Part of the problem is that there are quite a few sites with community driven content, and contributors' time/content ends up divided between different sites. Someone might come up with, e.g., a good tsumego and share it on a problem site with intending on it being shared with the community. It might be copied to sensei's or other sites, but the person doing the copying doesn't know the problem as well, so they might miss some important lines, or it might be misclassified. The original author might make updates on the original site, but they don't get copied, etc.

I took a couple days to do a WME of one page that needed it badly (got ambitious enough to make a special photo for the page, learned all about the tesuji, found some representative games...), and I figured that I could do maybe a couple pages every month and maybe get one section of the site cleaned up nicely over time, but as happens with most of these sorts of things, I end up not having as much time for it as I imagined.

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KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

I wonder whether the people complaining about bad navigation do 1) know about and 2) actively use the board search. (http://senseis.xmp.net/?positionsearch=1) And fwiffo, are you aware of the fact that tsumego at SL are often/usually added without solution lines at all?

I can only speak for myself, but I know about position search. I'm more concerned about the case where you remember that there's some page about a topic, but you're not quite sure what the title is.

Perhaps this is more of a problem for people who have been looking at Sensei's for quite a long time, rather than ordinary users.

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Occupy Babel!

I've found SL very useful for certain tasks. It's a great source of information about Go books (both English-language and other languages), Go terms, and Go concepts. Many of the best explanations of Go concepts/terms I have seen are on SL. There are also some great pages on Go terms in other languages, etc., which tend to make Go in Japan, China, and Korea a little more accessible to English speakers.

I don't find it as useful for general studying, because it is not as well organized as books are. But I think it is invaluable as a reference and as a repository of Go knowledge.

I've always found the search function on SL to work quite well.

On WP, the more I know about a topic, the less helpful the topic templates seem. To beginners they would be downright misleading. I wasted a lot of time trying to clean up the "Enlightenment" template at one point - basically, every month a Peruvian would add a figure from the Peruvian Enlightenment, or a Hungarian would add a figure from the Hungarian Enlightenment, and then after a while someone would say "We can't have just one figure from the Swedish Enlightenment, let's add three or four more to round the list out," and over time it was becoming a list of (not very) famous people born between 1600 and 1900, rather than a list of the (primarily French) people associated with the 18th century Enlightenment.

My point is that if we say here "Templates and hyperlinks are great, let's add a ton more to SL to make it easier to find articles," we (= a group of people in which I was the median contributor) might just screw things up. Just a few months ago there was a dispute here about whether a corner shape Willemien had added to SL was useful or not. I know that learning the status of the groups currently in the "L-group" template helped me a lot, but I certainly don't think that I'm qualified to say which of those arise frequently and which arise rarely, or to make a template of tesuji, or joseki, or what have you.

Oh, but: if anyone wanted to start a list of SL pages whose contents are dan-approved but which are written in poor English, I would be happy to donate some time to editing them.

@Jts I think there's a distinction between templates as authoritative content, and templates as a navigational aid. Ideally they'd be both, but they'll help you navigate even if there are a few dead-ends.

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Occupy Babel!

Because you mentioned the corner shapes page.

I did make an Index page (Path) Common Corner Shapes with the shapes that strong players should know by heart.

I could agree to rename the Cornershapes page to something else. (WCCSP :Willemiens comprehensive corner shapes dictionary )

My objection was against the idea to just to remove the "non-common" shapes from this page and not not have anymore a page where all corner shapes were brought together.
what made it evn worse where statements like "There are 10.00 of these shapes" and handwaving without giving examples

Maybe I should put common between quotation marks because how often do you see the [sl=]Lgroup[/sl] in professional play?

Editing of pages is frought with riddles, I like to make comprehensive pages and to make pages understandable for beginners, even if that implies that for experienced persons the page then becomes crowded and contains superfluos information.

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Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

Just to repeat something I said earlier in this thread, the biggest problem is that Sensei's is not a wiki (at least the way Wikipedia is), it's a collection of comments in a chronological order. If the discussions took place on Talk pages, and the articles were edited like articles, and not forum threads, it might be more useful. Comprehensive pages are great, if they have a narrative, and not just a series of comments.

To be fair, I don't consider myself qualified to contribute much to Sensei's, but the structure will prevent me from ever doing so, as it's not conducive to serious explanations.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Yep i saw your comment and then i thought, but those pages should be marked with the Needs WME Template (just add {{Needs WME}} at the top of the page) but then i looked at that page and oh there are allready so many pages there

I am not a favourite for talk pages but would copy the discussion to a [/discussion ] subpage.
the advantage of a discussion subpage above the talk pages is that everybody can edit the subpage. (and copy good bits to the main page) and you can add questions in the discussion itself.

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Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

Further proof that Wikipedia destroyed any understanding of what a Wiki is meant to be. Wikipedia is sort of the big anti-wiki. People there are quite rigid in formalism, actively discourage contributions, even introduced a special new feature to automatise discouragement (at least in the german edition "sighted versions"), they cite 100 references per page, but still get everything wrong (at least in any contentious matters). For all mistakes of its own, I hope Sensei's Library will never be like that.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?SLIsNotWikipedia

When I read this post the first time I thought Kirk was describing L19x19 SL is a real wiki imo. The real articles are just that, articles written at some length and then added to or modified by subsequent contributions. Granted, good articles are spoiled by inappropriate questions or irrelevant contributions inserted into them but that doesn't change the wiki nature of SL. And yes, there are pages that are just a sequence of comments but those could well be a good article in process of creation.

SL is a repository of go knowledge and thinking which has its flaws but is more useful than any other single source on the web. Other sources, such as L19x19 are poorly organized for a role as a repository of systematic knowledge or thinking. Also, in L19x19 no one can edit anyone else's posts so L19x19 really is a collection of comments in chronological order. The comments are never consolidated into a unified article, as happens on SL as a result of a master edit. Discussions can be easier to do on L19x19 but collection of knowledge is easier on SL.

I wanted to revive this thread, because the discussion of where to post book reviews has bubbled over into a discussion of SL.

At one point in that discussion, John Fairbairn suggests that a new structure for SL should include less discussions because discussions are better organized here. This makes a huge amount of sense. Discussions that clog SL could be fruitful if carried on here, particularly if the collaboration between SL and L19 were improved.

One idea would be to install a sub-forum specifically for SL and to link to it prominently on SL.

The reason I suggest this (and others have as well) is that the L19 forums function better than the SL forums and may be better suited to unite and ignite the somewhat stagnant SL community. What do you think?

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Patience, grasshopper.

I would like to mention a page that I think we got close to right on SL, the 10,000 year ko page ( http://senseis.xmp.net/?TenThousandYearKo ).

Several people collaborated on a WME in October, 2005, which has held up pretty well. Structure is part of the reason. There are a number of subpages, which have made information available without cluttering the main page. Since the WME, a couple of subpages have been added. Recently new material has been added to the main page, and I hope that it will result in another subpage or two, or perhaps in another WME.

I think that there were three keys to making a good page: 1) collaboration, 2) attention to structure, and 3) knowledge. People who were interested in making a good page and who knew something about it got together, talked about it, ironed out their differences, and got it done. With the resulting clear exposition and clean structure in place, it has been relatively easy to add new material without messing things up.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I wonder whether it would make sense to put disclaimers at the end of SL pages along the lines of:

"This page discusses a [basic, intermediate, advanced] concept and is aimed at players from [lower rank bound] to [upper rank bound]. Please do not edit this page unless you consider your strength to be [upper rank bound +5] or stronger. If you are weaker than [upper rank bound +5] and believe you see a typo or style problem, post a comment on the discussion page."

This functionality already exists. You can set page difficulty for each page. (Introductory, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert) It is shown in the upper right.

(But opinions may differ, and setting page difficulties is one of those tasks nobody generally volunteers to. I.e. there is the feeling that some of the Beginner Exercises may be intermediate or even advanced, but re-evaluating the pages and re-setting difficulties is tedious.)

I don't see the point in even discouraging changes on typo, style or language (many contributors are not native speakers) problems. On pages I wrote I always prefer people changing whereever they believe it is necessary instead of adding overhead by asking "Your sentence is non-grammatical, may I change it.", please do change.

I brought it up because Bill had mentioned weaker players doing "grammar edits" on his pages that completely destroyed the meaning. Obviously if original editor would like a copy editor, that's fine with me. (As you know! )

Yes, I know. In any case a grammar edit that destroys the meaning is a minor annoyance at worst and easily undone after all. If we have a 1000 contributions a day, monitoring them will start looking like a task, nowadays it really isn't.

If enough people think it's worth having a forum here just for discussing Sensei's Library, I would be in favor of adding it.

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KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

This can definitely be true with poor editors, but if the editor is actually any good, this could actually reflect an ambiguity in the source context (that is, highlight a mistake that already existed). (Note, I'm not at all suggesting that Bill's experience was an example of the latter ).