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Meta Discussion
Keywords: SL description
What do you like / don't like about Sensei's Library?Write down your thoughts below. Related pages:
2003 November 10Anonymous: Is it possible/desirable for the text of recent edits to be in a colour other than the normal text colour? I like to read 'Recent Changes' but am lately at a loss as to whats changed in the pages it refers to. Arno: us junkies only read the diffs ... 2003 November 1(Moved from MessagesToPeopleCurrentlyPresentInTheLibrary) Fhayashi: Is it my imagination, or have there recently been a lot of new pages with little to do with go? Perhaps some of these things are best left in the already existing discussion pages, such as here. SL is a wiki about go, not a wiki about discussion.
dnerra: I apologize for creating the page Men. It was meant as a subtle hint that certain similar pages might be equally superfluos. But I regret that it has now been used as an anchor for yet another go-unrelated page.
(Sebastian:) I don't want to start a discussion here, now, therefore briefly: You have a point. But most was meta discussion, which is germane to SL. If anybody knows of a wiki that offers solution to our questions, please let us know, we could learn from them. One such site may be Fhayashi: By meta discussion, if you mean discussion about discussions about go, I don't think it's germane. Let's keep it to discussion about go. Meaning pages should be about go. Discussions about the pages should either be on the pages, or in pre-existing pages, such as this one. May sound strict, but if certain restraint is not exercised, there will soon be more pages about pages about go, rather than pages about go. (Sebastian:) The last few days had indeed a high proportion of meta talk. But even for these days, your statement is far fetched. In the last 3 days there were 4 meta pages created. Contrast this to the following numbers: Right now Sensei's Library contains 7612 pages. 55 pages edited during the last 24 hours. New pages created since Oct 29:
This is:
You can do the math yourself, but it should be obvious that there's no danger of meta pages taking over, even if we assume the rate of the last few days goes on. Fhayashi: On October 31st, there were 91 edits, 54 of which were on 'meta' pages. Ominous, isn't it? Charles I think things go better when contributors contribute, rather than discuss what other contributors do; try to write well, rather than discuss the language used by others; and edit in such a way as to make SL more useable, rather than discuss editing. That said, I'm not happy with the whole development over recent months. Some superficiality and even silliness has taken root here. As if the attention span of the readers had halved. 'Things were better in the old days' - well, maybe not. Older pages here don't individually look great, always, when you look back. On the other hand I'm mostly interested in good technical articles appearing: they are rarely enough written for other media. And there are not many more of those. Fhayashi: This is what I mean. I come to SL to read articles on how to play go well, and to have my and other's questions answered by similarly strong players. We should all keep in mind that SL is really about go. Some people seem to enjoy discussion for discussion's sake, which is fine, but I'm not sure this is the place for it. SL should be about go and discussions about go, and not much else. Charles But another way to look at it is that the core material, for example the pages accessed from GuidedTours, are the real Library. The RecentChanges can now only make quite small increments, per day or even per month. Arno: I think that the recent rise in meta discussions has to do with the growing number of contributors. They are still coming to terms with editing a wiki and what is appropriate and what isn't. I think that in a short while (after they have exchanged ideas and meta discussed) they go back to contributing. After all, the wiki is not shaped by talking, but by acting. The current state of SL has been reached not by talking, but by contributing in a respectful manner. In short, you should not feel compelled to add comments to every discussion. Even if you do not edit a meta page for a week you will see that life still goes on :o) 2003 October 30Charles I've just deleted a couple of 'server blacklists'. I don't think material like this should be posted to SL. 2003 October 29SnotNose: (Possibly) new concept: ThicknessAttenuation. Not sure if it deserves to be linked to anything. Discussion started by Robert Jasiek now at editing freedom - discussion. 2003 October 26(Sebastian:) Should we have an FAQ page for SL? Here are some (including a comment) that I found in the sandbox:
Charles Move to Quick Questions?
(Sebastian:) I wasn't aware of that page and yes, one of the questions was already there. Is that page also a good place for questions regarding SL itself?
Charles I guess it hasn't been much used recently - by all means bring it back into prominence, for example by linking to it.
Question: Is it possible for a twisted mind to erase everything ever written on these pages? Answer: There are backups. Answer 2: SL has been around for over three years. In that time a fair amount of minor vandalism has occurred, but the strength of the community keeps things running rather smoothly indeed. Many wikis have been around for much longer than that, even; and the oldest ones are probably the best place to look for discussion on this sort of topic. Therefore I refer you to
I'm impressed with this living library!!! good idea fellas, I'd like to see more of this dynamic web stuff on the internet.... ahh what a Weird Wired World - funkyBside
Q: How to write B.C. without the periods? 2003 October 24Charles If I can make a brief general comment, on the launch of Talk pages: we can have 'encyclopedia'-style content here, we can have 'magazine'-style content too (quite suitable for the pages of the BGJ - RIP the AGJ), without detriment to either. Or to any of the other kinds of content that gets posted here: reference material, joseki, mathematics, links and so on. I'd just like to sharpen the demarcation a little at this point, because I see that as the way forward. Bill: While I am in agreement with having Discussion or Talk pages, I am not so happy with the current implementation. For one thing, I think that Talk tends to trivialize the contents of the page. We already have Coffee Machine and Library Lobby for talk. For another thing, it seems kookie to me to have Agehama Talk and Omoshiroi Talk pages without Agehama? and Omoshiroi? pages. In particular as regards omoshiroi?, it is not clear whether that should be an alias for Interesting or not. We need some feedback from Sebastian or others to determine that. Some editing will need to be done, and having a separate Omoshiroi Talk page will complicate the editing. This also ties into the question of whether a discussion is about linguistics or go. The answer is not so pat. A good deal of learning go has to do with learning the vocabulary. Charles Well, I don't see why Talk about something needn't have the same status as Discussion. I'm aware that the demarcation I'm suggesting isn't water-tight, but it is surely better to shuffle material about a trio of pages X, XDiscussion and XTalk than to scrabble around in different parts of the site. Can we see how this beds down, before conclusions are drawn on the kookiness? The reaction that the vocab and learning go are close together is what I expect from the Japanese-speakers here. But in a sense they are excluded from the normal experience, which must go more along the lines of 'how much of this stuff do I need to know, right now?'. Bill: The point about terms is not the words per se but the concepts. I think that it is important to learn about leaning attacks, but when I talk about motare on SL, I am almost certainly talking about go, not language. On other, not so straightforward terms, questions of translation (language) may blend with questions of concept (go). If I wrote about go and later found that what I had written has been moved to another page and labeled as being about language, I might feel that my writing has been misrepresented. It is one thing to express a differing viewpoint on certain material, another thing to impose that viewpoint. I think that a wait and see attitude is fine. Why don't we wait and see if the people engaged in such discussions create Talk pages for them themselves? If it is a useful structure, people will use it of their own accord, won't they? 2003 October 22Charles A rec.games.go posting has just appeared, suggesting that the content of the web site at
consisting of classical life-and-death problems, be somehow transferred to SL, before that page goes offline shortly. I have no reason to doubt that the posting was from the site's owner (though there is every reason to take some care over this point). I think the copyright situation, for what is a superficially attractive offer, is treacherous. For example, the Igo Hatsuyoron problems there are (said to be) from the Yutopian edition: which because of the editing and removal of some deliberate 'false trails' in the original is quite probably not public domain. I was never very happy with the Kanazawa problem series posted here, despite the strong defence made of the use made of the underlying classical collection. Anyone wishing to take up on this offer to copy material across to SL ought, in my view, to do some serious homework before posting it here. 2003 Oct 9SnotNose: Am I the only one who finds it extremely hard to follow a game with diagrams with numbered stones without the use of some medium by which I can play the moves one at a time? When I read a game commentary at home I always play it out on a board. I also review games (with and without commentary) by SGF on my computer, where I can see stones placed one at a time. But I almost never get very far through commented games on SL because I can't handle a board full of stones with more than 3 new moves (numbered). I just lose patience. The reason is that I need to see the new move in the context of the whole board to begin to understand it. But, with all those other numbered subsequent moves sitting there, it is hard for me to see the board clearly. This is interesting because I have no trouble mentally adding stones to a board--like when reading out sequences--but I can't seem to mentally subtract them--as with those subsequent numbered moves. Is this a problem for anyone else? Would it make more sense to think about an enhancement to SL to include a game viewer so commented games can be viewed one move at a time (with appropriate comments appearing at the right time in some other area of the viewer)? Just a thought. Charles Gobase does this very well. I feel there is an argument for keeping SL to a different approach: namely not to encourage the posting of diagrams with long sequences. (There a regular requests for longer runs of numbers; I have had regular comments from kyu players which are negative about diagrams with too many numbered stones.) I realise that there isn't currently a site to which one can contribute commented SGF which are then editable by anyone. 2003 Oct 8wms: I'd like to see, in addition to the overall "most popular" list, per page hit counts in the "page info & history" link. Why? Because I'd be interested to see if anybody reads the pages that I update. In other words, is it worth my time to keep going or not. Having a "most peopular in the month so far" would be fun too, that way pages could compete for top notice without having to overcome years of lead time by the older pages! Hu: If hit counts are introduced, then some accounting should be made for viewing of diffs, for example through Recent Changes. That is the way I most often read additions to SL (especially the KGS Wish List page), and I am sure that a lot of traffic goes through diffs reported in Recent Changes and its sister pages. Arno: I have been thinking about having a monthly MostPopular list as well. Makes more sense. About the diff count: we had some 280000 page hits in September and only 20000 diffs. So even if the diffs are omitted it would not skew the counter too badly. Reading diffs is mostly done by junkies. 2003 Sept 22
AvatarDJFlux: Ever since the very first time I came to SL I've always thought that the name of our game is not prominent enough in the Front Page. Adding the picture was a step forward but not enough, IMVVHO.
Go
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Box formation |
In BQM 102, I wrote that a similar kind of framework as a "box formation". But on closer inspection of the box formation page itself, the "box formation" is defined as occupying four star points all in one quadrant.
Bill: I call it a box, too. I think that any rectangular or almost rectangular enclosure can be called a box or box formation.
unkx80: I have moved the current contents of box formation to four star points box formation.
mgoetze: I think the material currently at New Fuseki Era ought to be what you get when you look for Shin Fuseki, and that the first of John's posts ought to be on another page linked to from there. Is there any good reason to keep the present arrangement?
Also, is it just me or has only a third of the work been done at Taisha Five Way Junction?
Charles It seems to me that BQM105 is getting into a tangled if interesting state. I wouldn't want our poster Sazn from Korea to feel any less than very welcome here. I would also like to see something more like a joseki page edited out of this.
Fhayashi Anyone know of any English commentary on the games of Rin Kaiho? There seems to be nothing in English written about him or by him.
Bill: He is the author of Golden Opportunities. :-)
Charles Now that the technology to make pages like 3-4 point enclosures is available, I'm seeing more of them. Can I comment, though, that I don't like what was done just now to the 3-4 point page? There was a list of links to pages dealing with individual enclosures such as the 3453 enclosure. It has been replaced by just one link to 3-4 point enclosures. The 3-4 point page is a beginner page. I have never met any beginner who could handle the 'raw data' of all the kinds of enclosure listed, without comment. Enthusiasm for linking to all the information on a topic that we have on SL seems here to be running ahead of sensible pedagogy. These big link-from diagrams are good for reference material, but far too dense otherwise.
Blake: Actually, I'm not sure that the individual links to different enclosure pages were any more transparent to a beginner. I certainly find a diagram more intuitive than the 3-4 6-3 type of notation. Though if you think it's better, feel free to restore the links :)
Charles One point is that the single-diagram approach lumps together very unusual techniques and the most common: it's not selective.
Blake: I suppose that's a good point. A beginner (not that I'm a strong player, mind you) wouldn't be able to distinguish between the 'secure and standard' and the 'really bizarre.' I will restore the links.
Bill: Having seen this exchange, I took a look at the page and I am confused. There are links to specific enclosures there, but they are the weird ones. Maybe Blake hasn't restored the previous links yet?
Charles Would anyway be better in the small low enclosure style on that page. The general point would be to do with correlating difficulty levels, styles of indexing, and access to 'reference areas'. What happens for joseki here seems a reasonable model.
Bill: Well, if we are taking the idea seriously that the 3-4 point page is a beginner page, rather than a reference page (We still haven't revised our difficulty indicators), what the hell are links to the 3-4 7-3 enclosure and 3-4 3-7 enclosure pages doing there? (Among others.) They are certainly not common, as is claimed.
It's one thing to encourage beginners not to be too bookish, but to use and develop their own judgement, quite another to suggest plays to them that they will find difficult to handle.
Charles Yes, those links don't belong there.
mAsterdam: As Bill said: "We still haven't revised our difficulty indicators". The discussion seems to have stopped a few weeks ago. What is needed to get this ball rolling? (Dutch saying, don't know if it means the same in English).
Blake: Those are the links which were there before, and I actually made them more legible; originally they were in the notation like '[3437 Enclosure,' without separation of any sort.
Also of note: small stone (,
,
,...) notation doesn't work in diagram titles. See J groups. Can this be fixed simply, or is it a problem inherent in the diagram-rendering routine?
mgoetze: Well, while I can understand Charles' criticism of uncommented information on a page marked beginner, I found the way it was left to be unpleasing; enclosures were mentioned twice one the 3-4 Point page and you still had to jump around to get to the actualy information; too much redundancy for my taste. I have added the links to the main diagram about enclosures on the 3-4 Point page with additional comments about what is usual and what isn't, and hope this will be acceptable.
And while we're on the topic... I think many intermediate-level players use SL as a reference, and if they want information on the 3-4 Point, they're going to look on that page, regardless of whether or not it's marked beginner...
Velobici: Lack of dates in reporting events. An example of this can be seen in the first comment on the KoreanDominanceDiscussion page. The first comment is that Japan has recently won a tournament. When? When the entry was first added, the question answered itself. Now that some time has passed, its not clear whether this happened this year, last year or earlier. Furthermore, we dont know which tournament. Please add basic information. Who? What? When? Where? and How? when at all possible.
MarkD: Very good point Velobici. Same thing is true for expressions like "last July", "last month" etc.
MarkD: I am not sure if this topic has been raised before, but I've seen many japanese words with an "s" at the end for plural form. (example "4-5 point Josekis"). Because there is no plural form for Japanese nouns (one Joseki, two Joseki,....) this looks a little strange.
Any suggestions for future edits?
mAsterdam: Fuseki appears to suffer from similar treatment. Any more victims?
Andrew Grant: I'd prefer to spell these words without the "s", but I've seen Japanese terms pluralised with an "s" many times in a wide variety of go books, not just on SL. There doesn't seem to be any accepted convention on this, unless we wish to establish one here.
mgoetze: I'm rather new here (in fact I'm not even sure this is the right place to ask this...) so I thought I'd solicit some feedback before jumping in and changing anything. But doesn't it seem that the Jubango page is rather biased towards Go Seigen? I mean, I love Wu as much as the next guy, but I would be more interested in finding some information of a broader scope on the Jubango page than the match record of one player, which I can also get by following the link to his page. And aren't there any other players who had several Jubangos? If so, how about posting their records on the pages of those players?
Stefan: Hi Michael, and welcome to SL. Since I wrote the first versions of Jubango, I feel I can answer this question. Your criticism is justified: when I started the page it was not 'rather', but _entirely_ biased towards Wu. The reason is simple: that was the only Jubango-related information I knew of. Usually other people here quickly add whatever they know or research when you post incomplete stuff here. Sometimes it takes a bit longer though... Anyway, I encourage you to go ahead and edit the page, and make it a better one.
mgoetze: Well, a full-text search for jubango does reveal a few specific matches not involving Wu. But I'm afraid I would not have anything else to add in terms of content; I would only change the form. So I think I'll wait a bit and see if anyone else does a better job of it than I possibly could. (Hint, hint!)
mgoetze: Great job, AvatarDJFlux! I wonder if someone could provide similar short descriptions of some of Go Seigen's Jubangos? Then maybe someone else could contribute info on another modern Jubango, and afterwards the page would be ripe for a Wiki Master Edit.
Dieter: I just got over with my own old habit of making pages called old... after a WikiMasterEdit. However, I'd suggest that in the WME statement we mention the number of the version preceding the WME.
mAsterdam: The list on please review me only seems to grow. Maybe the pages on the list could be marked as "to be reviewed" in a more visible way (uneasy line color / warning sign - whatever). This way there would be (I hope) an incentive to get those pages off of the list. An easy way for the senior authors to let the less experienced deshi know that their work is 'good enough' to not urgently need a review anymore would help too, IMHO. (For instance: I would like to remove Priority from the list, but I simply don't know wether it is good enough to be removed from the list).
Deebster: A petty, petty thing, but easy: "This page does not yet exist" pages shouldn't say "x last edited by on January 1, 1970 - 01:00"
This is probably why I never finish anything, too obsessed by trivialities like that one...
Andrew Walkingshaw: This is a Unixism - that's the first day of the Epoch (Unices count time as the number of microseconds from 00:00UTC, 1/1/1970. Thus, any uncreated file has that creation time, in some sense...
Deebster: Yes, I know it's the Epoch (i.e. date('r', 0); in php), I was just quibbling about the fact that the 'last edited' message shouldn't be on something that's never been created, therefore never edited. As I said, very unimportant.
mAsterdam: Indeed. So we'll get at least 20 edits about it.
Frs: I suggest to create a page like How to play / record (experimental) games played at SL.
The seed for it is in the first section of 13 x 9 Game 01.
Moved to Page difficulty discussion -- mAsterdam
Charles A thought as I look back through edits of method of playing inside systematically. I adopt in writing here the convention standard in English prose, of writing words rather than numerals for numbers up to ten (inclusive). This would be typically be required by copy editors.
I believe this makes for readability. We have no need for move numbers in the text since we can do and
. We sometimes need numbers other than integers, and they of course should be written numerically. I feel happier writing 'five' rather than '5' when I can; and would ask others at least to respect this in what I write.
By the way, the whole 'liberty' issue was first aired there, as far as I can see; and it really was an imposition on my page marked Beginner. I'm not sure we are done with the issue, but can I flag here that this was never to my taste? A clean-up is urgently required. If we can ring-fence the ambiguity point, to the extent that (a) it is not mentioned on Beginner/Introductory pages and (b) [liberty] on such pages is really [liberty|liberty - introductory], then I think we might be able to make some progress.
Bill: I am happy not to talk about the number of liberties in introductory pages. I am not happy to give a false impression to beginners when you count above atari plus one. I think that the problem can be addressed without going into the difficulties by linking. That is, any page that talks to beginners about counting liberties need not present anything complicated, but should let them know that there is more to it and link to the Liberty page. When they are ready they can forge ahead. I think that this is a good approach in general when simplifying things for beginners. Don't confuse them, but let them know that there is more, and give them a link or links to the appropriate page or pages. This is a good way to use hypertext, I think. :-)
Charles Bill, we certainly know your views; and we know that they are strongly held. What I don't know is if they are shared by others here. Perhaps they are. But I really don't see, in the many postings here, anyone else who firmly believes that a true beginner - a genuine novice - really needs an ambiguous notion of liberty. We do know that Richard Hunter, writing a book-length treatment, makes an explicit switch of meaning; as is possible in a book.
I really feel we may have to get to votes on this. It would be a shame if Bill felt that this was in any way a reflection on the value others place on his prolific contributions here.
Bill: Charles, I do not believe that a true beginner - a genuine novice - really needs an ambiguous notion of liberty. I am sorry if I gave that impression. And I do not think that I am saying that by advising a link to the liberty page if you really get into the question of how many moves it takes to capture a stone or chain. That way you avoid confusion.
You want a vote for making things simple for complete novices? You have mine. You want a vote for not giving the impression when doing so that that is all there is to it? I vote yea to that as well. You want a vote for not linking to appropriate reference pages? I vote nay to that.
Charles Well, I'm going to take it upon myself to try to resolve this discussion. There are 13 Beginner pages now linking to liberty. I'm going to make a liberty - introductory page as a kind of preface to liberty, make it clear there that it's only the beginning of the story on filling liberties to capture, and divert all those links there. I shall make it 'work in progress' on that page for the moment. (Later - this has all been carried out, though the liberty - introductory page is still a draft. It occurs to me that the word 'tutorial' should be used more often on SL.)
Bill: Cher Charles, I took a quick look at Liberty - introductory, and it looks very nice so far. Thanks. :-)
Moved to Page difficulty discussion -- mAsterdam
Charles It occurs to me that the development of SL, and a much-needed 'page churn' bringing older pages back to current attention, is inevitably raising the question of authority. This is obvious in the cases where material is here because it has been written about in books by Ishida, Kageyama, even Hunter. It also comes in to all discussions based on Japanese usage. It is quite unavoidable when we talk about joseki, because the whole point there is that standard sequences have their status because they are used by strong players and then accepted on a communal basis.
My own 'solutions' here:
From a wiki standpoint I don't think that authority as such exists. It's more like the old scholastic habit of glossing everything, to the point where the glosses overtake the initial material. Which is not so bad for SL: the older books in English do date back several decades.
Bill: Great pic on Front Page! :-)
Deebster: Agreed. In WikiNews, Arno says we have Juha Nieminen to thank. There's some more of his stuff at http://www.students.tut.fi/~warp/pics/ (I feel no guilt at the extra bandwidth I'm causing as I don't think it's paid for by him :) )
Charles Well, the miai values list is well launched, with 50 different positions there now. Obviously it will shortly need subdividing. Clearly, too, this isn't an ideal reference for learning the endgame basics. But it seems to work quite well, for the smaller endgame plays: as well as discursive treatments, I think.
HolIgor: I think that the most useful application of the list in the reduction of a little bit complex position to the position with known move value. But in order to do this efficiently one needs to index the positions somehow. I propose to reference the diagram by the move value and an index of a diagram for that value of the move.
Then the explanation would become like this.
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Take away point and reduces to 0.75(Diag 1) position |
See corridor.
The rule would be to add new positions with the same value at the end.
Charles It was certainly my hope that such a list would clarify how to compute miai values - and so give an operational definition of what they are. The question HolIgor raises is the natural next step. It's really a choice of method: do we assume that in a well-developed list the smaller plays on which calculations depend have already been done? That's a kind of 'dynamic programming' approach and justification. Or on the other hand should there be some kind of pointers showing the way?
By the way, I think it is inevitable that some unreliable values will be posted; but that shouldn't be too much of a problem in the longer term. For someone reasonably expert, checking the value takes about the same length of time as creating the diagrams.
Charles Matthews Thinking about the Endgame Reckoner discussion, I wondered where we were on reference material on SL.
There are these categories:
On the last of these, one can envisage, one day, a list of standard endgame positions, arranged by miai value. Points about that, in the light of what Bill Spight has been posting.
Therefore one could expect this project to end up spread over many pages of type MiaiValueStrictlyBetweenThreeAndFour. That is, it would be for the expert. It would not do the job the Endgame Reckoner seeks to do. It would probably not deal comprehensively with endgame mistakes, either. The tesuji would simply be shown as correct play, rather than flagged as such. The value to amateur dan players in general would be in fractions of a stone.
That is, it would have many of the drawbacks of a joseki dictionary. The fact is that (as far I know) a large-scale list of this kind isn't available, so this is one area where collaborative work by amateurs could move things on.
I feel much more committed to the joseki project right now. Considering how much detail the monkey jump reveals on close analysis, this is probably a three-year effort for the dedicated. Not to be defeatist, though: this area probably obeys some version of what I call one-ten-hundred in study, even if the 80 for 20 solution isn't a great one.
[1] As you mention the monkey jump, I always have to read out the correct response from scratch, and I don't feel bad about that.
Deebster: I was thinking about date formats. America and Europe use different date notation, i.e. America uses mm-dd-yy, whereas Europe uses dd-mm-yy. When I see 08.11.03, I have no idea if the date is the 8th of November or the 11th of August. I generally have to figure out who wrote it, and where they're from before I can decode it.
Could we decide on a standard? I don't think either side is willing to change, so maybe something like 21.Dec.03 could be our standard?
dnerra: I think if you use the standard notations, there is no ambiguity. American notation is mm-dd-yy, Europe notation dd.mm.yy., and British notation dd/mm/yy. Am I wrong?
Velobici: I have often had the same problem. The European way makes sense in that the duration of the time period continuously increases (day to month to year). Unfortunately, when dates are sorted the results are nonsense (01012003, 01023002, 02012003). We can address both issues by using yyyymmdd or yyyy-mm-dd (e.g. 20030102 or 2003-01-02). The time period is continuously decreasing and the sorting works as expected.
dnerra: Hey, we are not talking about file names! IMHO, 010305 is unreadable no matter what convention it is intended to use.
Velobici: oh no, not two-digit years again...I just got through dealing with that a couple years ago. 2001-03-05 is so much better than 010305.
Deebster: Well for something that a computer might sort, the big-endian yyyy-mm-dd format is obviously best. However, I'm thinking of dates mentioned in the text, and it seems that we should be thinking of how humans can most easily and unambigously read it.
I think trusting that people will use whichever of the -./ separators is correct is probably a little hopeful.
unkx80: I usually prefer to write dates as any permutation of "2003 May 22", spelling out the month. But if written with all digits, I tend to use the yyyy-mm-dd notation, because of the sorting reasons already discussed above.
DJ: The international standard format for dates is yyyy(hyphen)mm(hyphen)dd, therefore today is 2003-05-22.
This was set by ISO (International Standardisation Organisation) and adopted by CEN (Comit? Europ?en de Normalisation) and all national standardisation bodies (UNI, DIN, BSI, AFNOR, ANSI, etc.)
Charles .. and by CRM.
Benjamin Geiger: But, do we really want 2003-05-22T12:58:10.3372-0400 ? (Yes, it's a valid ISO 8601 time stamp.)
Dieter: ... or need it, for that matter. Make yourself clear when a date could be ambiguous and the ambiguity would be bothersome.
Benjamin Geiger: Could we add something like this to Wiki Etiquette or SL Conventions?
Frs: I think, adding pages like Help?, Support?, FAQ? would make it easier to find help topics with SL. And I miss a help link in the navigation menue on the left.
Arno: Lately, I have been thinking about the wiki syntax. Two things that come to mind is, having "![" instead of "[[" to escape "[", as the "!" is used for all other escapes as well. And using ">" to indent blocks instead of (mis)using definition lists ";:".
Searching around on SL I see that many people would like to see the camelcase syntax go away - links could only be done with square brackets - I'm not sure this is a good idea - I like the name RecentChanges. And headings <h1-3> could use another syntax as the "!!!" is not really nice to look at. An idea is e.g. "== heading h3 ==", "=== heading h2 ===", "==== heading h1 ====" (on a single line).
Also there are alternatives to the current list syntax which would allow paragraphs in lists etc. However, that would induce a greater shift and would require relearning some wiki techniques - although nice I think it may be to disruptive. For an example see http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/NewBlockMarkup
Another idea I had, was enabling short notes for path pages. This could be done with definition lists. I.e. on the path main page (e.g. HikaruHistory) you'd have "; [>Meijin] : Sai is said to be of Meijin strength." or some such. I.e. the notes would put the current page in context of the path. That way you could add a short note, how the current page "fits" into the path.
Also, the idea of allowing private sub-pages crossed my mind (e.g. for having your private "scrap book" where you can selectively make those pages public or not). However, I'm not sure if this would lead to too much a fragmentation of the "wiki space" (or whatever its name is :o)
Charles Arno, I'm a big fan of paths, and would be very interested in any enrichment possible of their syntax. For example standard footers, or thumbnails of a diagram, to be included in all pages of certain paths.
Arno: footer would be header as well (because the path navigation is shown at the top and the bottom of a page). Could you tell me an example for the thumbnail idea?
Charles For example, all the pages on the tsuke-nobi joseki path to carry the same starting position (joseki after first five stones). I don't know where: perhaps in the left side bar, perhaps where the Stones character is now.
Dieter: Another path fan here. If a page belongs to one path only I would like to have the previous/next feature included not only if you arrive on that page by the path itself.
David: I like the proposed "![" syntax. It's more consistent and intuitive. The ">" indenting would be useful, especially if it could work at different levels: "> > ". (I think whitespace should be allowed and ignored here; "> > Text" looks nicer than ">>Text". This would make it impossible to indent preformatted text, but you can do that just by adding spaces anyway.) Personally, I don't like "camel case" links, but there's no reason not to allow them. I prefer the current "! Heading" to "== Heading ==". I am slighly against the block markup because of the disruption you mentioned. My feelings are neutral about changes to paths and the creation of private pages.
While we're talking about markup, how about having the wiki eat the first character of each line of preformatted text, so that the text itself is aligned with the rest of the page?
Tristan: Is there any way to save material here while you're writing it, but in such a way that it is protected against editing by anybody else? I was half-way through writing a big chunk, saved it because I don't trust my machine not to crash, and found that it had been edited even while I was working on the next part, which resulted in my over-riding the other editor's work when I saved the new version of my work. Or perhaps is the only way to stop others editing works in progress is to head them up with the request "Please do not edit yet until this notice disappears"? I have nothing against people editing my work, but I want to save them the trouble of editing something that is about to change radically, anyway.
should do fine, really.
Charles Well, that was probably me - if it's any consolation you did the same to me in reverse. Yes, post a 'work in progress note' by all means. If you get the SL notice informing you of someone else's edit, when you try to save, you can copy all that's in the window and re-use it. This happens to me all the time, by the way. In fact ten seconds ago!.
Dieter: I think I am a frequent frustrater of Charles' edits. Here's a vicious trick: when you feel someone else will soon mess with the page you're editing, save it quickly and then move on. He will lose valuable time doing what Charles writes hereabove.
Tristan: Thanks for the above advice. I'm still quite innocent in the ways of wiki. I would like to point out that I've no interest in perpetrating "vicious tricks", however! (LOL) I only wanted to save people the effort of doing work that I would delete in any case. I'm nice, like that, you see.
Arno: if this is getting bothersome I could change SL's behaviour: e.g. locking pages for ~30minutes when one presses edit. I did not implement it, because I thought that simultanious edits don't occur too often. Another idea (instead of locking) is to show a red warning when someone has pressed the EditPage link during the past 15 minutes and has not yet saved the page.
Tristan: The red warning idea sounds like a much better idea to me than locking the page. I often tidy up my pages very quickly after saving them the first time, so being locked out for 30 minutes would be very frustrating.
mAsterdam: Loss though concurrent update also happened at elementary moves, see JasonD. As the deshi population grows it will happen more often. To me locking for 30 minutes seems a little drastic for now. Furthermore (maybe I should do this another way) I press 'edit' in a second browser-window to get to the source of a page without intending to edit it, and usually without pressing cancel immediately. Maybe if everybody knows the locking time (say 5 minutes) it 'll work, even better if 'preview' re-initializes the timer. The red warning has my sympathy. I think it also would help to delay the appearance in recent changes for say 30 minutes if that is feasible. Just my 2 Eurocents.
NN?: How about a three-way merge like version control systems such as cvs use? This would prevent data loss at the price of requiring manual editing in case of conflicts.
Charles It is hard to see how to prevent 'competitive editing', without also removing the valuable possibility of real-time dialogue.
BobMcGuigan: Relative newcomer though I am I, too, have experienced a few editting clashes. It's really not much of a bother, but something like the red flag idea would be preferable to the lock-out, I think.
unkx80: I seldom encounter the competitive editing of a page (probably because I live in a different time zone from most of you), but I guess flagging a page as "under construction" will do. Locking don't seem a good idea for me, it is simply frustrating.
Arno: I have implemented the warning. Feedback? -> GuineaPigsFeedback.
unkx80: Very nice feature, thanks! =)
10 May 2003
Fhayashi: I love what AndreEngels is doing regarding the joseki listings. Whenever we all decide what the rational naming scheme for each variant is, we can go back and fix things, but looks like Andre is making the information accessible. I've already started to contribute my small bit...
Charles Yes, nice one, Andre.
6 May 2003
Fhayashi: Ericosman, what's up with the pages like "me" and "unfinished discussion"? Each page should at least attempt to make sense regardless of context. It's hard to imagine that anyone would look up useful go-related information about "me" or "unfinished discussion", and as it is now, someone has to take time to manually delete pages that don't make sense. You have to realize that SL is a community resource for information about the game go. There are plenty of free webspace available (geocities/yahoo hosting my own) if you feel the need to stake out your own share of cyberspace.
Eric Osman: I'll remove the "me" page. But please leave "unfinished discussion" as it's just that, one in which I'm composing the page. Thanks.
Morten - Eric, I look forward the form and content which "Unfinished Discussion" will take :-) However, as mentioned above, it might be useful if, next page you want to leave 'unfinished' you give a descriptive name which the page can keep afterwards as well. (e.g. MethodOfMultiples).
Morten- Joseki nomenclature discussion moved to OpeningSystematicClassification.
Eric Osman: 17:13 EDT According to Deleting Pages, pages can't really be deleted on this wiki. So in an attempt to delete the "me" page, please refrain from actually putting in any actual links to it. I'll also edit the orphaned "me" page to remove its content and replace it with one sentence saying "this page has been removed".
By the way, I'm surprised you even found the "unfinished discussion" page at all. I attempted to make that page be unreferenced until I completed it. Maybe the revision history info for my homepage is the only thing pointing at it ?
This brings up an interesting topic: Should orphaned pages be deleted, or should they be allowed as a way for users to temporarily keep pages private while they are still "works in progress" ?
Morten Some of the users can delete pages - you just need to leave a note here or elsewhere that you wish to see them deleted and it will be done (I removed Me) - You will need to do the same to have a page renamed. As for 'unfinished' being seen - most of the creatures who lurk here have a beady eye on the RecentChanges which shows pages being edited - and are usually quick to respond Big brother is watching you :-)
Charles WikiOrphans is cleaned up regularly. Arno seems to enjoy the effort to break the round number barriers like 6000 in the reverse direction from most of us: from above.
5 May 2003
Eric Osman at Sand Box, here edited slightly:
Hi, ericosman@rcn.com here. I recently started composing
a technical wiki page.
However, I didn't finish it, and when I came back the next day to work on it some more, to my dismay , others had already edited it.
Is there a way to create a wiki page such that it remains private, or at least un-editable, until we're finished creating it ?
Thanks. Please send email to me . /Eric
David: Sure, do it the wiki way: Leave a polite note on the page explaining your intentions and asking that others not edit it until you're done. If you don't want people to even see the page until you're finished, you can edit it as a file on your computer and post it when it's done.
> If you don't want people to even see the page until > you're finished, you can edit it as a file on your > computer and post it when it's done.
Well, I'd be happy to do that if there were a way to have the wiki formatter on my computer so that I could occasionally press "save" in order to see what the page looks like so far, just as I can here. Is that possible ?
David: If you just want to see what a page will look like, use the "Preview" button when editing. You can edit and preview a page without saving it. Copy the text in the edit box to a file and paste it back when you have your next editing session.
Are you sure that you want to do this though? Your Get Strong at Joseki problem discussion page has attracted thoughtful comments by strong players. In general, it's good to make your pages available so others can benefit from and contribute to them.
Eric Osman at Me?, here edited slightly:
I want the sentence back there on the Sand Box, the one that says
"send email to me"
to have a link on the me so that when you click on it, it starts an
email to me. But I don't know how to do that !
David: Do it like this: [me|mailto:ericosman@rcn.com]. There's more helpful formatting information at Text Formatting Rules.
11 April 2003
About how pages should look like. Take JosekiAsASourceOfBadHabits. I had a clear idea of what I wanted this page to be when I created it. It is rather of article bred, but of course I welcome other thoughts and examples. Now, with that clear structure present (1 up to 5) should it rather be a starting point with links to five (as of now) pages, each describing a specific situation, or does the grouping benefit the general idea. Myself I prefer many pages, many links and paths for a wiki, over few pages with big overlapping content. yes I have been an OO programmer. On this occasion, as the author of an article, I hesitate. --Dieter
I like pages being subdivided. I enjoy pages more when I can take in the content without scrolling. Of course more pages causes problems, but they are the same type as those caused by the rapid growth of SL. --Charles
On a different issue, a point was raised at Don't provoke damaging plays on the second line about labelling a given mistake as 'typical for 10 kyu' or anything similar. Is this an acceptable, positive or negative thing to do? Quite a number of years ago David Erbach expressed an interest in this kind of information: i.e. correlating levels of play with typical mistakes. When do players really start to see snapbacks, for example? I don't want to express my thoughts on this if it is considered derogatory. But teachers of the game might welcome information of this kind, if it was collected more systematically. -- Charles
dieter: Thanks for the explanation, I now understand better the reason for such a statement. I still think the times an 8 kyu receives it as a derogatory one outnumber the occasions that a teacher might take advantage of such information, all the more because we can only offer our best guesses.
25 March 2003
Charles Matthews Are people happy with basic rules of go (now renamed as rules of go - introductory), in its current form? Is it really possible, as is suggested at beginner study section, to read and understand it in 15 minutes, with no previous knowledge of the game?
Bill: Pas moi.
Morten:I actually think that versions up to v. 24 were better than the current one. E.g. V24 is clearer, shorter and easier to grasp.
Charles I asked because I too had a feeling that this page had gone the wrong way. Well, if it changes back we'll have to pacify Robert J. - but it is something to consider doing now.
Robert Pauli: I'm not happy with it. It pretends to be basic, but it gives you the area-scoring version - without even warning you. If scoring differs among rule sets, then - sorry - it's no basic part of the game.
Dieter: I like it much better than V24. I do not agree that the latter is clearer. The only things I'd change about it is the phrasing of the purpose of the game ("Principle of Game Object" sounds like hox pox hoculum pox to me) and an inclusion of the fact that different ways of scoring exist, much like "suicide" is said to be allowed. Given the fact that most Western players in fact use territory scoring and do not allow suicide, I'd take those into the basic rules, even though I favour the other options myself.
15 March 2003
Fhayashi: Any thoughts about putting together a JosekiLibrary in SL?
Charles Matthews Many. It's a path of least resistance, really. It has been discussed inconclusively before, for example at Whither Joseki. My current thoughts:
But what did you have in mind?
Fhayashi: There are plenty of joseki libraries on the web, but the commentaries on each variation tend to be limited. All the books say "Study joseki, don't memorize them", so I thought a library on SL would facilitate discussion on them - i.e. why each move is where it is, what to do when your opponent varies from joseki, etc.
Charles I think we do that here, too. There are joseki articles - now numerous; anyone can raise a query for discussion, naturally. So, are we talking about some new structure? A page per known variation probably comes to about 5000. It is hardly possible to anticipate all non-joseki moves, is it? There are questions of that type in the BQM series.
I think it would be a good idea gradually to organise by links all the joseki material on the site by variation - this could be done by the end of 2003. But if one tries to add the whole of joseki knowledge at once, what happens is that one adds a large number of 'stub' pages with no content above what would be in an uncommented SGF file. This isn't a great idea, and it isn't so interesting to do either. I'll admit that I have done something similar for the unusual enclosures, on about 1% of the scale.
Fhayashi: I think the organisation of the joseki information is what I'm interested in. Somewhere to start, like a path for joseki information on SL, to begin with.
Charles Pincer path, for example, gives quick access to around 20 joseki. There are half-a-dozen paths already devoted to particular joseki: some but not all of those are referenced by Guided Tours. From my point of view the joseki page itself is the first place to look, arranging joseki by indentation: probably that has gone nearly as far as it can. My own policy is breadth-first development of the joseki pages.
I can see that 'random access' is the final test: whether it is possible quickly to find a given joseki on the site (or detect its absence). The matter of page nomenclature and codes for joseki has been discussed, again inconclusively. What we have now is a system of verbose names for joseki, not entirely standardised and certainly not very memorable. But I believe it is improving over time.
10 March 2003
Newbie question: I notice that in the recent changes, my username is followed by a question mark. What does that mean? -- Tualha
Answer: If you click on the question mark you'll be proposed to create a home page. HolIgor
Charles Matthews If you click on the question mark, you can make yourself a home page. In general question marks follow undefined pages.
Ah, thank you. -- Tualha
2003-03-04:
DJ: Hey, AshleyF, what you've done is sure cute!
Let me use a newagey jargoon: Groovy! This place is really graawin'...
BTW: Have you got Italian origins? :-)
Arno: what do other's think? would you like small graphics to show the move numbers? I could add a little hack. Maybe something like [img:b7] or some such.
dnerra: Arno, I think that would be great! This would also save us the (future) debate about whether "Black 5" or "" is better style :-)
Seriously, I think it would make the text read nicer.
David: I think it looks nice, but I don't know if the
added complexity of a new text formatting rule is
worth it, especially if it isn't used consistently. It might be that the
ways people cite moves (like "Black 3" or "") are uniform enough that
GoWiki can search for them and replace them with images when a page is
edited, or even on the fly. Whether to show images or text could be
made a user preference.
AshleyF I have actually experimented with this also using the SLSnapshot. It worked out fairly well and could be tuned further. The more difficult ones are things like 'the marked stone' or even worse, ' and the marked point are miai'. Maybe a one-time conversion plus some macros like {
} which humans could enter?
On his home page, AshleyF hints that his experiment isn't complete. I think we should find out what other interesting things he's thinking about before making any changes.
AshleyF I'm basically just thinking of inline icons for relating the commentary to points and stones on the board. Ideally, it should be as complete as the diagramming feature itself; containing Black and White stones with numbers 1-10 and with square and circle marks. Also was thinking of having icons for marked and lettered empty points. That's about it.
Some other ideas I've had (but I think are over the top for SL) are further separating presentation from data in SGF. For example, 'macros' in comments to refer to points and stones on the board rather than having markup tags. Then the SGF viewer could decide how best to represent the correlation. I was further thinking of defining a bunch of common comment glyphs (gleaned from KJD and Teaching Ladder games). Things like 'a and b are miai' could become '{miai:Q12,R13}' and the SGF viewer could decide to present however it sees fit. Some may simply display as text (in the language of your choice). Others may use inline icons and display matching markup on the board. Others in the future may even do some bizarre stuff like a 'cartoon balloon' at the point on the board being discussed or a finger pointing at the board while the commentary is read aloud (yeah, I'm dreaming). Also, it could be translated to various languages or represented as a standard set of international 'glyphs' like Chess Informant does. Even within English you could turn on/off Japanese terms, for example, and choose whether to see things like 'semeai' or instead, 'capture race' in the commentary (I'm sure Charles would always choose the latter :-).
Anyway, inline icons would be cool.
Fhayashi: The game is from the book on Wings Go Club's website, right? I was thinking of reformatting that things, because it currently is a horrible 500-something pages long....
Hu: AshleyF's page may be "cute" but unless I am mistaken, the text seems taken wholesale without attribution and possibly without permission as a Google Search reveals:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Kawakami+of+baseball%22&meta=site%3Dsearch
2 february 2003
No pages StrategicGroup, Life, Death yet!!! --RobertJasiek
30 january 2003
Moved to Advertising On SL Discussion --Dieter
Discussions on the following topics have now a separate page:
August 25, 2001: I have done a WikiMasterEdit of this page. See old version (v71). Unsolved issues and recent postings remained here. Technical stuff moved back to GuineaPigsFeedback. Created some new discussion pages on a clearly defined topic. --DieterVerhofstadt
2002-11-02: The 2001 contents of this page (from version 193) have been transferred to Meta Discussion 2001 -- Hu
2003-01-30: The January 2002 through December 4, 2002 contents of this page have been transferred to Meta Discussion 2002 -- Hu