What do you think of sensei's library

[BaghwanB]

I find it a mix of fun and useful and frustrating.

If you can find the page/section/discussion on what you want it can be a great in-depth discussion of a given specific topic or aspect of the game. But that is if you can find it (and if it exists in the first place). The 'referenced by' feature is pretty good for making the semi-obscure connections, but I agree that a big overhaul would be great.

I also enjoy the random page feature sometimes so I can try to stumble onto something new and interesting. Kinda chat-roulette for SL...


Bruce "Sashay sensei" Young

[willemien]

Thanks all for your responces.

I am a bit confused by

(1) I cannot find what I am looking for.

- is it because you are looking for a certain position?

You are looking for a subject:
- gives to much results (using normal search)
- but it has no page (title search)
- or is not an alias (title search)

The first is a problem that can happen with any big wiki.


(2) Structure
This is a problem with any big wiki but how can we solve it?
was thinking about more paths/ keywords (but which? and how)
just the number of pages (around 20.000) is allready to big for an index
What other solutions are there?

(2) Discussions in a Wiki
- sensei's library is not wikipedia, but i do agree sometimes a page is more a discussion than a decription of the subject.
I do prefer a seperate / discussion subpage above the talkpages forum. (that is mostly uneditable by others)

(3) uneven content (sometimes you get more than you hope for sometimes not enough)
There are quite a lot of pages of "stub" quality.
(this is a stub itself as well)

(4) Corrosion of context.
That is a problem, but has also to do with copyright (or at least the ethical dimension of it)
Sometimes I see on here nice articles (especially by John Fairbairn) , am i allowed to copy them to Sensei's?

(5) Editing and improvemnt.
A problem here is than sometimes things that are clear for a specialist not at all clear for an beginner, can we add more explanation to the specialist page?

(6) people
Yes sensei's needs more people at sensei's, there is a lot to do. Even for the suggested "serious overhaul" i don't think there are enough deshi's

[John Fairbairn]

Sometimes I see on here nice articles (especially by John Fairbairn) , am i allowed to copy them to Sensei's?

In my case, I prefer this not to happen.

[RobertJasiek]

20000 pages is still small enough to put each page into a good structure and reference by all relevant keywords from their pages manually.

[hyperpape]

Willemien--search works poorly on Wikipedia, but they get by because
1) they are so often the first Google result, (so Google provides a virtual search).
2) the pages are densely hyperlinked, meaning that once you've found something on your topic, you'll often just find other pages you're interested in
3) their aliases and redirects are quite complete, so that you can often just type something in the location bar and get where you need to be.

I do not think Sensei's scores particularly well on any of those counts.

Btw: I don't really use much of the top-down navigation on Wikipedia--it's just too buried. I suppose this depends--if I went to the wikipedia page on philosophy, it has so many links that this is like a form of top-down navigation. The big exception is the templates that accompany articles--these often are helpful, especially for browsing. I feel the same way about sensei's, except we don't really have the templates. Even though I know about the reference section, I don't start there.

[fwiffo]

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.

[tapir]

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?

[hyperpape]

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.

[Bartleby]

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.

[jts]

The big exception is the templates that accompany articles--these often are helpful, especially for browsing. I feel the same way about sensei's, except we don't really have the templates. Even though I know about the reference section, I don't start there.

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.

[jts]

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.

[hyperpape]

@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.

[willemien]

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.

Because you mentioned the [sl=CornerShapes]corner shapes[/sl] page.

I did make an Index page (Path) [sl=CommonCornerShapes]Common Corner Shapes[/sl] 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.

[kirkmc]

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.

[willemien]

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.

Yep i saw your comment and then i thought, but those pages should be marked with the [sl=NeedsWMETemplate]Needs WME Template[/sl] (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.