What do you think of sensei's library

[gowan]

My biggest question is, why are so few SL contributors 4d+?

Why are the top players completely disinterested in submitting authoritative content?

It would be nice if some would answer with what they need as incentive. It can't be that they're holding out for the amazing book deals...

Strong players get strong by playing and learning, not writing and teaching, that's why.

Since we all play Go for fun, it would stand to reason to assume that strong players, taking into account the above statement, have more fun playing and learning than writing and teaching. it sort-of sucks for the lower-rated players, but what can you do... If you want the strong players to contribute, you need to provide some kind of incentive, monetary or otherwise. We have had a discussion about this recently on L19, as I recall. The bottom line being that if you want somebody to do stuff they don't like doing, you need to pay them. Other than money, there is not that much weak(er) player have to offer... worship, maybe?

You can see the same issue popping up all over the place - the issue of incentive and, ultimately, money. Pros play for money... they write for money... they teach for money... even if its not you who pays them. The whole discussion about European Championship - there is also a strong undercurrent related to money. The reasons for strong Asians visiting Europe... same thing, no matter how some wish to smudge it. And so on...

'Tis how the world turns.
We are all becoming americanized, I guess...

The question is - given that these are the cards we have been dealt - what are we going to do?

I wouldn't reduce everything to money. Many strong and knowledgable people have posted a lot on SL, without receiving money and with no incentive other than a desire to share what they know. There used to be a belief in the go community that stronger players had a duty to help weaker players learn the game. That tradition still exists in Beginners' Rooms, and in Tabemasu's Q and A thread here on L19, for example. But no one has the time or energy to respond to every request. In almost any situation in which someone is giving a lot the generosity can only go on so long before giving-fatigue sets in.

[Knotwilg]

Thank you all for your comments. Based on these, Tapir, myself and other librarians will adopt a policy to clean up the library by

- improving page content
- removing all discussion from content pages to discussion pages, while converting the valuable elements into content (also known as Wiki Master Edit)
- improving navigability, by increasing interlinkage, adding index pages and categorization
- removing pages that have no apparent added value and are long outdated, since such pages clutter up the space and tend to demote the experience of browsing through SL

It is unpredictable if we will persevere, let alone succeed, but energy's up right now so you are welcome to join in.

[Kaya.gs]

i feel empathy for several of the concerns people have said in this thread.

From my point of view, i use sensei's regularly, specially when someone online needs to know something about at term or a situation. It has vital and decent information.

Following our server philosophy, i thought senseis could be a vital addition to provide a much needed service: a glossary of go terms. Currently in the chat in Kaya.gs , you have a simple command line, where you can do ":command_name arguments" and you can do ":senseis kikashi" and it prints senseis definition into the chat.

Ideally this would be totally automatic, but there are two big issues around it. First is that there is no semantic distribution of the information. The text is not organized in any way that we could identify the definition, or the first paragraph.

Second is that there is a lot of garbage and useless information. The classic are the meta discussions like, "kikashi", "kikashi discussion", "kikashi discussion spin-off" or the endless comments below a topic.

Example:

Aji is a Japanese Go term that has been adopted into English. In the context of Go, aji roughly means possibilities left in a position

This definition is derived from one the meanings of the word aji in ordinary usage: taste, in the sense that it lingers. By analogy, aji in Go refers to lingering possibilities that are latent and cannot be used immediately, but might come to life if the situation changes. That is why aji is also often translated as potential. Another translation as funny business or unfinished business has been proposed by Ed Lee.

It is clearly indecent to have the bold text into the definition of the word.

The lack of some semantic way to read the information has another difficulty for us, which is dealing with having organised translations of terms. There is no doubt that english is the most important language in the west in the Go community, but we have to support many other languages, including and specially, japanese, korean and chinese.

I'm not really asking for senseis to fix or do anything, im just explaining the shortcomings i have as an "enterprise" user of the service.

Even in this situation i dont know a better community expandable glossary of go out there. So in the end i decided to keep using senseis. I created a page that will hold the definitions that will be used in the server , and in the future i will arrange it so i can read that specific page in a more semantic way, so i can organize the languages.

As people use the :senseis command, they not only get a small compact definition but a link to the sensei's page. I expect this to provoke user cooperation in the future, specially regarding translations, as they see how to easily contribute.

[ketchup]

My impression of Senseis is that it has been effectively dead for at least the past five years or so - it was already dead when I started playing go. But despite being dead, it was, and still is, the most useful online resource available. At this point, if you make it completely static and locked, it will remain an awesome archive of go knowledge.

Pretty much this is my viewpoint as well. There may have been tiny work done over the years, but I don't follow it. I started using Senseis as a way to learn go terms, and it's been helpful for linking to newer folks.

I'm also going to say that I greatly enjoy some of the more humor related articles on senseis. It shows a lot of internet go history, and it's nice to have around. I think the tagging needs to be more clear that certain articles are for humor though, as sometimes a mean-spirited troll will link some of these to a new player. A widely-known page is this: http://senseis.xmp.net/?b2bomber. I just don't think the humor tag is prominent enough sometimes.

-edit-
I just noticed how old this thread is. Well then.. carry on.

[tapir]

It is clearly indecent to have the bold text into the definition of the word.

Many English language go terms are invented and spread by amateur players without being considered indecent, as they are used in the books we all used to learn from. Should new English go books don't invent anything new? I don't think so. Should innovation be allowed only in books but not elsewhere? I don't think so, closure of terminology comes with maturity. In the special case of the proposed translation, it is at least a genuine attempt to offer a translation as opposed to the vague descriptions for an untranslated term we have. It has been adopted by at least one professional teaching in the west. It is hilarious that writing "has been proposed by XY" makes it sound indecent, while a blunt statement without attribution likely would have been perceived differently, right? Aji as a term is in my experience as over-used as it is under-understood, which is caused by having many vague descriptions on display, but no English term.

Disclosure: I am somewhat responsible for the current state of the aji page. I took lessons from the early adopter professional and I wouldn't feel comfortable to discard a term my teacher uses.

[EdLee]

Disclosure: I am somewhat responsible for the current state of the aji page.
I took lessons from the early adopter professional and I wouldn't feel comfortable to discard a term my teacher uses.

Meta-disclosure. Sorry about that, tapir. My fault. If I'm not mistaken, said pro in turn got it from me.

Coincidentally, today I borrowed the following book from the public library:

What Language Is (and what it isn't and what it could be), by John McWhorter (First printing, August 2011).
(Chapter 2, Language is Disheveled. Ch 4, Language is Oral. Ch 5, Language is Mixed.) So there.

[hyperpape]

Although having the new definition attributed to Ed Lee is awkward, I see nothing bad about its inclusion. Chinese, Japanese and Korean have a pre-existing vocabulary for dealing with the game, while we have to decide what to translate, what not to translate, and in each case, we still have to figure out how to get people to understand that. None of that is easy, nor is it work that's complete (think of John's great thoughts about nerai). And while the professionals who teach in the west do a lot of that work, amateurs do too, especially when it comes to the subtleties of phrasing, evocative analogies and all the vagaries of the English language.

P.S. Dropping one's trousers at a wedding is indecent. Having Ed mentioned in the definition is unsuitable, awkward, or (this is a stretch) inappropriate.

[emeraldemon]

It seems like most people found Sensei's Library the most helpful when they were starting out; I don't see anything wrong with this. Maybe would should make an effort to target the beginner-level pages and make the library as a whole as beginner-friendly as possible. The reason I wrote [sl=IntroductionToLifeAndDeath]Introduction to Life and Death[/sl] was because the Life page was full of discussion about moonshine life, double-ko-seki, etc.

[hyperpape]

I think one of the big issues for Sensei's today is the barrier to entry. I try to contribute, but I'm doing really minimal work compared to Tapir and Dieter. In part, that's because I feel intimidated adding sequences unless I really _know_ that they're right. And wiki master editing (taking a disordered page full of comments and making a unified presentation out of that) is hard. But I do have some ideas about how folks can contribute.

• Sensei's has a very good pattern search, something that's sadly lacking on L19. There's tons of room for Sensei's to link to or incorporate content that's discussed here, making it permanent where it's not permanent on this board. Sometimes that happens, but I'd like to see it happen more. Whenever I see a focused discussion on here, I try to do that search, and I've definitely been able to add some content there as a result.
• Another area that would be easy for some people to contribute is the history of Chinese and Korean professional events. I know of no English language source that has titleholders for many of the old titles, except probably GoGoD (GoBase has some, but there are issues of transliteration and completeness).
  
  Unfortunately, I only know of one regular contributor to SL who reads those languages. (see http://senseis.xmp.net/?ObsoleteTitles and http://senseis.xmp.net/?ProfessionalTournaments). It would be truly easy to link to relevant Chinese, Japanese or Korean sources so that regular contributors can extract the data (Google translate and laboriously matching up characters that you can't read ftw!), and it would only be a bit harder to start adding champions, dates and scores.

Edit: My memory is being jogged. There are other contributors who have good or at least partial comprehension of an Asian language. I don't want to try and tell them what to do, however, so this is still a place where someone could help out.

[Thunkd]

I agree with everything that has been said about Sensei's Library, but I have a different idea about how to solve the problems. Add user accounts and allow users to rate pages, mark pages as incomplete, confusing, insightful etc. then allow user's to sort pages according to these rankings. This accomplishes two important things. 1) allows people to find good pages (good pages bubble to the top). 2) Provides an easy way for editors to identify problem pages that need help.

[RobertJasiek]

Rankings are as good or bad as the persons issuing them have necessary background knowledge. IOW, there won't be objective ranking. Therefore ranking is a bad idea. The current subpage discussion system is good.

[Thunkd]

Rankings are as good or bad as the persons issuing them have necessary background knowledge. IOW, there won't be objective ranking. Therefore ranking is a bad idea. The current subpage discussion system is good.

Subpage discussions don't help people find pages.

[jts]

Hyperpape, I think you need to close a tag...?

I like the idea of trying to get a little mitosis going on many Sensei's pages, so that the basic issues are covered on a daughter page suitable for beginners, and the sloppy discussions of the advanced topics are moved to a daughter page -- hopefully the uninhibited dialogue between confused low-kyus and stronger players will produce pages evolving in the right direction, while the portal page stays nice and clean.

This also makes me wonder: does Sensei's Library have some sort of "flare" system such that people with a willingness to edit can distinguish between grammar edits and "can someone please clarify this" edits?

I also like the idea of trying to wikify the most productive threads here. Hopefully that way there will be no repeats of GD. The last time this was suggested John Fairbairn was strongly opposed to that idea, which I think dampened enthusiasm, but since he won't be adding to threads in the future his dissent isn't germane anymore.

[tapir]

I agree with everything that has been said about Sensei's Library, but I have a different idea about how to solve the problems. Add user accounts and allow users to rate pages, mark pages as incomplete, confusing, insightful etc. then allow user's to sort pages according to these rankings. This accomplishes two important things. 1) allows people to find good pages (good pages bubble to the top). 2) Provides an easy way for editors to identify problem pages that need help.

Don't want to sound harsh, but:

SL has even now little problem in acknowledging problem pages. See e.g. [sl=PleaseReviewMe]Please Review Me[/sl], [sl=ToBeMasterEdited]To Be Master Edited[/sl] for inspiration. What lacks is people to tackle the problems. No additional way of organizing, rating, liking, +1'ing will get the job done. In short, what SL needs is editors not managers.

[hyperpape]

Does the current search page distinguish between sub-pages and main pages? If so, there is an additional benefit to splitting out content.

@jts I don't advocate appropriating people's comments without permission, if it means copying them into SL. However, we are free to incorporate ideas, diagrams, and everything else.