The main issue is that people aren't overloaded. Sure, admins have moderation powers, but they'd rather be spending the little time they have to work on the board working on the board. The barrier for entry is lower for moderators because it requires less technical knowledge. Also, I don't feel completely comfortable as a moderator; I don't think I have the temperament for it. Especially on days like today!

_________________
KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

Yeah, I rage when people misuse "its" versus "it's"...its quite annoying .

Perhaps we should have a language police. It would have the power to edit any posting, but only to correct syntax, grammar, and spelling. That way, language errors would not propagate, but people with weaknesses in those matters would not have to fear to be misunderstood or ridiculed for it.

_________________
A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

Actually I think this practice is done on sites like stackoverflow, and it's not too odd of an idea .

Yeah, I got my "Strunk and White" badge pretty fast.

_________________
A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

"Actually, I think this practice is done on sites like stackoverflow and it's not too odd of an idea."

_________________
Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

"Actually, I think this practice is done on sites like stackoverflow, and it's not too odd of an idea."

Well, there was a grammar police thread on GD.

_________________
a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

Speak for yourself. We (some of us) have a long and rich history of ridiculing people who can't spell, can't use punctuation etc and we're not about to stop anytime soon.

Edit: I hope nobody caught the embarrassing spelling error.

_________________
FusekiLibrary, an opening library.
SGF converter tools: Wbaduk NGF to SGF | 440 go problems | Fuseki made easy | Tesuji made easy | Elementary training & Dan level testing | Dan Tutor Shortcut To Dan

Actually, it looks more like a punctuation error. I see no spelling error.

_________________
Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I edited out the spelling error. Seems I missed a punctuation error. Point is, at least I try. Some people don't, and they will face public ridiculing.

_________________
FusekiLibrary, an opening library.
SGF converter tools: Wbaduk NGF to SGF | 440 go problems | Fuseki made easy | Tesuji made easy | Elementary training & Dan level testing | Dan Tutor Shortcut To Dan

Are all three versions correct? *scratches head*

_________________
My homepages: http://senseis.xmp.net/?Unkx80 and http://yeefan.sg/.

I'd prefer: "I think this practice is done on sites like stackoverflow; it's not too odd of an idea."

Get rid of the passive voice and simplify:
I think sites like stackoverflow commonly use this practice.

_________________
"This is a game that rewards patience and balance. You must think like a man of action and act like a man of thought."
-Jonas Skarssen

Agree with the first part; disagree with the second. Because language is continually evolving, one can certainly argue that "right/wrong' usage is really a continuum. New phrases and words emerge; new usages appear; linguistic styles change.

butt some time's gramer and speling is just SImply ronge!

Having said that, the idea of a grammar police is just silly.

Yes, languages evolve. However, you do not need to force this evolution. If too many people evolve a language at once, it diverges into dialects, and subgroups will form that cannot understand each other anymore. This defies the aim of a language to enable communication.

Evolution per se is neither good nor bad, but there are differences: there are changes that make the language more precise, more expressive, and there are changes that introduce ambiguities and provoke misunderstandings.

Spoken and written language are actually quite different. Spoken language contains many seemingly subtle hints to resolve ambiguities, like little pauses and modulation of the speech melody. Written language has different hints, namely the different spellings of homophonic words and punctuation. Without these hints, parsing of written text cannot be done in a single pass any more: you need to read the letters, guess the intended pronounciation, guess the meant words, guess the logical structure, and finally assemble the meaning (with possible backtracking at each step). Through grammar and spelling rules, these steps are standardized. A single misspelt word can quickly be reconciled in the context of the rest of the text, but if that context is also misspelt, it takes a lot of decrypting to read.

_________________
A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

Since this topic is now about language, let me pose a question to all native English speakers (this comes from a debate on a Finnish forum, where no-one had the necessary authoritative knowledge to settle this):

"cojones" is originally Spanish, but widely used as a slang expression in English. Is it or is it not nowadays part of English?

_________________
Offending ad removed

There are already established, different languages. I am the last to tell people that their mother tongue is "out".



No, they are not necessarily bad things. However, if a language change necessarily leads to them, i.e., the language's expressiveness or precision are reduced, then that change is bad.



These are different levels of abstraction; the meta-context is not the topic here. As written before, "some" misspellings can be corrected, but the correlation between number of mistakes and reading time is not linear.



This is also a tangent, but while a badly written text is never in the danger of creating the illusion of understanding, it is also never in danger of creating understanding.

Your post seems to go into the direction of such claims as "Good is the new bad, and bad is the new good."

_________________
A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

"I think this is done on sites like stackoverflow; it's not too odd an idea." You can do and you can practice, but I haven't heard of "doing a practice", and "too odd of an" is, I believe, an invalid extrapolation from "too much of an".

_________________
So you've got an eye?
That don't impress me much

It is more like you point to the moon when I am talking about the dirty dishes.

_________________
A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.