![[Welcome to Sensei's Library!]](images/stone-hello.png "Sensei's Library")
Can we delete this page? (1) Not funny. (2) Extremely uneven voice - not clear whether it's trying to be goofy, mean, or amusingly helpful. (3) In the unlikely even that someone stumbled on the page, a beginner might get very confused. It mixes up slightly hyperbolic advice (lose 1000 games quickly, which is working for me) with extremely bad advice (play GnuGo every day); meanwhile, some of the apparently sarcastic advice ("self-atari is very strong") is actually ambiguous, since self-atari is such a basic killing technique that we don't even remark on it; probably dan players do play self-atari more often than beginners.
It's twice marked as humour, and more or less typical of that. If you're on about this, why don't you worry about all the real jokes out there that touch crudely on sensitive issues.
If this were actually an encyclopedia of jokes, it would have been removed aeons ago because it's not funny. And that's the number one problem with it: not funny. The fact that this is a wiki dedicated to helping people learn about go, and this page would be misleading whether you thought it was serious or acerbic, is just gravy.
Sorry if you wrote the page or something like that, I didn't mean to offend. I just wanted to flag it for a librarian to delete.
I'm one of the librarians, and I'm not minded to delete this. I see the attempt at humour, and feel its not for us to judge what is and isn't funny, and worse to delete that which I don't find funny. Live and let live. As long as its not offensive, it seems to me its best to let people practice their attempts at humour. It takes many misses to actually hit the mark. So tolerate and ignore, in my opinion.
All right. I understand that perspective. My own view is that in a wiki with more pages than most people will ever read, average quality is important.
Hello. I am a librarian, too. I tend to agree with both opinions.
1) I don't want to police humour or more general: Wiki should be open to all kind of contributions.
2) I do believe average quality is important.
Is it possible to reconcile both positions? I believe so. If humour pages were temporary by default (say a page not edited for two years is removed) people would still be free to add each and every silly joke, but Sensei's Library wouldn't aggregate attempted humour the way it does. Please note this isn't policy in Sensei's Library. (Personally, I would like to see such a policy for humour pages and with a longer time limit for homepages, but most responses have been negative so far.)
In a similar vein one could make a policy that when removal of an old humour page is requested, the page should be removed, but with a clear understanding that this doesn't amount to quality criteria for humour pages and it does not prevent addition of the very same lame joke. For 99% of the lame jokes nobody would bother to reintroduce them, which would be an improvement on the current situation.
I was very reluctant to remove humour pages until now, because I feared administrative action will be inevitably misinterpreted as general quality criteria. This is, however, too much wikipedia-style thinking and there is no reason to compromise on openness while cleaning the library. Complaints pages (i.e. KGSWorstAdmin) are handled in a similar way for several years (periodical removal of old complaints, but keeping SL open for new ones).
We recently touched the topic on Coffee Machine.
Best Tapir.
I agree with the spirit of Tapir's remark. The fact of the matter is that, in practice, when we say "let's tolerate other peoples attempts at humor", we often mean "let's let Sensei's Library stand forever as a monument to the inside jokes of a clique of people who fooled around with SL circa 2004." I don't necessarily want to set myself up as the arbiter of good taste on SL, but there is a problem, and a time-limit on jokes would help that.
Let me note as an aside that I think an eager beginner trying to get something from many of these so-so humor pages might be seriously confused. I myself can't even figure out whether or not Cubic Seki is a joke.
Then the issue is actually separating the content from beginners or warning them of all the stupid things you can do with a Go board that aren't Go.
Comments like this make me feel very lonely. After a lengthy treatise on how to reconcile openness with maintenance you insinuate sinister intentions. If you clean up your kitchen, this isn't the first step towards a ban on cooking either, on the contrary. I know that Wikipedia maintenance is centered around the concept of relevance and this might be the origin of the misconception, but I believe it is possible to avoid the trap. We don't have to misconstrue openness for experiments as an obligation to keep everything for eternity.
This page is a good example as the whole discussion subpage is basically comments about removing this page, but librarians simply were not acting on the request, because they didn't want to be seen as judging humour or were reluctant to remove anything that "doesn't need to be deleted".
Here is what I will do: When someone requests the removal of a humour page - please in future always by the Remove Template, I will remove the page if the page wasn't edited during the last year and nobody speaks up for the particular page on Page Remove Requests within two weeks. When the last edit happened within the last year, I won't remove it even if it is as silly as Maynerd?, to make clear that SL is as open as ever. I would hate to condemn the people to inactivity, who want to tidy up the place without having librarian rights themselves.
No objection to this delayed deletion with easy appeal concept. I acknowledge that you are attempting to take a balanced, well intentioned approach, so its well within the spirit of the wiki.
You make a very important remark there about the cubic seki.
The main question is how detrimental bad pages are to SL overall. Frankly, humor pages without incoming links are completely harmless, unless we actively discuss their existence, making them pop up in the recent changes. They're humour pages, hence should not confuse anyone. If they do, then the "humour" keyword is not fulfilling its purpose. Maybe we should mark humour pages differently?
However, a "theory" page like cubic seki, or important pages such as the section on ko, if they get laden with awkward wording, exuberant examples or theoretical discussions that are tangent at best to play in practice, are much more harmful to the overall image of SL.
Deleting a page like the parent here will do almost zero to the overall quality of SL. The monuments to inside jokes of 2004 cliques are actually minuscule china. It's fabricated go beasts like cubic seki that couold make SL impenetrable. But even that page has a low potential of being reached. It's the cupboards at the entrance of the library that we should worry about most.
Well, yes. However, while we are trying to limit it, there is still a lot of overlap between humour and normal pages. See e.g. Fool's Seki? (maybe a suitable beginner exercise - hardly a page on seki), quite a number of humour pages were entered in main indices in the library and have misleading keywords (yes, undone library work) and of course there are humour pages that are very understandable in their motivation but add a lot of confusion to already difficult issues (mockery humour pages, as fictional ko rules pages, fictional tie breakers etc.). Other pages are probably worse, but from an outside perspective if we are reluctant to touch maynerd and shodan quick, it probably looks pointless to even try to do major editing required in other places.
Hi Dieter, you make very good points. However, in a way you point out exactly why the low-quality pages irritate me so much. #1: I try to do a lot of work on the pages nearest to the "Main Entrance", in particular the beginner pages. These pages are mostly links, so I follow the links to try to make sure that these pages themselves are helpful and content-rich, and to decide whether they should be linked on the beginner pages.
My current irritation with these two specific pages - CubicSeki and ShodanQuick? - started because they were linked on entries that are linked to prominent beginner pages. But these are just two examples of something more general. Sure, you can say, remove all the links, problem gone. But at the same time there is #2: I would really like to intensify the wikization of SL, rather than cut pages loose. I don't think "if you stick to the top ten most popular pages, you won't find any worthless content" is a good guide either to how good wikis work, or to how people use wikis. If you keep clicking you can get to very obscure topics very quickly. ~172
Fully agree. I was not suggesting to cut the links but indeed improve those pages which have a low distance from frontpage or high overall incoming linkage. If they cannot be improved, deleting them is an option. For those far away from the front page, yes they can still be reached but someone who gets there is probably just strolling around and not looking actively for good stuff.
I'm wishy-washy about this, not the least because Arno always favoured maximum freedom and embraced all content, as long as it is go related. I have a natural tendency to tidy up things myself, but Arno's example taught me to let go of that and invest effort in valuable pages, not try to make all pages valuable.