A useful, easy shape: atari on 3rd line

[billywoods]

The pages on honte and vital point give a definition, rather than a study plan, because these are not concepts beginners will understand after 15 minutes on Sensei's Library

Indeed, no one will understand what honte or vital points are if they only have SL to learn from. If it's not a site that can at least claim to have these two basic concepts reasonably well covered, what is it trying to be?

On another note, if these aren't beginner pages, and don't involve a study plan, why are they linked to from the beginner study section? (Edit: apologies - honte isn't linked to, but vital point is.)

I think it's kind of awe-inspiring that you can find a heavily-commented, 9x9 beginner game on sensei's library.

Awe-inspiring? Introduce a beginner to the rules, and tell them what it means to win or lose, and the first things they will ask will be variations on "what does a game look like?", or "how do I know where to play next?", or "what are you thinking about when you play your moves?". It's very basic pedagogy. It's the same rationale as the one behind commented pro games, or the one behind Malkovich games. These things existed for players of all strengths except beginners - it was an obvious addition to be made.

Have you ever read a commentary on a professional game? Inevitably when, during the end game, one player "puts stones in a situation where capture is unavoidable", the commentary will talk about capturing stones.

Is it useful, in a beginner study section, to define what it means to "capture" a group of stones (i.e. remove their last liberty) and then instantly abuse the new terminology? Compare the uses of "capture" in the captions for diagrams 3 and 7. I think it's just confusing.

As I said, I thought it was a great page. There should be lots more written in the same spirit. But it could (and, if aimed at beginners, should) also be clearer than it is.

I simply don't believe that beginner exercise 1 is too hard for you.

I didn't mean too hard for me (though in fact some of the later ones may well be), I meant too hard for beginners. On the beginner study page, the link to these exercises comes right after capturing and simple uncapturable groups (two eyes or seki). But exercises 2 and 4 already involve reading throw-ins; 5 would be oshitsubushi except for a shortage of liberties; I skipped ahead at random to 35 and found a double snapback! What kind of crazy-strong beginners are you expecting?

It's also "hard" in the sense of unsympathetic. The first time I tried some "elementary" tsumego and couldn't do them, I just muttered rude words about how stupid I was and stopped doing tsumego. That's part of what being a beginner is like. Most people do not see go for the first time and think "awesome! I want to get strong right now no matter what", they think "awesome! This looks fun!" - right up until it's not fun any more because they're being silently humiliated by a bunch of strong players who think double snapbacks belong on a "beginners" page. This is also basic pedagogy.

(i) Leave "Beginner Exercises" as is. (ii) Delete the last 50-100 problems. (iii) Move the last 50-100 problems to a separate section on the same page, to make sure there is no confusion. -- Does anyone have strong objections to any of those three changes?

I have strong objections to outright deleting worthwhile content, yes, but I don't have a strong preference between (i) and (iii) because I don't really believe the page serves much use to beginners, and I don't believe the last 50-100 problems are the only hard ones. (As I said, I'll try the problems myself. They'll probably be useful for me - even the earlier ones. I'm KGS 3-4k. This should tell you something.)

[billywoods]

Oh, I missed this:

"4463 enclosure with 34 contact move" shows a number of variations with a few comments - what more do you want?

Some structure. It's a big mixture of common, simple variations, and variations that were played once in some random pro game (or even references to them without diagrams), and variations that nobody on SL seems to understand. There are comments like "black will play b to start a ko" where I can't find a ko, and unanswered questions.

Concretely: I'd like to keep well-established variations at the top of the page, preferably sensibly ordered somehow; questions about these or other variations can then collect at the bottom of the page, preferably under a 'discussion' heading, preferably all separate, preferably all well annotated. It's just a case of readability.

[daal]

but that's a discussion for another thread, perhaps.

Interesting way of illustrating the difficulties of maintaining a wiki

[billywoods]

Interesting way of illustrating the difficulties of maintaining a wiki

I take your point, but I'm not quite sure I agree.

There's nothing difficult about maintaining order and structure on a wiki, or indeed a forum thread. Everyone's just got to want order and structure. It's perfectly natural that, if I say "another thread, perhaps", and I get my request immediately ignored, I will have to make a difficult choice. In this case, I chose without hesitation to allow the derailment: irrelevant discussion isn't getting in the way of the content of this thread, because the content is in the first post, and I will take responsibility to edit relevant comments into the first post, at least for as long as I am active on L19. And that is how SL should be too: I actively encourage chat and discussion (obviously!), as long as it's kept separate from the main content, which should be regularly updated, well structured and easy to read.

Of course, there's the separate issue that this discussion merits its own thread. If jts or others still want to discuss it, I may ask a mod to split the thread. If it dies soon, probably no need.

[Phelan]

I couldn't even find the shape that this thread is about. The search function does its best, but if I don't know the name of the shape, and it doesn't happen to be indexed on a page I can find easily (both of which are common), the information is lost in the void.

I don't want to go into trying to identify and solve SL problems, even if I like seeing people put their efforts to it.
However, I noticed that no one seems to have mentioned that SL has a Position Search, that searches for a given pattern in the diagrams saved in the DB.

Did you try that?

[billywoods]

I couldn't even find the shape that this thread is about. The search function does its best, but if I don't know the name of the shape, and it doesn't happen to be indexed on a page I can find easily (both of which are common), the information is lost in the void.

I don't want to go into trying to identify and solve SL problems, even if I like seeing people put their efforts to it.
However, I noticed that no one seems to have mentioned that SL has a Position Search, that searches for a given pattern in the diagrams saved in the DB.

Did you try that?

Nope, I had never seen that search page before. I've just tried it: depending on whereabouts I put the stones and exactly which diagram I enter, I get this page on maido (quite frequently), no results (quite frequently), hundreds of irrelevant results (if I make the pattern area too small), or the cathedral page you linked to (very rarely). The page about maido looks related, but doesn't link to the page about cathedrals or vice-versa. So it's actually pretty hard to find.

I suspect this is just a general problem: you don't want the search function to be too precise or too loose in its searches, but unless you know the exact diagrams in the page you want, you're not sure how precise or loose to be with your input. If my second diagram (the obvious starting point) was part of the cathedral page it would be a little easier to find, but there are plenty of sensible searches in which that page still wouldn't appear (e.g. diagrams with extra surrounding stones like in my second spoiler).