Here is a list of reviews that have appeared on L19: viewtopic.php?p=45918#p45918

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Patience, grasshopper.

Ho hum. I'm the major guilty party that this discusses.

I tried hard to make the errata pages sub-pages from the main page about the book. I tried to make the errata link from the book page as small as possible. The book I first did this for was 'Making Good Shape', which I think is one of the best Go books in English. My copy was very well worn out before I replaced it with a copy of the 2nd edition, which is still in pretty good condition. To buy a 2nd copy of the same book is a comment on how much I liked the book. And yet your comment "a comma is missing between X and Y on page Z" is not just humour, but a pretty accurate description of some of the typographical errors. Well I have actually communicated with the author on this subject, and unfortunately the 2nd edition was greatly improved, but still had many of the same kind of jarring errors, mainly of the type where black and white are mixed up.

So why bother? Well lets examine the alternative. I could start a long correspondence with each publisher, where I send a list of the things I found and they take the time to send a polite but carefully not too engaging thank-you, with the addition that many have also been been found by themselves after printing, and by other readers kind enough to write in. Then on the next reading I find some more and write another letter to the publisher. At this point they start to wonder if there will ever be a way to phrase a letter to stop this annoying, but well-meaning individual, from bothering them.

So now lets think of what is particularly special about a wiki. Anyone can edit it. So anyone who wishes to can co-operate, and anyone who is not interested can just ignore it. So I thought it was quite suitable for listing errata, because I wouldn't have to do all the work. I would just add what I found, other people could add stuff they found and nobody repeats effort. The publisher just ignores it until he is thinking of doing a re-print and has a quick look then. I guess it takes less than a day for the publisher to incorporate the changes he wishes to, and just ignore the ones he disagrees with.

I included the small stuff as well as the large stuff because of a couple of problems:
1. Where is the border between large & small?
2. I would see a mistake and think 'Didn't I see this before?'.
If a publisher is re-printing, it is as easy to fix the small stuff as to fix the large stuff, all at the same time. Well as long as someone has pointed it out, because if it was so obvious, the publisher would never have allowed the mistake to appear in the first place.

I am not a strong writer or a strong player, so I find writing reviews hard, even though I also think I should try harder. You are right that there should be more reviews on SL.

So, I meant well, I tried to do it in a way that didn't dominate the book page, but it looks like I caused offence anyway. Sorry.

From my point of view, having written and published a dozen books, as well as a number of ebooks, I think you need to understand the publishing process. There are some mistakes which are very serious - in a go book, that'd be a diagram - that merit changing. Making this kind of change can cost money, depending on how the book is printed. (If it's offset, and the publisher has kept the plates for a reprint, it means redoing a plate; not a huge expense, but not just a couple of bucks.) If it's just changing a typo or a comma, it's less likely that a small publisher will go to the trouble.

On the other hand, in my experience, publishers are always interested in any reports of typos. (Some authors are less so, because it's a headache for them to then go through the process of getting the corrections to the publisher; again, the size of the publisher makes a big difference.)

But no matter what, the law of conservation of typographical errors applies: for every typo you correct in a new edition, one or more new typos appear. No book is perfect; I've never had a book where I haven't spotted a typo on the first page I've opened at random; not that there are typos on every page, but you just open to those pages, for some reason. The gods of typography want it that way.

Again, if it's not diagrams, or essential explanations (alive vs. dead; sente vs. gote), send the info to the publisher, but don't count on it being corrected in books by small presses.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

You made yourself pretty clear on that earlier, I well remember you explicitly stated you don't want to be quoted on SL anymore. Fair enough. Addressing SL as a single entity to be reformed or reform itself, however, shows a profound misunderstanding of what a wiki is meant to be, but alas, you do not want it to be a wiki anymore (only signed contributions, no discussion...)

This politicking between platforms (did mentioning rgg merit such ridicule) is particularly strange in case of book reviews that are in no way limited to a single platform and in a thread asking for cross-posting of own reviews.

This is the experience not just of book authors but also journalists, and may even be proof of aliens among us

When I had my first book published by Oxford University Press, I was wined and dined several times in the process (the world was a more civilised place then), and one story I heard more than once was about some anniversary (the 400th?) of the OUP. For this occasion the top brass decided they would reprint their first (?) book in a traditional manner but with the special provision that they would make absolutely sure that it had no typographical mistakes. It was checked umpteen times and finally someone decreed it was safe to go off to the press. But in the process, when the frame containing the colophon was handled, a letter at the end of the date fell off. As this was a Roman numeral, no-one noticed even when a trial impression of the form was made.

The book duly appeared in large numbers, and of course the error was then spotted instantly. Chagrin all round.

The moral of this story is that this one tiny and unimportant error is all that seems to be remembered now about that book. Few people know or care what the book was or who the author was or what the anniversary was, but many people know about the embarrassment.

This is part of the problem with focusing on small errors in go books. If your cardigan has a small hole in it, you inevitably poke your finger in it, make the hole bigger, and eventually make the cardigan unusable. You forget that the purpose of the cardigan was not to be a plaything but was to keep you warm, and it was probably doing a pretty serviceable job of that until you subverted the process with your fidgety digit.

I edit a number of articles on Wikipedia, and, while you or someone else has claimed that Wikipedia is not a "real" wiki, I find that the segregation of content and discussion makes a lot of sense. At a minimum, perhaps SL should have two types of pages: those that are articles, which are more like Wikipedia, and those that are free-for-alls, which is the way it is now.

Looking at Sensei's recently for something, I noted, in the few articles I looked at, an alarming number of statements that were either wrong or out of date. The risk of the SL approach is that everything accretes into a big lump and no one weeds out the stuff that is wrong or out of date. And the comments are linear, so they aren't organized in any appreciable manner, so you have to read a lot of dross to get through many of the pages.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Indeed, it's because they tried so hard to overcome the gods of typography, and flew too close to the sun.

One friend who is a novelist hates when readers send him e-mails with corrections of typos. However, in his last novel, I read it in galleys, and found an error - not typographical, but factual, regarding the possibility that a certain group played a concert at a certain venue in a given year. I pointed it out, and he agreed that it should be corrected, but was especially impressed that an "anorak" copy editor had also spotted the same mistake. Given that the copy editor was in the UK, and the group was an American group who was never very well known in the UK, and the concert in question was in the 1970s, it was indeed impressive that a copy editor who didn't know the group went to the trouble to fact-check that item.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Sensei's Library does try to separate content and discussion, that's what the "Discuss page" link at the top of every page is for. Additionally, there are many pages that have a /Discussion subpage, which is in the wiki style (often preferable when discussing diagrams).

There are two main reasons that many pages still have a lot of discussion in them. The first reason is lack of manpower. Inexperienced users ask questions in the middle of pages, and it is a lot of work to move those questions, including any relevant context and diagrams, to discussion pages. The second reason is that, unlike wikipedia, there often is no "definitive answer". No scholarly journals to quote. In many cases, having named contributions allows the reader to click on the name of the author and decide for themselves how much credibility they want to assign to various opinions. In some cases, this depends on the playing strength of the author, in others it depends on other expertise (for example, see Choshi)



If you see statements that are wrong or out of date, please edit! Even just slightly editing pages puts them on the RecentChanges list, and often attracts attention of other editors. I've seen it happen alot of time that a single edit suddenly results in a flood of edits by others and a much improved page.

SL would benefit if it had fixed articles as another type of pages. This would prevent expert contribution from being "improved" to become destroyed, weak contents. Of course, articles should still have discussion subpages so that the author can be motivated to correct and should have a page name that does not lock the topic for the public. E.g., PageName/UserName. Quite like PageName/Discussion.

This would totally destroy the wiki model, and is impossible to manage. You have to manage who are experts, in what field they are experts, and decide which pages can be edited by which experts. And what if the experts do not agree? Bureaucratic nightmare.

If you want static pages, make them sub-pages of your homepage. Those are generally considered off limits to editing by others (other than for questions or comments not altering the main text, which you are free to remove). That way you also automatically provide context on who the author is.

Do you have any examples of expert contribution being destroyed, BTW?

Let me bring up again my suggestion that a Wiki Master Edit, after a decent interval, like one week, not be locked, but made more difficult to edit. For instance, an edit would appear as a suggestion and not be implemented for a day or two. That would give knowledgeable users a chance to improve or delete the proposed edit.




Geez, over the years I have seen many examples where knowledgeable contributions were directly marred or destroyed by ignorant editing, or where context was changed so they became meaningless or misleading. For quite some time my main activity on SL has been to try to preserve the quality of content that I know something about. It requires eternal vigilance.

Let me mention two examples. In one a beginner engaged in massive edits, bringing up ideas that he thought were better, but always saying, "Correct me if I am wrong." The best thing to have done for the content would have been to revert to the previous pages, but that seldom happened. It was a nightmare while it lasted. In another one someone asked a question about something I happened to be expert in. It turned out that someone else had copied something that I had written and changed it to make it clearer, in his opinion. The trouble was that he did not understand it. Hence the other user's question. I corrected the material and gave a link to my original text (which I think should have been done, anyway). In response the copier accused me of not understanding Wiki!

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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.

Bill, exactly how many book reviews have been cut apart, master edited, huh? Oh yes, it was a thread about book reviews. Never mind.

That's exactly why I won't spend any time on SL. I do, as I said, edit some articles on Wikipedia, and they already require vigilance, but there are other editors. I don't want to get involved in SL, where it seems that the protection is less solid.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

This is just nonsense, IMO.

At Wikipedia, it completely depends on what page you are editing. Articles that are in the watchlist of active knowledgeable editors are generally reasonably safe. With other articles, you can do pretty much whatever you want (except straight vandalism or spam which gets picked up by bots). Unlike SL, there is no way to keep track of all changes at WP, there's just too many.

Seriously? On WP, you see each change, and you can undo them as you wish. I have my pages in an RSS feed, which, while it's not updated correctly, allows me to follow them regularly.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

On SL on the other hand: You can see each change, undo the last one, put pages in your watchlist, have the RecentChanges page color coded by whether they are on your watchlist, or whether you recently edited them, choose to see only changes to pages in your watchlist, or only changes to pages you recently edited (or both). Oh, and you can get RecentChanges in an RSS feed.

Sure there are some differences, but the same basic functions are there.

I disagree but lack time to discuss this.



As such they are useless because readers do not find them easily. Readers search for topics - not for unknown author names of possibly existing pages.



Some pages that rested destroyed for many years have finally been improved. So I cannot find lots of new candidates quickly. Currently the Haengma page has very improper contents though; it keeps readers weak and desinforms them; every broader meaning of haengma was destroyed.

Some other time then.

Note, btw, that SL does sort of have this option now. Librarians can lock pages, which prevents normal users from editing them. This function is currently really only used to protect core pages (Front Page, Privacy Policy, Copyright). The only other locked pages are those of the RGG FAQ, which are an SL version of the relevant rec.games.go FAQ, and therefore edited externally.

I think there are situation where this mechanism can be used, though we might disagree on specifics. Certainly any external text copied to SL, such as, for example, official rules texts, could be locked in this way.



If you make a page like, say: "Robert Jasiek / Mathematical Term Force", that will be picked up by a title search for "force".

The full title then should make it immediately clear what this page is about, and who wrote it.


Can you pinpoint which version still contained a good definition, and which edits destroyed it? Haengma seems to be a notoriously difficult concept to describe easily, and since the first version is from 2001, many changes may have been in response to new books or new information as it became available. Certainly this concept does not as yet seem to be widely understood in the western go scene.

I want to be clear that I do not mean to bad mouth SL. It is a valuable resource on go. However, it is written and edited by amateurs, and there does seem to be a ratchet effect, where material that is too difficult or at too high a level gets debased.

Also, in the case I mentioned of massive edits by a beginner, I think that that was handled well by the SL community. Simply reverting to a previous page would have been insensitive.

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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.

Just another point about comparing SL to WP. Everyone on SL knows something about go; while not everyone knows something about every aspect of the game, they are familiar with it. That means that, potentially, a much larger percentage of people on SL are "eligible" to edit any given article. (With, of course, the caveat, as Bill points out above, about high-level stuff.)

On WP, on the other hand, people know only a tiny number of the subjects present; most likely, a minuscule percentage of them. For this reason, very few people are qualified to edit any given article. This means that few people - other than vandals - do edit any given article. It means that edits are more apt to be related to the article.

On SL, a lot of people post "comments" in articles showing that they don't know much about the topic. This dilutes the quality of many articles, and, as I've said elsewhere, makes reading articles very difficult.

SL is a good resource, and has a lot of information. But much of that information is simply garbled at best, and bad at worst. The decision to allow anyone to edit (as opposed to posting on discussion pages) is very egalitarian, but leads to a lowest-common-denominator result.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville