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Best of HTLAL thread? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5789 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 23 07 November 2011 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've had a similar idea for a long time but have been unsure of how to put it into practice. You're right - there is a wealth of excellent information and insight in the forum archives and gathering it and presenting it in a more condensed, thematic form would be a fantastic resource and would really highlight the ideas and experiences of the forum participants over the last seven years. Topics might be either instructional, or for reference and/or language related entertainment.
Creating quality articles would, of course, require a serious investment of time and energy, but we could do it! We could start by trying a few articles and posting them in the collective writing room, then work as each other's peer editors. I'll try to gather info and write something and see if it works. Anyone else want to try drafting something? * I have to confess that I got the idea of an "article team" from another forum. It really worked well on that site to organize that site's many outstanding contributions. Edited by meramarina on 07 November 2011 at 7:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6292 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 10 of 23 07 November 2011 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I really don't think that votes are going to be an effective measure, because the
majority of them are seen in arguments, where a vote appears to be replacing an "I second this". The Esperanto threads are a good example, and no, I don't think they are the best forum posts. Instead, I would go with meramarina's approach and summarize the most valuable forum ideas in articles, while linking to the original thread. This also saves people the time of having to wade through pages upon pages of posts within that thread. And if someone takes the time to write an article about a topic (other than threads in which he's the major contributor), why, it must be that it's a valuable piece of information. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5203 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 11 of 23 07 November 2011 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was going to second leosmith's idea of votes, but it is true, as Sprachprofi has said, that some high-vote-count posts have to do with people taking sides in debates. Still, I doubt these posts often get more than 10 votes. Do we how many posts have gathered more than 10 votes on the whole site? Still, even if this worked, such posts can be very context-specific and without any organisation, it would be a weird consecutive read.
I don't know how we could implement this, but what if, instead of trophies, we were awarded a number of "best of HTLAL" picks? Say I get 4 picks, I can select up to 4 posts as top posts. Because I would only get to choose 4, I'd be unlikely to pick something very specific or that has to do with people taking sides in a debate. This way, no one has to sort through the best suggested posts -- we each individually do our own sorting. Edited by Arekkusu on 07 November 2011 at 8:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5789 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 23 07 November 2011 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, the idea as I have it so far, in very rough form, is that after some time and work from anyone who wants to contribute an article, that we'd assemble a collection. Included in these pieces would be some posts/ideas/particpants that do not receive the recognition they deserve from the voting system. Voting is only one way of highlighting good content. I'm proposing this as an complementary alternative, not to replace the voting feature, because that does work for some content but it cannot represent all of the really good stuff. Well-done articles would enhance the overall quality of the forum and add value to it. The material is already there,and we'd all benefit from better organization of it.
I have no idea where or how the results of this project could be featured on the forum as it exists now. Perhaps if we get started on it ideas will occur to us as we develop this idea. It's experimental for now, but it has potential, I think. More ideas! This is interesting! Edited by meramarina on 07 November 2011 at 9:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6978 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 13 of 23 07 November 2011 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | ||
It's a not a bad way to determine which posts go in, although it does have an exclusionary flaw which makes me hesitate from wholeheartedly supporting it. We know that trophies depend on number of votes received. If I remember correctly, one needs 51 votes to get the first trophy, 201 for the second, 501 for the third and 1001 for the fourth. Only the Administrator knows what the other thresholds are. According to the forum's tracking today, 574 out of the forum's 29586 members (1.8%) have more than 20 votes to their name. This means that under 2% of the membership would have a say in determining useful threads thanks to their having at least one trophy (i.e. these people have at least 51 votes to their name). Of the 136 people with more than 100 votes to their name (roughly interpreted as people with at least 1 trophy - although this excludes people with 51-99 votes to their name but with a trophy anyway), 8 members have 4 trophies (or more than 1000 votes). 8 out of 29586 is 0.027%... It seems too skewed to me. Because of the nature of this forum, I suspect that a big portion of the votes come from people who've never posted or those who have no trophies or few votes themselves. Doesn't it make more sense to allow those people a say in choosing what they find or have found as useful? How about a randomly selected pool? Let the dozen or so Moderators and/or the Administrator himself randomly pick 500 names from the membership and ask each person via PM to submit his/her top 3 picks for useful and relevant threads by a certain date. The condition is to exclude choices with wisecracks, political overtones or shouting matches over a language's supposed superiority or inferiority, past, present or future. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6292 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 14 of 23 07 November 2011 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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The vast majority of forum members never posted, and I really doubt that they are
following the forum all that closely, hence they are not suited to know which threads are the most worthy of recommendation. Theoretically, I would expect the oldest members to know best, but only if they have also kept reading the forum. So a criteria composed of seniority and activity level? Or we could collect anyone's suggestions and later make a poll to weed out bad suggestions - unlike typical forum polls, this one would have to allow people to vote for more than one item though. Edited by Sprachprofi on 07 November 2011 at 10:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5203 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 15 of 23 07 November 2011 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree with weighted preponderance and I think it's quite justified. If we used Meramarina's option, newer members wouldn't likely be writing articles either. However, Sprachprofi, I can easily imagine the number of posts becoming way too high for any kind of voting to be manageable. But what do we consider "Best of HTLAL"? The top 10%? Or is the top 1%? Members could be awarded picks based on the number of posts they've written. If we think Best of HTLAL would be the best post out of 100, then each 100 posts written yields a pick. Of course, that wouldn't take into account that some members may write less, yet write more Best of HTLAL posts than others who write more... Edited by Arekkusu on 07 November 2011 at 10:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4952 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 16 of 23 07 November 2011 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I guess a "Best of" thread would be fun to read, but how useful would it really be? As others have noted, there's so much in the archives that a lot of good info would probably fall through the cracks.
I'd much rather see the search function improved. As it is now, it's not very useful. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful |
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