopes) discussions about the pages which have more of an encylopedia flavor--the "SLpedia part" of the site, which personally I believe could indeed benefit from a special SLpedia deshi status, since, as was pointed out above, the density of knowledge to scope of information ratio is much different for Wikipedia than for SL, and the mentality required is somewhat unique.
Another "face" of SL is as a kind of collection of home pages and blogs, although frankly I can't understand why anyone would want to use SL as a blog. Since they do, though, the most recent generation of CMS's support these usages as they should, although I have no idea if it's even feasible to consider backfitting existing SL functionality into a new framework. Remember that Donald Knuth did say, though, that the most important design decision you ever make is throwing away the current system.
One final radical idea for pumping new energy into SL: split apart its pieces and let them go their own way--the forums, SLpedia, player info DB, etc.
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DrStraw: Is it practical to start a new version of SL (SL2 or SLII?) into which individual pages from SL can be copied, but subject to some sort of restrictions? What I visualize is some extended period of time where people can discuss what the structure of SL2 should be, what is permitted, and how changes should be controlled where necessary. Once a set of ground rules are agreed upon some sort of minimal enforcement could be implemented and we would have a new, clean wiki but also have the ability to transfer pages from the old if they are still pertinent. Clearly, such a new SL2 would also be subjected to abuse and random wanderings much as SL is, but with ground rules in place from day one maybe it could be made a better place. As someone earlier in this discussion said, if standards were in place on all pages to start with then people would be more likely to jump in and fix non-standard edits.
uxs: Maybe it would be good to split SL into several different sections: reference material, discussions about go where the result could be transferred to reference, homepages, online go stuff, kgs (and other servers, but let's not kid ourselves: it would be 90% about kgs). I don't know how easy this would be. Online go and homepages should be automatically split, the rest would go into discussion by default. A standard body of reference material could be transferred fairly easily.
Or perhaps it could be as easy as creating a few new pages types: Online Go and Discussion should be prime candidates then.
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Dieter: Our subject makes it difficult for us to maintain an encylopaedia-like attitude and very natural to go into discussion mode. This balance between Wikipedia (connotation good) and Usenet (connotation bad) is at stake. I see intrinsically three kinds of pages (as opposed to the two in Wikipedia). I'll take keima as an example subject.
- The keima: what does this word mean?
- Discussion about what the keima page should look like and what it means: shall we restrict the page to a linguistic one and refer to knight's move? Or is there a difference in notion that should be made clear (see the hamete-trick play discussion)
- Discussion about how to use the keima: advice on good and bad play. How did it occur in my game etc
First complaint about the current state of affairs, is that 3 too often interferes with or blurs the parent page, which is intended to have 1. Some people have put 3 under the discussion page, but maybe the real purpose of the discussion page is 2. So, category 3 really has no clear place. But 3 is the nature of about 85% of the contributions. Moreover, pages with discussion on how to play are often very interesting.
Second, we have had the etiquette of signing your contributions. For 2 and 3 that works all too well, but for 1 it is counterproductive, because it makes 1 appear as 3.
Third, we have a lot of parent pages, whose title already indicates 3. For example: Crosscut then extend.
In Usenet everything is discussion. On Wikipedia, you don't have pages entirely of nature 3. If they exist, they're mostly uninteresting for the average reader. So, I wonder if we must implement these 3 categories, drastically reducing pages of nature 1 - which can then end up in the reference lists. The problem is always history, attitude and backlog: it will demand a lot of effort to get pages from status 1 to 3 and to convince ourselves that a new page is really 3 and not 1.
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kokiri - i think it's easy to underestimate the amount of work involved in a SLII-type project - the pages that exist now do so as a result of unstinting hard work. You only have to look at the number of pages that were last edited by Charles (not wishing to single him out at the expense of others, but it's the easiest example i can see) to realise that to get where we got today took a great undertaking. Reading between the lines Charles would seem to prefer a purist document mode style to SL, but i think this overlooks the fact that many of the most interesting pages are discussion style threads of debate between the stronger players here and whilst I largely agree, i think there's a need to be more flexible. I like Dieter's categorisation above but I think i somewhat disagree with it perhaps.
Take Block on the wider side as an example - it's a page that I have vaguely had my eye on for a while. The main page is a reasonable stab at describing a core concept - I think it could be better, but that's not really my interest here. Instead the discussion page gives me nightmares - there's some interesting stuff in there, but it's going to give anyone who comes to it fresh a real headache. In my view, I would like to see it WME'd possibly into a few different pages (B.O.T.W.S - how wide is too wide? maybe) that present the points raised there in a more rational format. I guess the question is, what would we like it to be - an accurate historical record of the discussion as it happened, or an edited article making the same points/comparisons etc. structurted to be user friendly to the student of go coming to leanr about the subject? I would prefer the latter, maybe others disagree, I'm not at all sure.
Arno: I have tried to sum up this and previous discussions, as well as emails and other sources to give an idea what SL 2 could look like. As Morten would say: LMKWYT
Fhayashi: The whole nature of wiki makes it difficult to come up with a proper, 'authoritative' collection of knowledge. The whole wiki-concept runs counter to authority. It's more like a brainstorming session, and not an encyclopedia.
That being said, I think an ambitious encyclopedist(s) could use the unfiltered information in a wiki (of any sort, not just SL) to come up with an edited, referenced, 'authoritative' work.
Is this the goal of SL, or SL2?
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