Please, support proposal for a Lojban StackExchange site

[gleki.is...@gmail.com]

Please register and press "Commit!" button for our proposal for Lojban on StackExchange

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/83133/jbobau-joi-jboceu-lojban-language-and-culture

[karis]

Would you please explain the benefits and shortcomings of doing this.

[gleki.is...@gmail.com]

Em segunda-feira, 15 de agosto de 2016 15:24:19 UTC+3, karis escreveu:

Would you please explain the benefits and shortcomings of doing this.

mailing lists are not popular these days. having an allocated website with publicly available questions and answers can remove the need in geekish search for mailing list logs and get a database of questions ranging from asked by newcomers to advances ones and answers to them.

[karis]

I've never heard of stackechange. How do you plan on making newcomers, and others aware of it?

karis

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2016-08-15 16:01 GMT+03:00 karis <comca...@gmail.com>:

I've never heard of stackechange. How do you plan on making newcomers, and others aware of it?

StackExchange by itself is a popular place http://stackexchange.com/about

 

karis

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[Michael Turniansky]

StackExchange is a popular place for "preeminent site for programmers to find, ask, and answer questions about software development."  I am a programmer for the past 30+ years, and even I don't use this.  Nonetheless, since we don't want to just reach programmers, andlojban is not a programming language (although  it could be masaged into use as one) this is not the appropriate place to add lojban.

            --gejyspa

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[Timothy Lawrence]

The link said "Stack Overflow, the preeminent site for programmers" not Stack Exchange. Stack Overflow is just one sub-network of Stack Exchange.

See the current Stack Exchange sites here: http://stackexchange.com/sites

They have Latin, sports, religions, mythology and many natural languages as sub-networks, so Lojban would be a good candidate to fit in with all their other languages.

---

From: loj...@googlegroups.com <loj...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Michael Turniansky <mturn...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 16 August 2016 8:56 AM
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Please, support proposal for a Lojban StackExchange site

 

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[Michael Turniansky]

  Oh,yeah, that was on the very last line, after talking about programmers for a halfdozen sentences.. missed it.  Still don't use it,however, but I retract my "not appropriate" comment.

    --gejyspa

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[Alex Kozhevnikov]

Been lurking here for about two years since my last post, but this
just had to be replied to.

StackExchange is _the_ Q&A site - anyone who's interested in the
growth of Lojban should seriously explore/grok StackExchange,
preferably on a sub-site for a subject which interests them, before
dismissing this, because it would definitely help that cause.

Look, I'm 25, and I've been comfortable with email and email lists
like this for a long time. But for the majority of my age-peers, email
itself is this tertiary, neglected communication medium that they're
not exactly eager to use for regular communication. And email
distribution lists like this one? Of everyone I personally know, _no
one_ would chose a mailing list over StackExchange as a medium for
asking question in the pursuit of learning a new language. Here's an
example: I just tried asking my partner which she would prefer: she
doesn't really like or frequent StackExchange - but it took a good 20
minutes before she even understood what this kind of mailing list is,
let alone why anyone would want such a thing. I'm willing to blame
about half of that on me starting out with the assumption that she
knew/remembered what it was and thus not zeroing in on how to explain
it quickly enough, but it's illustrative. Mailing lists list this are
_alien_ to the population cohort that's taking over now. StackExchange
isn't a common household name like facebook yet, but it's not foreign
either.

karis: In terms of awareness/visibility, the current options are to
StackExchange like a candle is to a star. In terms of leaving a useful
record for the future, there's no real comparison. There are other
issues: because I often don't have time to read every lojban mailing
list email, I end up tuning them all out: that effect doesn't happen
with a StackExchange, because it's not a stream into your inbox, it's
a directory of questions with relevant answers, indexed by topic and
sorted by quality (as collectively determined by the masses). The real
question is how will the newcomers to the StackExchange discover this
mailing list, which I think _does_ offer value that a StackExchange
doesn't.

When I first joined this mailing list a few years ago, I asked if
dotside was widely accepted/used. I asked a question about signing
names and the exact arguments in favor of the slightly different ways
that I saw people signing their names. If I ever knew how to
find/search publicly available archives for this mailing list for
those questions, I don't remember how to do so now. Nor ever seen it
show up in a search engine query about it: but I do know that if there
was a lojban.stackexchange.com, it would be trivial to search for, it
would almost certainly start to show up on the first page of search
results for relevant keywords, and it would even be automatically
suggested to someone who starts typing up a similar question on the
site. A new StackExchange site will have vastly more exposure than
this mailing list, simply by sheer volume of traffic already going
there, the fact that it already has communities interested in both
natlangs and conlangs to whom mailing lists are about as
accessible/comfortable as floppy disks and cassette tapes, the fact
that popular questions get recommended/linked across all StackExchange
sites, and search-engine exposure (the vast majority of the time if
I'm looking for information about something that there's a
StackExchange site for, the StackExchange results show up first - the
only exceptions I can think of are obscure open-source technical
discussions, where very well established mailing lists with well-known
highly-ranked-in-search-engines web-accessible archives occasionally
still win out, sometimes.

gejyspa: It was after two (moderately long) sentences. That you missed
it suggests to me a serious bias against allocating another second or
two to genuinely properly evaluate the new thing being presented to
you, and/or towards dismissing it out-of-hand. And honestly, that you
think your 30+ years is an argument for its obscurity is
eyebrow-raising to me. Accumulating experience naturally means you'd
have less reason to seek out something like StackExchange than a new
software developer. And if you've had decades to develop a skillset
for acquiring knowledge in the absence of a resource like
StackOverflow/StackExchange, that would clearly reduce the likelihood
of finding it after it did appear: if you answer your questions by
reading the documentation/manpages, testing it out, reading through
the source-code and/or disassembly, stepping through with a debugger,
or asking another coworker, etc, and are comfortable enough navigating
that set of options, there's no reason why you'd ever find it.
Meanwhile the modern youth type their questions in a search engine in
obtusely natural-language sentences, and hope for the best. Which,
with the growth of things like StackExchange, has gradually become an
actually viable strategy.

Regards,
mu'o mi'e la .a,lekSANdr.koJEVni,kov. do'u

[la .altair.]

As my first post to the mailing list, I want to say that I'm hugely excited by the proposal to have a lojban stackexchange site. I'm excited for many of the same reasons as Alexander above. StackExchange is a highly optimized medium for creating clear and relevant question and answer snippets. It means that I can google for a question about lojban and actually get an answer. The answer will have just the right amount of context. It will be vetted and updated. Discussion will be minimized to make the actual answer stand out. 

There are many lojban sites and projects that I love, but lojban's overall web presence is extremely confusing. I just can't easily figure out which sites I'm supposed to read, which are archival, which are redundant, which are talking about older versions, etc. Mailing lists have their place, but I am vastly more likely to participate actively in a stackexchange site.

It will bring in proportionally more programmers, but that's always been lojban's main audience of appeal. The english language stackexchange is also really popular, so we might get lots of interested linguists and multilinguists as well.

Overall I just imagine a stackexchange site will do a lot to smooth out the learning curve for me. I can imagine getting interested enough to be a moderator or an author of longer writings.

[Michael Turniansky]

No, that I missed it suggests that they themselves still consider their target audience to be programmers.  Look, I'm not against question sites.  I'm a contributor to quora.com, for example.  But take a look at stackexchange's demographics.  They reach about 27 million unique visitors per month.  90% are male (do we really want lojban to be more male-loaded than it already is?), and 26% are in the united states (source: quantcast.com). Is that all we want to reach?  (yes, 73% of those are also in the sweet spot of 18-44yo) Email, OTOH, is read every day by about 1.2 billion people (out of the 4.3 billion who have it), and ISTM that if it's on a subject matter you are interested, you actually will read it. (case in point-- you are reading this, aren't you?)

And I agree that for asking a question, perhaps a mailing list isn't the best.  When I have a specific question, though, I don't limit myself to one site (and now that I have seen it, I have indeed read specific Q/A on stackexchange from time to time).  I use a search engine to see who has an/the best answer..

Like I said, I have no objection to you guys adding it to stackexchange, I just question why you would think that's better than email.

                     --gejyspa

[Michael Turniansky]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 8:44 AM, Michael Turniansky <mturn...@gmail.com> wrote:

No, that I missed it suggests that they themselves still consider their target audience to be programmers.  Look, I'm not against question sites.  I'm a contributor to quora.com, for example.  But take a look at stackexchange's demographics.  They reach about 27 million unique visitors per month (And, I notice, 24 million of that are specifically to stackoverflow).  90% are male (do we really want lojban to be more male-loaded than it already is?), and 26% are in the united states (source: quantcast.com). Is that all we want to reach?  (yes, 73% of those are also in the sweet spot of 18-44yo) Email, OTOH, is read every day by about 1.2 billion people (out of the 4.3 billion who have it), and ISTM that if it's on a subject matter you are interested, you actually will read it. (case in point-- you are reading this, aren't you?)

[Kyle Roucis]

90% are male (do we really want lojban to be more male-loaded than it already is?), and 26% are in the united states (source: quantcast.com). Is that all we want to reach?  (yes, 73% of those are also in the sweet spot of 18-44yo)

Wow, seriously? Making a Stack Exchange site for lojban is not mutually exclusive to other channels. Our community should not care *what* a nintadni is, just that they are interested in Lojban. Anyone is free to suggest more channels for spreading the word about Lojban, and providing more visibility and utility to the community.

I think it's sad that the lojban community harbors such shame for our demographic reach. Lojban has no rules about who can and cannot participate, and that is exactly as it should be. All are welcome, as long as they understand that it takes work, interest, and engagement to learn the language.

I think the StackExchange proposal is a great idea! It will provide a searchable and structured way to answer oft-times complex or controversial questions about lojban.

Kyle Roucis

www.kyleroucis.com

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[Amanda Babcock Furrow]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 08:44:33AM -0400, Michael Turniansky wrote:

> No, that I missed it suggests that they themselves still consider their
> target audience to be programmers. Look, I'm not against question sites.
> I'm a contributor to quora.com, for example. But take a look at
> stackexchange's demographics. They reach about 27 million unique visitors
> per month. 90% are male (do we really want lojban to be more male-loaded
> than it already is?), and 26% are in the united states (source:
> quantcast.com). Is that all we want to reach?

Hey, I'm female, and I'm a happy stackexchange user. Wait, stackexchange
doesn't know that! Why? Because the vast majority of stackexchange users
*aren't logged in* and might not even know they're on stackexchange. They
just googled something, and stackexchange came up as the best possible
answer on google. That happens everyday.

I think stackexchange might be counting its users who provide answers
rather than the huge anonymous crowd of people stopping briefly by to
*benefit* from those answers. We would be attracting passers-by, not
just heavy users.

I support the stackexchange proposal. There is no barrier to entry, unlike
the mailing list, but it will help casual browsers become more knowledgable
about our community and *find out* about the mailing list.

Now to go get a login so I can literally support it...

ni'o mi zanru lo nu lo jbobau kibystu cu da'i se jmina fi la .stakekstceinj.

mu'o mi'e la clakre

[karis]

Ok, please make sure I'm understanding correctly. It sounds like the number of people who like an answer determines its value. That makes sense in terms of how clearly it's written, but is there any way to monitor how accurate it is? It sounds to me as though StackExchange could encourage confusion about what is official or even the basic underpinnings of lojban with the usage of a few or even one person who gets on frequently and answers questions however they choose. That will, in my opinion, further encourage dialects that drift further and further apart. lojban was specifically created in ways to avoid this as much as possible.

karis

[Johannes Löthberg]

While that is certainly possible, hopefully there would be users that know Lojban well enough to notice that and they can either edit the answer, or flag it so that a moderator can take care of it.

On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 1:03 PM, karis <comca...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, please make sure I'm understanding correctly. It sounds like the number of people who like an answer determines its value. That makes sense in terms of how clearly it's written, but is there any way to monitor how accurate it is? It sounds to me as though StackExchange could encourage confusion about what is official or even the basic underpinnings of lojban with the usage of a few or even one person who gets on frequently and answers questions however they choose. That will, in my opinion, further encourage dialects that drift further and further apart. lojban was specifically created in ways to avoid this as much as possible.

karis

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2016-08-26 14:05 GMT+03:00 Johannes Löthberg <demi...@gmail.com>:

While that is certainly possible, hopefully there would be users that know Lojban well enough to notice that and they can either edit the answer, or flag it so that a moderator can take care of it.

Exactly. Moderation is possible.

 

On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 1:03 PM, karis <comca...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, please make sure I'm understanding correctly. It sounds like the number of people who like an answer determines its value. That makes sense in terms of how clearly it's written, but is there any way to monitor how accurate it is? It sounds to me as though StackExchange could encourage confusion about what is official or even the basic underpinnings of lojban with the usage of a few or even one person who gets on frequently and answers questions however they choose. That will, in my opinion, further encourage dialects that drift further and further apart. lojban was specifically created in ways to avoid this as much as possible.

karis

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