If you are, or if you like the style of those sites, you may wish to join this project:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposa ... game-of-go

We only need about 30 more interested people before it can get really interesting...

Haven't we just been there? Unsuccessfully?

Or is this one different?
I'm confused...

http://www.shidogo.com/

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Shidogo never had time. Now it will be closed down, because Stack Exchange is pruning its system and creating SE 2.0.

Stack Exchange learned its lesson from SE1.0, by creating a minimum number of participants for any Stack Exchange site to go into private beta, so that sites don't go dead.

To that end, I am promoting it, because I want to be able to ask questions on a go forum that works by 'best answer' instead of by 'dan/kyu' rank.

If mathoverflow.net ranked people based on their levels of education in math, rather than on their answers, it would be a much less exciting site to use.

Thinking in terms of dan/kyu is bad, in my opinion, for dialogue. I follow Kageyama, who says that people should try to understand the moves they play, in order to grasp the fundamentals of go, and in order to improve more quickly. Don't forget he was on TV, as well as being a pro player.

There's a big difference between a go player who can answer people's questions, and a good go player. And, in fact, the number of 'good teachers' is small, primarily because much of what is written about go either does not get translated into English or is ghost-written for a pro player (like it says in The Breakthrough to Shodan).

rant follows:

Go books need to be reclassified, but this will never happen in our lifetime, because of our flawed system of education.

We are educated to believe that, in order to read a difficult text, we have to read the simpler texts. Want to read Newton? Learn all of this algebra first. And don't read Al-Khwarizmi, who never used algebraic symbols anyway.

But it's wrong. Newton only relied on Euclid and geometric representations of algebra, like those found in Al-Khwarizmi, to write The Principia.

This is only true for the 20th century. Before that, the system of education expected people to read classics (Euclid, Aristotle, Plato)...

All that to say, there is a big difference between a conceptual book on go, which anyone can learn, and a 'commentated' approach, in which the reader is expected to follow a commented game. The former does not require a huge rank, because the concepts and terms can be grasped with close study. The second is like our modern way of studying math, requiring a subtle familiarity with concepts in order to follow the flow. Neither is bad. But the boundary between 'pro' and 'kyu' books is skewed.

StackExchange is a perfect way around this failing in modern education. Any programmer, mathematician, Linux/OSX user, cook, go player, etc. can ask for expertise. It's much more of a dialogue. Yet it retains the idea that some people are better at explaining the complexities and subtleties (using a subtle interplay of terminology rather than diagrams or symbols) than others.

Why does this problem exist for us?

Books like Yoda's book on sabaki, which is either an incredible journey deep into the mind of a pro player, or a ghost-written collection of commented games that I would find highly unenlightening, etc. etc. never get translated into English.

I understand your goal in this, but I still feel the technology is clunky at best when it comes to fulfilling this expected "dialogue" concerning Go. Stack Overflow is not about "dialogue" so much as it is about experts supporting the community through an extolling of specific information.

The problem with applying this concept to a site about Go, for me, is that you can get the specific information, but lose the dialogue.

Stack Exchange is designed to zero in on specific information to the exclusion of associated tangents. Discussion of Go, to me, requires the ability to move off into tangential realms to truly work towards the information the questioner NEEDS, regardless of what they ASK.

The original Stack Overflow Trilogy seems like a good example. Stack Overflow itself is an amazing success. If I'm struggling with an issue when programming, there is NO better site.

Moving on to Server Fault ... I am in a job role where this site would ideally be the most useful to me. I support systems built on Oracle/MySQL and Solaris, not to mention the communication between such systems over a network, and communication TO a customer network. I will always try to find an answer on Server Fault before I look to Google, since Server Fault is much more specific to my needs. What I've found ... the question is there (actually, it's very rare that the question has NOT been asked), but 9 times out of 10 there is no answer that works for me. I then move to Google (or Bing; I use both) and find a discussion, a dialogue, on a forum somewhere that goes through the troubleshooting in detail and helps resolve my issue. So, Server Fault has, for me, a 10% hit rate.

Then we come to Super User ... I'm a tech geek. I love technology and computers. However, I would say my hit rate on Super User when I'm looking for an answer is roughly 2% ... being generous. It's just not that great and doesn't feel like I can get the answers I need from that community. Again, I usually find answers in forums where there is a healthy discussion thread.

Don't take this the wrong way. I really do wish you the best on this idea ... I'm just concerned that it might be the wrong technology for the task ...