Maybe. There are many formats possible, i could take whole paragraphs. Just any organised way to order that clears out the defintion would give me excellent results. Potentially i can just take as much text as i want without being intrusive. But the problem there is things that i think make them poor definitions, like the case above , or the inclusion of peoples comments.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

It is very unlikely that the whole structure of SL is changed to provide easy extractable definitions. In fact, there is debate whether we have too much definitions on SL. See: Definitionism - and there is a practical problem too: a definition isn't worth anything if it is just an opinion in disguise. What makes definitions work, is a stable demographic that uses a special language and can agree on the definitions. English go terminology simply has not reached this maturity yet, that it can provide stable meanings for words. Especially for terms such as Aji, where we most of the time help us with vague descriptions. Looking at CJK practical use of words instead of providing definitions, which may be right or may be wrong or may leave everyone confused, seems like the better choice to me.

I think the point about rigorousness and importance of definitions is a bit orthogonal to the point about organization. Even a loose definition can be set apart in the text so that it can be extracted by a script. A Robert Jasiek style definition can be shoved into the middle of a discussion.

Also, this discussion is a bit confusing. Sometimes I think Kaya is objecting to the presence of "funny business" (misguided, imo), and sometimes I think he's objecting to the "has been proposed by Ed Lee" (which isn't good, but is also minor).

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Occupy Babel!

Here is another example where it is easy to help contribute to sensei's. There have been several rules disputes mentioned in our discussions of L19. Last year, there was a case where a team that was playing to win on time was somehow forced to resign or was disqualified. There is a sensei's page on rules disputes.

In general, pages like this are not likely to affect the overall quality of sensei's, but they could be an important adjunct to individual memory. And of course this will not just be true of rules disputes, but any notable events in the Go world.

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Occupy Babel!

I think that it's totally appropriate for SL to be as unstructured as it is. The nature of a wiki is to provide a very low-friction way for someone to put their thoughts on a page, and it's the content that counts, not the organization.

Someone like Dex can come along afterward and clean things up, if he wants to use the wiki for some useful semantic purpose from his software, or people can reorganize in the spirit of making information easier to find. If you don't like the bold text in the middle of the paragraph, then make some footnotes, or put it at the end in parentheses, or something. That's fine. But the most important thing is keeping people writing in the first place, and if you make contributors adhere to a bunch of writing and organizational and citation standards, then that won't happen as often.

I actually prefer the discussions and comments on the content pages, rather than on separate discussion pages. Though I'd agree that a consistent format would be preferable to the current "mixed" approach, even if this means consequently separated discussion pages. I agree with Cata that the nature of a "true" wiki is to be a little "wild" and perhaps even "chaotic". For popular projects like Wikipedia this may be impractical, but the Go community here is so small still that a less strict way works well, too.

Just to make it clear, my observation had no intentions to put work on senseis to get organized, i just stated the shortcoming i suffer.

Be that as it may, as senseis is already half-way included into Kaya, it wouldnt be bad to brainstorm or explore the possibilities on how can both parties get more out a synergy.

As i skim over this post, one of the key issues in Senseis is getting people to work and edit it. I said before that i would expect Kaya's pages on senseis to have activity because users will be able to edit them and see the glossary changes right into the server, but its a very small window of benefit for senseis, other than branding (as any go term looked-upon will have sensei's name).

Given a potentially big flow of people going from Kaya.gs to Senseis, what could senseis get from it? or how could senseis transform them into regular users?

From our standpoint and as it is, what we get from sensei's is content(although we will have to re-process all the content we use), but maybe it has a lot more to offer us.

Time to get creative

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Founder of Kaya.gs

Most edits are anonymous so you don't really know anything about the people contributing the content. I've contributed a reasonable amount over the years and I know some stronger players do too. It's just that it's done in an occasional, adhoc way, rather than being a formalised and regular routine. Isn't that how wiki's work? And it's hard to track what's happened unless you look at Sensei's every day.

Also, I think Sensei's took a hit when the community sort of forked and people went over to Wikipedia. Sometimes now I find myself wondering whether it's better to add new content to Sensei's or Wikipedia and I think a few other people do too. Sensei's has the advantage of supporting go diagrams.

I think more integration between go sites would be better for the community too. As a simple example, can the people working on josekipedia set it up to autolink go terms back to the Sensei's pages? Can Life in 19x19 do this? We've already set this up on Go Game Guru and we already link to a small number of terms. I'm in the same position as Gabriel, where it takes time to review each page and decide whether it should be linked to. Some definitions are really confusing and I'd rather write my own, or rewrite the Sensei's page eventually. That's partly why I haven't done it yet.

If someone wants to help out and prepare an organised list of terms with matching URLs, I can add them to our database and it will autolink those words whenever they're used in our existing articles and in all reader comments. Here's an example of what the formatting for the list looks like:

eye|http://senseis.xmp.net/?eyes
two eyes|http://senseis.xmp.net/?TwoEyes
ko|http://senseis.xmp.net/?ko

One new term per line.

It's most useful for language that is very specific to go and foreign language terms. For example 'furikawari', 'two eyes' or 'eye' (singular) - words that go players use when they talk or write comments, but are rarely used in normal speech. Words like 'jump' or 'opening' are too ambiguous to autolink (but fuseki is clear). Maybe someone could start a master list of the good quality definitions on a Sensei's page (my preference is the format above and if you enclose each line in square brackets it will work on Sensei's too) and then other go sites could use it as a resource for creating links to Sensei's? The page itself could be used as a checklist of sorts too.

I think if we start sending more visitors to Sensei's it might encourage more people to contribute to it. Wikipedia has the advantage that nearly everyone knows about it.

I think I mentioned this somewhere previously, but since there seems to be more enthusiasm for working on Sensei's at the moment I'll mention it again. Go Game Guru is licensed under Creative Commons. Isn't Sensei's too? If so, Sensei's can just take excerpts from our content (including bit of commentaries) on the condition that Go Game Guru gets attribution (in the form of a link back to our original page for each excerpt) and Sensei's doesn't use it for commercial purposes (not a problem I think). Don't just copy our pages wholesale because then Google will think Sensei's is a content scraper and Senseis' pages may start disappearing form the index. Relevant excerpts (or what Google call 'snippets') are not an issue though when they acknowledge the source.

We decided to license the content this way largely because we thought people might use some of it on wikis or translate it. There are quite a few people translating under the terms of the license already. If we let people take excerpts and translate instead of just linking to us, then some of the more important content will survive even if the three of us are killed in a plane crash.

Just because we don't personally want to write all our content on Sensei's library, doesn't mean we can't work together.

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David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

Because there is an only small percentage of such players?



Whom do you call top players? With Bill Spight and myself there are, e.g., two top researchers. If you follow RecentChanges, you might not always notice because we do not always login. If you asked why top players would not contribute 24h a day, well, their (like everybody's) time is limited. E.g, it can happen that I don't have any time for SL for a couple of months; it is simply impossible to write a go book while editing SL.

Sadly, Sensei's is not creative commons. Creative commons did not exist (or wasn't ubiquitous) when Sensei's was started, so it uses an older license that is incompatible. Given the amount of content on there, it is likely that it will never be possible to mass import Sensei's content to any other site.

It is possible to dual-license your own content so that it can be added to Sensei's.

License incompatibility is a real shame, in my opinion.

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Occupy Babel!

I don't believe license incompatibility is a problem. It becomes when there is so much bad practice around that someone may start to contemplate sueing someone else. But before anything like this happens the social cost of the bad practice would be by far more damaging than any legal issues would be.

And you don't need to dual license or any fancy legal stuff, when you can put your own stuff on several pages. This happened to a lot of Joseki material original on SL, which is now on Josekipedia too. Afaik this is due to Andre Engels who was very active in this area of SL participated on Josekipedia. What all pages are lacking however, is feedback going in both directions. They add variations on Josekipedia, on SL there are some additions and changes too, but basically they remain distinct after the initial input, nobody bothers to edit at the other place. Even where the contributors do overlap like SL and L19, there is very limited spillover.

From the SL point of view, relying on outside links too heavily has one major downside (and it has been pointed out as a problem of SL in this thread). All those links to the interesting XY discussion on godiscussions, articles on gobase or your now abandoned blog around the corner are now without value to either all (godiscussion) or the majority (gobase) of readers. I have no doubt when linking to the BGA page for their book reviews, they will stay online, but many other - mainly the individual - pages are far from sure to survive.

At least under Creative Commons individual clauses can be waived. So the share alike clause could be waived as a special case for Sensei's.

I'm surprised about this though. Admittedly I never looked into exactly what license Sensei's was using, I just assumed it must be Commons because I kept seeing wholesale reproduction of Sensei's material on Wikipedia. In a way it's stupid problem to have if everyone is happy to share Go knowledge. Can the license be updated to make it more compatible with other sites?

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David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

Social control is by far more effective than legal means in such a small demographic as the English-language Go-player internet that is spread over half the world. It also makes for much lesser overhead costs (lawyer expenses etc. etc.)

When the basic idea is not to copy wholesale but to make an extract of content available elsewhere, then the resulting text isn't under the original license anyway. If there are wholesale copies anywhere it is more often because the original author either explicitly allowed it or he does it himself. Other kind of copy/inspiration/spillover likely takes more the form of EndgameTesuji14, for sure you refer out of courtesy, but the thing taken (a tesuji) is hardly licensable.

SL looks like a remnant of the 80's. Anyone ever thought about making a more modern wiki-page about Go?
F.ex. one could use interactive EidoGo diagrams.

Did you use many web-based wikis in the 80s?

Well, Go itself looks like a remnant from the Stone Age, no?

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?