SL & GTL status

[arnoh]

Hi,

SL & GTL are currently offline and will remain so for a day or two.
We detected problems with the harddiscs and need to replace them.

As far as I can tell, no data has been lost (in additon, I keep several backups anyway.)

Replacing the discs and replicating the data takes time - that's why the sites will be unavailable for some time. I will inform you when the sites are back up again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

regards,
/Arno

[Abyssinica]

I won't be able to live.

[virre]

The amount of times I went to the site to see if it was up till this news.

edit: Oh and thank you for that update.

[DrStraw]

I won't be able to live.

Good opportunity to practice your L&D problems, then.

[Krama]

What is SL & GTL?

I can't seem to find the site on google.

[emeraldemon]

Sensei's library and go teaching ladder.

[Knotwilg]

For people new to the go community, Sensei's Library started out in 2001 in an attempt to cover all go related knowledge. It has been reasonably successful for Go terms and as a Go portal. It has a large collection of go problems and a fair coverage of joseki, but for both topics there is more extensive coverage at sites dedicated to those subjects. I'd still claim it is the first and most extensive site for go knowledge. At some point it was probably the most active forum on the subject of Go.

A few years ago the active community fled SL, allegedly due to its not integrating sgf. Another recurring complaint was that signed contributions were wikified into anonymous articles, damaging both experts' feelings and the confidence level of the audience in the merged result, which was carried out by a list of contributors which probably still did not represent a critical mass of expertise.

The advent of L19 (as this site is abbreviated) drew the active community away, alleviating both issues (but in my biased opinion exposing a range of other weaknesses). You could say SL now serves as a reference to forums like L19 and L19 could serve as a forum for SL (but doesn't really).

The Go Teaching Ladder is a site where you can submit games for review. Its popularity seems also to have declined, probably in favor of go server study groups and L19's sgf integration, but it still maintains a steady rhythm.

As a long serving librarian at SL, I'm of course biased in its favor.

[Javaness2]

I wasn't aware that SL contributors didn't like other people wikifying their articles. I believe that I am correct in saying Charles Matthews (a wiki mammoth) stated that one of the reasons he left SL was due to its conversational nature. That is, articles tending to be a progression of signed comments on a subject, rather than the wikipedia style of an encyclopedia. While discussion is interesting to read, I think the better style is to mature such articles to the consolidated and unsigned state. Discussion can always be preserved in /discussion pages.

SL is very nice, and more people should contribute positively to it.

[skydyr]

I wasn't aware that SL contributors didn't like other people wikifying their articles. I believe that I am correct in saying Charles Matthews (a wiki mammoth) stated that one of the reasons he left SL was due to its conversational nature. That is, articles tending to be a progression of signed comments on a subject, rather than the wikipedia style of an encyclopedia. While discussion is interesting to read, I think the better style is to mature such articles to the consolidated and unsigned state. Discussion can always be preserved in /discussion pages.

SL is very nice, and more people should contribute positively to it.

I can understand the desire for acknowledgment, but it seems equally possible to just have a blurb at the bottom that "this page was contributed to by/derived from discussions by x, y, and z," and leave the meat of the discussion to another discussion page, as you suggest.

I suspect much of the problem with SL is that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been written about. There's only so much you can write about "what is a hane" before eyes glaze over. The more advanced the topic, the stronger the author or authors need to be in order to discuss it coherently and correctly. It's also harder and harder to discuss things in a general manner, and topics need to become more and more specific. The BQM is one way to deal with this, but it doesn't really have any organizing principles other than "this question was asked before this one and after that one". In addition, because they are answers to a specific question and people then move on, there isn't a great deal of curation or refinement of the answers. This is a lot of work that requires a certain level of expertise, carries no reward save that of a job well done, and is often thankless to boot.

I wish I knew how to fix that. I feel at my level, which is certainly not weak, that I'm not qualified to modify a lot of the articles on there, and it's a shame.

[tapir]

Sorry for the truism: Different people dislike(d) different things.

Imo, the feeling "I am not able/worthy to contribute." is somewhat misleading, there are tons of pages (players, tournaments) and odd jobs (maintenance work like fix obsolete links, format tables) that do not exactly require high-dan understanding of the game, but still need to be done. However, it isn't exactly rewarding to do so - far less wisecracking opportunities than on your personal blog, no likes and very little visible acknowledgment of your work - not even an edit counter as in wikipedia. I mean, when even go players think you are weird (someone once called me otaku for recognizing Mukai Chiaki) for recognizing top players contesting for titles in their field, what encouragement do you have to maintain professional player profiles?

[Javaness2]

Maybe the EGF should have an Edit SL day? Although having said that, the EGF tournament subwiki seems to have vanished. Can you see it anywhere on those hard disks Arno?

[happysocks]

Gawd speed good fellows. And. Thank you.

[logan]

All I can say is that I've edited/created over a thousand pages on SL and haven't once signed my name. So to each his own.

(P.S. There's a great deal of work that can done on SL that doesn't require expertise such as, data entry (player/tourney stats etc.), link maintenance, and making visual changes to create a consistent and efficient look between pages.)

[virre]

(Updating the list of links to Go-clubs, the Swedish section was filled with dead links etc)

When I see a new term for the first time, I will look for it at Senseis Libary, afterall most of my beginner questions will have an answer there.

Sure it seems the update frequency is not so much, and people argue quite a lot about things I don't understand but I don't care.

SL is a wiki, it works as a wiki. Even if the topics instead of /discussions are a bit strange I find them charming and teaching. (Sure I could click disscussion but I seldom do on any wikisite)

[HermanHiddema]

The good thing about Sensei's Library is that is is so powerful that you can do almost anything with it.

The bad thing about Sensei's Library is that is is so powerful that you can do almost anything with it.

Sensei's library can be and is used as:

• an encyclopedia
• a terms dictionary
• a forum
• a joseki dictionary
• a tsume-go trainer
• a Chinese/Japanese/Korean translation dictionary
• a player database
• a tournament results database
• a game review mechanism
• a place to play go games
• a place to blog about go
• and more...

Sensei's can do all these things, but each individual thing can be done better by a dedicated site (e.g. L19 for a forum, goproblems.com for tsumego, josekipedia for a joseki dictionary, KGS for playing, etc, etc).

Because it can do so many things, sometimes people work at cross purposes, and that causes irritation. The situation that Knotwilg describes is probably an example where some people are using SL as a forum (talking about the page subject with named contributions) and others are using it as an encyclopedia (condensing the knowledge into a readable article). Imagine if the L19 mods went around and replaced threads by summaries. I'd think many people would be quite upset.

Note that neither side meant wrong, or was really doing anything wrong. They just had different ideas of how SL should work.