Meta Discussion
Icons for difficulty scale [#2560]
When I looked at Tsumego From Games and on crux's book reviews, I felt the need for some common indication of the level for which the problems or books are appropriate. I therefore came up with a system of icons on a scale like the following.
When I was looking at Tsumego From Games, I found it hard to find problems at my level, and thought "wouldn't it be nice if we had some nice way to mark the difficulty level?". So I started creating some icons for that. Now I saw crux's book review, and saw another application for the same. I'd like to ask for other people's opinion here before actually using them. Here's what I got:
- Overall range:
.
Individual range icons could look like this:
- Beginner to 20k
,
- 20k to 10k
,
- Single digit kyu
, or
- Dan
.
I also posted the svg file here, so others can improve on it: http://www.helm.org/s/go/sl/gradient.png.
You know about the difficulty tag, do you? (Does graphics add sth. to that?)
In my humble opinion, this difficulty gradient is really cool.
Yes, I know the difficulty tag, but that's for a whole page, and it doesn't show in or near a link to that page. For a reader looking at a page like Tsumego From Games, there's no way to know which of the problems suit her level.
Your second question is about graphics vs text. I see three advantages for graphics, in the way I proposed: (1) It stands out, and is therefore easy to find on a page that has a lot of other text. (2) The color coding makes it particularly easy to find your level. (3) The range display offers us a straightforward way to be as specific as we want, which is particularly important for book reviews. E.g., one book might only be introductory, and would therefore just display the far blue end, while we could just as easily show that another one is appropriate for readers from introductory level up to 15 k by displaying all colors from blue to yellowish green. For the reader, it's even easier: All she needs to look for is her color.
You don't have to wait for more approval or you will wait for a long time. Just go forward on some sample pages, that will generate more responses, though I believe it isn't easy to assign ratings to a large number of problems. Only one thing: I wouldn't add these tags on problems that are rated by page name already as in "Kyu exercises", "Beginner Exercises", if some pages don't fit there, better rename and move them to another index. For Tsumego from Games it might be a great addition.
The reason I'm asking is that I want to put my time where it is needed. If only two people (myself included) like this idea, then there may be more worthwhile endeavors here. (I'll start another thread about that on this page.)
Why do you write "I wouldn't add these tags on [...] BeginnerExercises". That's precisely the situation for which I suggested the tags! As you wrote yourself, "some of them are definitely not beginner but 7-4 kyu". Even if all exercises were in the range of 30 to 8 kyu, that still would be a huge range which cries out for more orientation. Currently, readers are just presented a big heap of exercises that are sorted by nothing but the date someone entered them; hardly a useful criterion for our readers.
I like it for Tsumego from games and similar indices but not so much where you have a level indicator in the name itself. I would rather move the too difficult "Beginner exercise" to a more appropriate place than make different levels of beginner exercises.
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