Slashdot Mirror
On the Subject of Slashdot Article Formatting
I'm not talking here about "Should a story be posted" or "I have 9 submissions about the same thing, which is best." Today I'm talking entirely about what I try to do when I decide that some story is good for Slashdot. What changes I think matter before posting it. Picking which stories to post is a big part of our job, matters of style and formatting matter too. Today I try to address what things I think are important before I click 'Save'.
The most important thing is what I'll call my most-important-link rule. Often submitters submit stories with like 8 links. I try to remove any link that doesn't substantially add to the article. For example linking ZDNet.com directly, and then a second URL to an article on ZDNet is redundant. Or if your link is to Joe's Blog, where he essentially says nothing except "I found this article". I'm not opposed to having several URLs in a story, but I want to make sure that they each serve a real purpose.
Next is proper anchor texting. I fix the hyper text on the vast majority of submissions. People link the word 'Here' or 'Article' or 'CNN' and I find that very frustrating. I want the hypertext to be the most appropriate 2-3 words that tell you exactly what you're clicking on. I think that is absolutely essential. Every URL should matter, and every bit of hypertext should tell you exactly what it is you're going to get when you click that mouse button.
Another key component in Slashdot article formatting is to strip off the extra text in a submission. I have a mental image of how long a Slashdot story is. Many submissions are to long or to short. So I get out the scissors and start looking for sentences to cut.
Often a submission starts with a clause that says something to the effect of "Hey guys, I found this URL that says...". I'd much prefer to cut that out and get right to the meat. Likewise many submissions end with a call to action... "We should get those guys" or "Lets show them what Slashdot can do about it!". I yank those sorts of things. As a general rule, I want the story to be short, sweet, and direct. Anything that distracts from that, I want to chop out.
Likewise some submissions are simply a URL and a single sentence. Since I want my articles to be around the same size, this is my chance to put in my own words. I'll try to add a joke or opinion. Or just a fact that I thought was worth sharing from the article itself. It's often these phrases that comment posters get most up in arms about: irate readers commenting that I should not be allowed to post my views.
I consider this opinion to be simply ludicrous. Slashdot was spawned from what today would be called a blog. To be more precise, it came from MY blog. Where I posted almost nothing but my own opinions. But more blatantly, I could simply rewrite the entire thing, say exactly what I want to say, and post it as an anonymous reader. Or as a made up nickname. I don't do any of those things. I simply add my 2 bits at the end to the occasional story. Not only do I think this is desirable on Slashdot, I think it's essential.
Now let us talk about one of my secondary concerns: spelling and grammar. Let me be clear. As you are probably well aware, I don't think these are as important as the things I mentioned above. I want a Slashdot story to be focused, directing your attention to the URL in question. It needs to be not to long, not to short. Links should be clear. Spelling and Grammar are secondary issues.
Slashdot is not the Wall Street Journal. It is not The New York Times. Slashdot is an informal meeting ground. A town hall. A pub. A bulletin board in the quad on campus. Here people might not properly capitalize a proper noun. They might transpose letters in 'thier'. They might use jargon that isn't in oxford. And all of that is OK with me.
Now sometimes a sentence doesn't parse to me. I'm not opposed to correcting the grammar in a sentence if it just doesn't work. But I simply don't think that a typo or grammar error is a make or break problem for a Slashdot story.
Many users routinely email me to complain about such errors. I'm usually fairly flexible on these matters. If the error is blazingly bad, I will often correct it. Of course some users like to email me to tell me how much Slashdot sucks, how fat and lazy I am, and how the most terrible thing in the history of Slashdot is the fact that the 4th story down contains the word 'to' when it ought to contain the word 'too'. That missing 'o' is the greatest travesty on-line today! It's hard to take that seriously. Especially when people are rude.
As an aside, for awhile we actually had an editor reading Slashdot articles and correcting grammatical mistakes. Turns out it doesn't really matter much. People found other things to complain about. It's almost as if some percentage of the population wants to complain. And they will find something to complain about no matter what. Perhaps by leaving a few typos on the site, I am making their day a little easier! Leave them some low hanging fruit I guess.
A a further side note to anyone who ever wants me to look at anything on Slashdot. If you e-mail me, include the URL. A comment mismoderated? A user who is misbehaving? A story with a typo? Include the URL. Don't say "The article about Novell" because there might be 3 in the last 2 days. Don't say "The last comment I posted" because it might be 2 hours and you might have posted since then. It takes you 3 seconds to cut and paste a URL. It might take me 3 minutes to find the content in question if you don't. That doesn't sound like much, but if it happens a couple dozen times, it adds up really fast. Do you want to stay an hour late at work today?
But back to the topic at hand, You are welcome to disagree with me on matters of grammar and spelling. And many of you do, very vocally in the forums. I would hope moderators would see such commentary as offtopic. A story about a new motherboard chipset has nothing to do with the proper use of "Its" and "It's".
The moderation system serves many purposes, but perhaps the most important is to provide a user, 24 hours later viewing at Score 2 or 3 an accurate pulse on the topic at hand. If the comment is not about the new motherboard chipset, that comment at least should not be modded 'insightful', and in many cases, ought to be modded offtopic of flamebait.
As with last week, I'm going to try to participate as best I can in the discussion. If major points arise I will update here. I think the real topic of this article is the formatting of Slashdot Stories: not moderation, the story selection process, and or story selection criteria. Please help by staying on topic so I can try to address these matters efficiently. And please don't email me directly- lets keep the discussion here in front of everyone so i don't have to answer dozens of you individually. Moderators, feel free to moderate good questions up to help me find them, and likewise if my answers are good, give those the thumbs up too so that readers can find them and save me from having to re-read questions i've answered already. Once again, I plan to do this as regularly as I can. If you have ideas for future discussions here, e-mail me... but I beg of you, wait until tomorrow!
Update Here is a further clarificatio on typo and grammar errors on Slashdot. I believe that Slashdot is a somewhat schizo place. A dozen voices stand side by side on the main page. Some of them will have proper grammar. Others won't. Just like a mailing list. Just like crappily written comments in some ancient piece of source code. Just like that email jotted out in seconds. Just like some bit of IRC chat you just read a few minutes ago.
Simply hiring a copy editor to purge these changes fundamentally alters the personality of the site, and my opinion is that alteration is for the worse. It might improve clarity to some percentage of readers who truthfully can't parse bad grammar or spelling. Likewise it might cut down on some offtopic meta threads in the forums. But the I think that it changes the flavor. The feeling. The tone of Slashdot.
Some people disagree with me. You are welcome to do so.
Another note about URL formatting. An interesting thread spawned in there about what text makes a proper hyper link. Given the example string:
CNN has an article about a sticky widget
What text should be linked?
There are 2 potential URLs in here, a CNN article, and the text 'CNN'. Some users think the words CNN should link to an article. Other users might link CNN directly to CNN, and the word 'article' to the article in question.
My stylistic preference is to only link 'a sticky widget' to the article. Not to link CNN directly to CNN.com (that link is redundant- I want only the most important links. And not 'article' because that tells you nothing about what you are clicking on.
Meta discussion on Slashdot is a substantial issue we intend to address in the moderation system redesign. Things like typos and grammar have a place on Slashdot, but today that place can only be described as 'Offtopic'. (And I think all moderators and meta moderators should keep that in mind). Our plans for dealing with 'Meta' discussion are best left for another editorial. In fact, I have one half written. Maybe next week.
Bravo Taco! Good points well made.
I would like to take slight issue about the importance of spelling and grammar, especially in the slashdot article itself. To your main point, the article is about something, not spelling and grammar. That is true. But correct spelling and grammar lend accuracy to the article and are not ancillary niceties. Too much carelessness around grammar and spelling leads to muddier thinking and sometimes requires extra interpretation from the readers.
Case in point from this very article, ninth paragraph, describing how long a slashdot article must be:
While it's mostly clear what you mean, the sentence could take on different meaning. For example, the "It needs to be not to long" could (easily in fact) be interpreted to mean the length of the article should be appropriate as not to leave the reader "longing" for more. And, the "not to short." could mean the article should have appropriate length to assure you have not "shorted" the reader. Nuances, yes, but appropriate (not perfect) grammar is important.
Again, thanks for the illumination of publishing policy. It really is useful!
Taco's "review" on article formatting is one that many of us should use and learn from -- especially anyone with a blog or an opinion site themselves.
The most important thing is what I'll call my most-important-link rule
I've actually been watching how articles are "formatted" for the past 2 months and tried to mimic it on one of my blogs. The result? More people clicking within that blog, staying on for up to 1/2 hour per visit. This is a good thing, it means that people like the content for whatever reason. If you're linking to other sites, make sure you find the link that really has all the information in total. Do some google searches before settling on the link you think is good. Don't link to 10 different sites all offering the same general information.
Next is proper anchor texting. I fix the hyper text on the vast majority of submissions.
I find that another of my blogs has better content than the previous, but it isn't read very deeply (if even past 1 page). I seriously believe this is because I would link to "here" or "article" instead of linking to "the housing bubble is about to burst."
Another key component in Slashdot article formatting is to strip off the extra text in a submission.
Of the 12 articles I've submitted to slashdot, the 3 that were accepted were posted almost verbatim -- I actually think it was because I left the editor with a good direction and a good article at link's end. The ones they rejected often were short articles, or opinion pieces with links to other sites with deeper information. I'm actually glad the editor at the time went to the link and read it (or probably did). Looking back, those submissions should have been rejected. I'd love to see an option on slashdot -- a checkbox saying "If rejected, show complete submission on user page as journal entry" so others can moderate our submissions on our journals. They won't moderate if this article is worthy, just comment on the submission. I'd love to know what others think about some of my submissions.
Anything that distracts from that, I want to chop out.
If you're a blogger, definitely listen to the part of Taco's "review" that talks about making generic comments like "I found this" or "Let's get these guys!" I hate blogs that write these little side comments. If I go to a site because of an opinion, I like to stick with sites that offer non-fluff text written by the opinion writer. I've seen newspaper columns that are all fluff content like that, and it drives me crazy.
It's almost as if some percentage of the population wants to complain.
I believe that to be true. The more sites (/blogs) that I work on, mine or those of others, the more complaints I see from the same people, even between two totally different sites. I have one grammar nazi (I actually appreciate his e-mails even if I don't adapt) who has probably spent hours criticizing my grammar on different sites (and on slashdot). What is the old cliche about one's importance if others are criticizing you? By the way, Google Toolbar's spell checker is pretty amazing, I'm trying to make it a habit to use it on every textbox.
Side topic:
I tried Digg, but I didn't like the feel of it. Democracy, to me, is not a good solution for posting articles. I like having someone doing some work, and I completely understand the dupes we see (I've submitted a few in my life, thankfully none were accepted). Sometimes I'll post something insightful and end up with 100 e-mails in my Inbox from slashdot users, so I can completely understand how the average editor here is a bit overwhelmed.
My final remark is one question I haven't seen an answer to -- are slashdot editors paid, and is it reasonable compared to the amount of work they perform? If they're not paid (or if they're employees of the bigger picture), why do they put up with us?
Paragraph 5 : Many submissions are to long or to short. ..the fact that the 4th story down contains the word 'to' when it ought to contain the word 'too'. That missing 'o' is the greatest travesty on-line today!
:)
Paragraph 11 :
I don't care too much for exact spelling either. (I spawned an entire thread about my misspelling of segue.), but I couldn't resist pointing this out.
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
I must have come to the site instantly as this was posted, beacuse the first time I clicked on "On the Subject of Slashdot Article Formatting", I got "Nothing to see here, please move along". I gave it a +5 funny.
As an aside, for awhile we actually had an editor reading Slashdot articles and correcting grammatical mistakes. Turns out it doesn't really matter much. People found other things to complain about. It's almost as if some percentage of the population wants to complain. And they will find something to complain about no matter what. Perhaps by leaving a few typos on the site, I am making their day a little easier! Leave them some low hanging fruit I guess.
I have a complaint, why is it that we are always fed the low hanging fruit? Is the high-hanging fruit reserved only for those who can reach it?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Next is proper anchor texting. I fix the hyper text on the vast majority of submissions. People link the word 'Here' or 'Article' or 'CNN' and I find that very frustrating. I want the hypertext to be the most appropriate 2-3 words that tell you exactly what you're clicking on. I think that is absolutely essential. Every URL should matter, and every bit of hypertext should tell you exactly what it is you're going to get when you click that mouse button.
This is the single most frustrating thing I hate about the modification of stories submitted to slashdot. Half the time a link of 'Here', or the website name would be much better than you trying to make it part of the context of the sentence. I've clicked on links that lead to nothing at all pretaining to the word you anchored it against. Heck, I'd even be happier if the links were just a list at the end of the story, not embedded within it. It's supposed to be a summary, not a webpage.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Haha. A big meta-bravo to you! (Seriously.)
Now let us talk about one of my secondary concerns: spelling and grammar. Let me be clear. As you are probably well aware, I don't think these are as important as the things I mentioned above. I want a Slashdot story to be focused, directing your attention to the URL in question. It needs to be not to long, not to short. Links should be clear. Spelling and Grammar are secondary issues.
Slashdot posts, what, maybe two dozen "stories" a day? To support this Slashdot has a crew of paid, therefore professional, "editors". Is it really that much to ask that rudimentary spelling and grammar rules are obeyed?
What's up guys? Why have you suddenly started "talking" to us? And for the record, I like it. I think there should be more direct communicaiton to your readers like this.
Before the inevitable crush of people pointing out the difference between too and to, let me just say that slashdot story lenths are perfect. Enough so you get the jist, but don't need to click if you aren't more interested. It's probably one of the best features of the site, and why I come back. (other than the flame wars.)
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Even Taco is running into problems with the dups. :-)
You failed to capitalize "Perhaps," and the noun "read-through" is hyphenated.
Maybe people should stop submitting articles. I see not other fix.
Not meant to be critical, but I'm wondering if you're letting the flames and hate mail about posted articles get to your head. A good book to read is the 7 Habits of Highly effective people (ISBN: 0743269519 at your favorite bookstore). However in short from that book, I'm wondering whether or not you're letting outside factors you can't really control get to you. Unfortunately there will always be people who will simply not choose to read or ignore what you have to say and will always send you hate mail and flames regarding this. Don't let it get to your head, ever, or they've won.
Post the articles you enjoy, and others will follow; It's that simple really...
...in bed
I mean, who's complaining about your article formatting? The only thing I see people complaining about in this dept are mistakes in grammar, spelling, and whatnot. And as you said yourself, you're human and make mistakes. I'm just not seeing a relevant discussion here... Your FAQ already states your good reasons why you reformat people's submissions.
I'm glad you're making posts "on the subject of Slashdot matters" but this one is a total non issue IMHO. Why don't we talk about more pressing issues like giving people reasons for their story's rejection so as to better improve that person's submissions in the future, or the problems with moderation, or other ACTUAL hot topic Slashdot issues?
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Dude! So make this a Stickie! Some1 make it a sticky!
Wait, damn. This is a blog, not a forum.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
Personally, I like articles that know the difference between "to" and "too"! Grammar is important!
How would I react to a television broadcaster saying that lighting and focus weren't all that important? Or a radio station claiming that static was okay? Proper spelling, grammar, and usage are easy compared to the syntax of a programming language or shell. Get them right and I'll take you more seriously.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
My biggest complaint is when the submitter blatantly trolls in the headlines. Not just an opinion, but an opinion that draws the ire of others. I'm not saying the opinion had by the editor, but the original submitter. I really wish you guys could consider rewriting or simply removing that stuff.
Oh, and bravo on all this communication stuff, Taco. You really kill conspiracy theorists when you are open with us. That way we get to see the people behind the curtain, instead of just the black box.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
You misspelled "reeks."
Don't care to see posts about how they post news. Can we move this to a 'admin.slashdot.org' section or something? Seriously I don't really give a crap about administrative duties at slashdot, just what the daily news is.
I don't have time right now to make some meaningful commentary, but since that never stopped anyone here I'll just say that I appreciate that you, Taco, decided to run this series of articles. Hopefully they would give some useful feedback you might use to improve /. or at least give the users some space where discussing these issues isn't offtopic.
On occasion, I've seen the submitter of a story complain in the comments about how what they submitted had been drastically changed in content, although still attributed to the submitter. I'm afraid I haven't got any links handy (anyone?), but should this really be allowed?
I have for a long time thought that being a Slashdot editor is one of the world's easiest jobs, but held back due to the possibility that there was more to it than I thought. This long description of a task that anyone with a high school degree should be able to perform confirms my original impression.
Rob, with all due respect, I am not impressed. Slashdot would be so much better if you all would either a) act like real editors (e.g. fact check, give feedback to submitters, spelling/grammar check), or b) admit that you are basically superfluous and get out of the way (e.g. like Digg).
At the very least, please improve your writing skills. Even in a "pub" like Slashdot, communicating well is important.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
If this is a communal meeting ground, why is it owned by OSDN (a for profit corporation last I checked) showing ads and completely opaque to most of its readers (who get quite frustrated when the admin's answers don't add up or when they're not present at all)?
Face it, Taco: This is a FOR PROFIT site. Once you've transformed something into a business you can't take it back or plead that it's "communal" in some way. Is it too much to expect that you make no more than one typo a week-one more than BBC News seems to make?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
This sentence does not make sense. Did you think before you hit save?
most of the people who work behind the scenes are in fact human
What do you mean by MOST??!! Not ALL of your editors are human? What creatures are being employed here?
Hellspawned demons? Blood-thirsty Aliens? Evil robots? Republicans?
WE HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW!
It's nice to see CmdrTaco participating in the site so actively again. The humans behind /. are why I started reading it (and from time to time, avoided it entirely :)) and it's nice to see active participation beyond just editing.
Good post, Taco. Digg!
"Next is proper anchor texting. I fix the hyper text on the vast majority of submissions. People link the word 'Here' or 'Article' or 'CNN' and I find that very frustrating. I want the hypertext to be the most appropriate 2-3 words that tell you exactly what you're clicking on. I think that is absolutely essential. Every URL should matter, and every bit of hypertext should tell you exactly what it is you're going to get when you click that mouse button."
I have submitted quite a few stories that read as follows: ' Joe guy went to the store and webcammed about it! you can access his webcam here ' with here being a link.
I do not see whats wrong with that. If you are reading the whole sentance you can easily see exactly what I mean. That submissions are rejected because of a personal preference seems very shallow. I hate it when multiple words are links actually as it pulls you out of the paragraph you are reading and makes you think about going somewhere else, instead of finishing what you are currently reading.
I find it very disapointing that because of a personal style preference by the editors, submissions are being rejected. Please argue why it is wrong to link just the word 'link'. If the reader is paying attention i see no reason for them to be fouled up by this.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
While I agree with some of the points you make, some others not so much.
4 38339
1). You make the point that you prefer to use relevent keywords in the story to be the link to the article, thinking that it "gives the user an idea of what they are clicking". I think it does the opposite. They already know the topic from reading the short paragraph on slashdot, what they want to know is what SOURCE they are clicking. Is it a blog? Is it an article? is it just a link to the MAIN PAGE of a news site? I typically just click all the links on an interesting story, and I'm irritated when half of them are duplicates of eachother or link to www.cnn.com with no story ID, just because CNN was an interesting word.
2). Spelling and Grammar aren't important? Quite often an article will be posted where the grammar is so off that I have to reread it a few times to guess what they meant to say. Sure the non-english speakers just think every word that sounds the same is, but the rest of us actually read the words and have a tough time following it. You say something to the effect of "Spelling and Grammar aren't as important as the article", but in that case, why not correct the errors that clearly detract from the article? If I see an article with the headline that uses the wrong "your", it makes me embarassed to even be reading the page, forget what the article says. If I get a resume with bad grammar, it goes in the garbage. It takes just as much time to write an article correctly as incorrectly, and if you have to read/edit them anyway, why not fix the glaring mistakes?
If you don't want it to be such a pain, why not just have a spell-check? Every other site on the internet has a spell check. It might still miss some of the less-obvious problems, but it will catch typos and similar issues.
While we're at it, why not an "intelligent html" edit mode? I like being able to add links, but I also like being able to hit enter to make a linebreak (I can't tell you how many times I've written a comment, decided to add a link, and then had to go through and add
to every line so that it didn't look like garbage)
Also, see my comment on the spelling/grammar from the last CmdrTaco rant:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173521&cid=14
For reference only, and to aid the future submitters?
/. post.
It doesn't need to include hyperlinks, just underline the "link" and after it we see [the_original_domain.org], as if it were a normal
It looks to me like the fundamental disconnect here is that the editors of Slashdot still perceive the site to be their blog. Many of the users believe it to have graduated from that to a legitimate news source, and complain when it doesn't live up to the mechanistic standards of, say, CNN. Google News thinks it's a news source and treats it in the same manner as it does CNN - but those who run Slashdot apparently don't hold it to that high a standard.
There's nothing wrong with this, but it might shut people up if they were reminded of the purpose of the site as intended by its makers. So, CmdrTaco, what exactly is Slashdot?
This may be obvious but sometimes it's painfully obvious that the editor just doesn't bother actually reading the article and will submit an article that isn't a short blurb but plainly false and/or flame bait.
It may be hard work but a quick glance and a short two paragraph read isn't gonna kill anyone.
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
You're choosing mediocrity.
Since there are a million grammar / spelling checkers out there, and they can be programatically applied (aspell perl library is one example), why NOT use them?
It's far more difficult to come up with reasons NOT to do the right thing. The paragraphs of effort that you just expended to discuss spelling errors, the countless comments you've read about spelling errors...
They're bits of your life that you've whittled away.
Now, compound that by adding in MODERATOR TIME. Now compound that by adding READER TIME.
Yes, people may have started to complain about something else. YES, that might always be true.
I don't care that there are complainers about topic X. I care that it's the same complaint, for years, and that it's a relatively easy problem to solve.
I have to wonder why you don't.
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
I think its not the mode of editing that gets readers up in arms. It's that in mainstream media, the job which is done by a slashdot "editor" is split between two people:
1. Journalist. This person looks at thousands of potential stories and fights between all of the ways in which one story can be written. They're most interested in delivering interesting product as quickly as possible and making their own name.
2. Editor. This person looks at one version of each story, and makes decisions about only a few versions of the final format. They care about ethics, reputation of the firm, and story selection for balance over an extended time.
As far as I can see, a lot of slashdot's problems come from having no editor.
Every time I see an "editor" complain that there's no way to avoid dupes because they look at a hundred versions of the same story, I think that slashdot needs an editor.
Every time I see an "editor" complain that spelling and grammar checking should come second to getting stories out there, I think slashdot needs an editor.
Every time I see an "editor" explain that posting an ethically dubiously connected or astroturfing story was ok so that the story gets out there, I think slashdot needs an editor.
Slashdot needs to grow up. Even though it started as Rob's blog, it's been years since the majority of users would accept that quality. "Daddy pants" is not a QA method for adults, and there is easily a hundred years of experience in the media industry about how not to make the kind of errors which slashdot regularly makes.
lol.
why is it every time some idiot bitches about spelling or grammar, he makes a spelling mistake. good job d00d!
Make sure it's not a dupe. It's very annoying to read the same story twice, with minor variations.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The biggest problem with dupes is all the inane "this is a dupe" posts. After the first "this is a dupe" post, all subsequent posts should receive an automatic -5 Redundant score.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
While I see your point that this is an informal forum and, as such, probably doesn't deserve highly focused editorial intervention with regard to grammar and spelling, there is a limit.
I, for one, find poorly written articles (at least with regard to copious misspellings and grammatical errors) actually pretty tiring to read. You want to understand what the author is trying to convey, not spend your time tripping over the grammatical and lexicographic speed bumps he/she is unintentionally putting in your way. Of course, I don't expect you or anyone else at Slashdot to be responsible for correcting it.
The moderation system serves many purposes, but perhaps the most important is to provide a user, 24 hours later viewing at Score 2 or 3 an accurate pulse on the topic at hand. If the comment is not about the new motherboard chipset, that comment at least should not be modded 'insightful', and in many cases, ought to be modded offtopic of flamebait.
The way slashdot works do not help for this, after 24 hours a story is not on the frontpage. Front page sotries are tend to live like 4 hours. People with mod points (the majority) will mod up and down only the front page stories.
In the last months I have seen stories in the front page that should not be there. Front page stories should be *really interesing* stuff, or stuff that may matter most people. I find that the Games section is more or less well managed by Zonk, I mean, I go quite often to games.slashdot and see some good stories about games.
About the comments, there are comments that are indeed off topic but nonetheless they are interesting. I have found really interesting sites/software digging on slashdot comments. And sometimes people do some offtopic plug to ask about something slightly releated to the topic but, nevertheless the information is interesting (For example a thread on IBS that I plugged on a stomach ulcer story.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Hee, lotsa luck- he made it clear that spelling and grammar are unimportant. Sheesh, the occasional typo wouldn't matter, but Slashdot is on a mission to continually lower the bar. Hey, who needs literacy anyway? Does it get you dates with supermodels? No? Then why bother? :P
we will end no whine before its time
...I look forward to reading it again in a couple of days when it's duped!
:-)
Hey, I kid, I kid!
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
No single minor gaffe makes a story worthless, but the cumulative effect vitiates the site's attempt to show any sort of professional face to the world.
If you're already paring back links and language, how hard would it be to pay a tiny bit of attention to language? You've only got five or six sentences to deal with, having pared things back as you describe, but the stuff on the home page is routinely riddled with phrasing and spelling worthy of middle school. That looks amateurish and degrades the site.
Posts are a different matter, people can be more casual there. The stories ought to be clean.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
When the subscribers email you about corrections, like spelling, before the story hits the main site, could you fix it? Or does this already happen.
I'm not quite sure exactly what you really want here. To be honest, I'm never quite sure how to anchor hypertext. It's always been up in the air for me. For example, take the following:
How should this be marked up? What's your preferred style?
Do you have trouble with any of them? How would you like it done? Should the article even be linked to in this sentence?
May the Maths Be with you!
zomg, you overaggroed AGAIN.
-cze
But I was intrigued by his mention of the huge number of people who mail him complaining about things. I'd be fascinated to know more about what people dislike about the site.
Might it be interesting to create a semi-regular Feedback topic? In the same vein as The Register's letter's column?
This would contain things like: in the past week, 80% of people complained about grammar, 15% complained about dupes, 2% of people were just incoherent, and 3% of people complained about the lack of Natalie Portman jokes these days. Plus, of course, a careful selection of the more amusing of the lunatic postings. It would also contain a summary of what people liked about the site, such as changes in formatting, policy changes, etc.
One of the things that makes a community is community involvement. In the past, Slashdot did have a reputation for not caring what its community thought, which is one of the reasons I really like these new About Slashdot articles. It's interesting to know what the editors think about things, and likewise it's interesting to know what people like and dislike about the place. It would bring out community spirit.
Does this make any sense?
I fix the hyper text on the vast majority of submissions. People link the word 'Here' or 'Article' or 'CNN' and I find that very frustrating.
Has it ever occured to you that the reason the 'vast majority of submissions' do this is beacuse it's right and you are wrong?
The correct way to link to CNN is (unsurprisingly) to link the word CNN, not pick some random adjective in the story, and the correct way to link to the relevant article is to link the word 'article'.
I'm thoroughly fed up with playing 'guess where clicking on this phrase will take me' with Slashdot. Slashdot's policy of strewing links about in a pseudo random way is the reason I have Firefox's status bar on by default.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
So far, these sound like good guidelines on what makes a Slashdot story. I've got a couple of ideas on this one that might help the editors out:
1. The guidelines listed above should get listed in the story submission page, so that everyone knows what they are. A lot of them are there already, but a few aren't.
2. Clarify what "not too long, not too short" means. Maybe even implement something like the lameness filter to enforce the rules.
3. We should consider making use of spell-checker during the preview stage. This is obviously a fairly major undertaking if the tools don't already exist out there.
4. Finally, I'd recommend a place for the editors to provide feedback on rejected stories. The idea is that instead of the user seeing just "Rejected" next to a rejected story, they get "Rejected - bad grammer", "Rejected - broken link", "Rejected - dupe", etc. That encourages people to submit better stories and reduce complaints about rejected stories.
I am officially gone from
Slashdot's crack squad of copy editing penguins. Here they are hard at workagain.
FYI, the linked page has a flash game if you care about such things.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
When not much attention paid to teh spelling, it adds to the larfs we get.
Don't say "The article about Novell" because there might be 3 in the last 2 days.
Is that a distinct count?
You'd think the guy would at least have some pride. If I knew that thousands of people were going to read my writing, I'd sure as hell spend some time making sure I don't embarrass myself.
I know he comes from the tech side (like most of us), but he's had 10 YEARS to teach himself how to write and edit English. If he'd show the slightest interest in learning to do this, I'd cut him more slack.
Take the very title of this article on article "formatting". After all this time, Rob still doesn't understand the difference between formatting (which is only about visual presentation of text) and editing (which is about getting the syntax and semantics right). It's sad for him, and it reflects poorly on anyone who cares about Slashdot.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Once i went to the store to buy two tutus, but the only two were too short. To another tutu store i went for my two tutus. This one had too many two-tutu packs for sale, meaning to choose, i'd have to wade through too many two-tutu packs. To hell with too many two-tutu packs i say.
I think Slashdot is pretty cool like it is. I like the way the stories are presented, and the occational spelling stuff just makes it better, IMHO. I'm in it at least reading every day, tho I might not actually post...
Keep up the good work - this is a really great site!
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
Aha... *gets out his complaint sending application*
Aww crap... spoil all my fun!
I think the greatest disconnect here perhaps is that I see Slashdot as something bigger and greater than you see it as. I see Slashdot as an important site that really matters to the tech community. Actually somewhat prestigious. I would want the editor to try to care about too vs to. (I mean, as an editor, you gotta go at least for the low hanging fruit.) Now I understand that spelling/grammar isn't a top priority, but the feel I got from your post was that it was of low value. I really wish it was of more value to you, because your site is of value to me.
As far as the rest of the stuff, like the cleanup on articles, it all sounds like good common sense stuff. You really should put that on the Submit Story page if it is not already there.
In fact, if you wanted to save yourself time, you could add checkboxes (default: unchecked) with the things you are looking for users to do, and have them check them off before submitting (to at least confirm they've read it). The small individual items you mentioned, like lead in, length, anchoring, etc. That part is my opinion, and I can understand it being controversial.
So I guess what I wanted to say is, thanks for the insight on the story massaging process. +5, Informative. I just wish our expectations matches as far as some of the importance of grammar/spelling. (Given, you're right about complainers.)
BTW... do you like adding in your own words, or would you rather we submit larger text with our stories and let you trim?
usually, the article is posted multiple times (dupes) which allow for corrections to be made. So the dupes are actually corrections of errors, yeah, that's it.
For example, i'd really like to know how the submission process works, how you review links, how you check for duplicates and inaccuracies, what help you have with the Slashcode base in finding dupes, how you plan to change the process (and Slashcode) in the future to reduce the number of duplicates and what the best way is to feed back when an article is incorrect, duplicate or something else.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
"...I meant to do that... Honestly."
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Great points and may I say up front how great these articles are.
:) ). These all add to the discussion, and that's the great part of slashdot stories.
I agree wholeheartedly with your priorities in saving a story, so I won't go on about them. Here's the only two changes I would make.
1. I like the editorial opinions/questions at the end of the story blurb and I fully agree they should stay. What I don't like is when they are biased and/or obvious flamebait. This accomplished two things. Firstly, you (the editor/slashdot) lose credibility and it just doesn't look professional. Secondly, you incite the trolls which detracts from the discussion, not adds to it which is really the whole point of an editorial comment. Ask a question, give an interesting comment on the linked story (encouraging others to actually RTFM!), give your opinion on a product (lame
2. I think grammar/spelling should have more importance than it is given. Bad spelling and bad grammar just looks unprofessional. Ok, slashdot is not the wall street journal or the new york times, but it does have credibility in it's field. There are some really interesting scientific discussions on here that attract world experts who genuinely know the complexities of subjects many others can't even spell. Bad spelling/grammar in the story blurb undermines all of this credibility and professionalism.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
I used to pay for a /. subscription. I no longer do due to all the dupes and errors.
The editors like of editing is costing you and the company you work for money.
Exactly. Dead fricking on.
Essentially Taco's argument here is that the site started as his blog, and that he wants to continue to regard it as the equivalent (to use your analogy) to a cable access talk show, rather than a polished source of news.
There's a middle ground, but the effort to clean up language would be so very, very beneath him. Apparently he wouldn't care how the picture quality was on his cable access station, and it's so very cool and informal of him not to give a rip, because he's really a content man.
I'm not a paying subscriber. Paying for a service entails certain expectations that Slashdot isn't meeting at the moment. The glaringly apparent laziness of the editors is the biggest mark against the site.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
And I tougth CmdTaco was an options poll!
Â_Â
It would be nice to see these posts from the last few weeks saved somewhere in the faq or somewhere that newer readers could find them.. I've submitted a few stories, and always sorta wondered what, exactly, the person reading it on the otherside wanted to see. Not to mention the various other matters that you've discussed, that I'm sure other new readers would find enlightening.
It almost seems to me that a line like that was put in just to stir you people up. The point Taco is trying to make here is that accidentally using "to" instead of "too" isn't that big of a deal. I find it ridiculous that people get so worked up over that little "o" missing. I knew what he meant when I read it and that is all that matters. If you parse a sentence a certain way and it doesn't make sense you take the extra two seconds and read through it again as if the "to" was a "too."
I mean seriously, the guy posts a whole article on this kind of thing and you make a comment like that, to be honest blinder that was pretty dick. Complaining about the editors isn't going to get you anywhere.
One of the things that drives me crazy is when the Slashdot article reads something like "Soandso writes 'blah blah blah etc etc blah blah blah'..." However, on closer inspection one sees that Soandso did not actually write the original text "blah blah blah" but rather pulled it directly from the linked article without paraphrasing.
This may seem a small thing, but I work in a field where one lives and dies by one's word and original ideas. It is anthama to take someone elses words and I would hope that the editors here try and correct the attributions whenever it is at all possible.
Download my free songs!
Thank heavens for that. Now that you put it in perspective, I guess I'd prefer dupes over fake stories any day.
I find the default italic font style for posted articles to be difficult to read in the amount of text posted. Would be much easier to read using a non-italic font.
I recall reading somewhere on the site a while back that I can set up my own stylesheet for the site, which would probably allow me to do away with the italics. But that takes extra effort I really don't have time for. I just want information quickly...
I know you have always stated that this will never happen but certain economic pressures might cause you to rethink the issue. Slashdot is still #1 but for how long? Really Slashdot is no longer a news site but like you said a community board. Before I could get all my geek news in some timely fashion from Slashdot but now your competitors do it better. You remain a popular site because of the large following you have accumulated over the years. Mainly because you were the first and the only site of this nature for some time. I think you need to realize this is why you continue to have success. There are other sites that have better features and are better designed. You can only run on your legacy for so long. So in summary when we will see new features?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
If your contribution to an article is nothing more than to point out the difference between too and to, then that's probably about as much as you contribute to society. I used to work as a consultant to a local organization. There was this one lady that ALWAYS did that. No one in that office really cared about spelling and grammer mistakes for stuff that stayed inter-office except her. It made everyone's job so much more laborious to have to go through this lady's emails and read about the proper usage of a semicolon. No one really gave a shit, because it never changed the message trying to be brought. And really, that's all she did. I never saw her actually contribute useful opinions or content to projects. Just sit back be critical of everyone's spelling and grammer. To this day I can't think of one useful contribution she ever made.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I read this last week.
I always have to hover over the links on Slashdot to see which one is the article discussed.
Here a rule: Links should be a noun (or noun phrase) that tell you where the link will take you.
Taco gets it wrong.
"Read through" doesn't necessarily have to be hyphenated. "Read" could be the noun, while "through" is a modifying adjective. He's giving it another read, and that read goes through the text. One must be careful not to correct that which is not incorrect.
You asked for matters to be pointed out if they need attention.
Is there possibily somethign wrong with the "Submit Article" function.
I submitted an article and here is the status
04:50 PM -- Wednesday July 06 2005 Pending
That's 7 months ago. Is something stuck in my profile? Or is the article submission that far behind in being approved/denied?
Thanks for attempting to be more active so that simply questions and matters such as this can be addressed.
Henry
Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
"As an aside, for awhile we actually had an editor reading Slashdot articles and correcting grammatical mistakes."
Should they REALLY be called 'editors' if they don't read the articles? Maybe Cut-n-Paste Monkey's?
You must be new here;-)
Seriously though there is a lot of merit to not only that, but what Taco has to say about grammar. The story and the information therein is the most important part. The packaging is secondary. I agree with that completely.
And thanks again, CmdrTaco, for posting your thoughts on this.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I can't say I ever thought SlashDot articles were ever edited or formatted. They pretty much look like a quick copy/paste from a half-thought-out text-only email.
Need I say more, your honor?
Replace every second occurence of "then" with "than".
I'm sorry Taco ... I couldn't finish your points. I'm not a grammar nazi, nor do I have a problem with the occasional typo. I do have a problem with you espousing your role as an editor and in doing so, writing an article that would make any entry level editor cringe. Being critical here, it looks like you typed up the article, did a rudimentary spell check, and then published it. Proofreading seems to be a lost art in your office.
I don't want to sound harsh, but your lack of language command undercuts the points you are trying to make with it. Whether you like it or not, people judge other people by their communication skills. This holds especially true on a platform that speaks to millions individuals.
Do yourself a favor. Take a class or two. Relearn old concepts. There is no shame in improving your skillset. When you are finished, I will listen to your theories on Slashdot editing. Right now, you sound like a punter giving pitching lessons or a fish teaching an eagle to fly.
From the Slashdot book review guidelines:
It's not just the pedants who are frustrated by poor English, think of your readers for whom English is a second language. It might be relatively easy for native speakers to deduce what you are trying to say, but I don't think it's so easy for everybody else.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
As seen in a Park District publication I got in the mail the other day:
"If you find a mistake in this publication, please consider that they are there for a purpose. We publish something for everyone and some people are always looking for mistakes."
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
"most of the people who work behind the scenes are in fact human
What do you mean by MOST??!! Not ALL of your editors are human? What creatures are being employed here?"
Well, I believe that they still keep Cowboy Neil on staff.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Maybe when you add stuff to a submission, just put the original submission (or the cleaned-up trimmed original submission) first, after the "so-and-so writes...." and then put "...; CmdrTaco adds...." second. That way what you said is clearly separated from what the original guy said, and, of course, clearly separated from TFA itself. I suspect if any reasoning homonids are criticizing you for inserting your opinion, it's only because your opinion isn't clearly marked off as such, and adding those two words ("CmdrTaco adds...") will shut them up. It won't shut up unreasonable critics, of course, but nothing will.
Good luck, man. I wouldn't have your job at any pay.
However, grammar is the rules which govern a language. As such, language use which does not follow the rules of the language is generally more difficult to read and understand by your readers.
True the previously mentioned use of the word 'to' in place of 'too' is not a significant brain twister. However, instead of reading a sentence once with clear meaning, including proper grammar, often times we will need to read a sentence at least twice to understand what the author meant, rather than what was written.
While this is generally perceived as trivial, consider the amount of time required to re-read a poorly constructed sentence coupled with the vast number of readers digesting the article. The result is an inordinate amount of wasted time.
While I don't suggest striving for perfection in each and every story, I would hope that the editors would make some effort at ensuring that articles are clear for a first read. Grammar is the mechanism which makes this possible.
Appropriate use of grammar is means to an end, not the end itself.
Man, I should give this a +5 for longest article with fewest comments!
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Add the year to the posting date! It's kind of frustrating to get back to a Slashdot article long after it was posted (say through Google) and see that the story was posted on "January 18", but with no indication of which year...
The Geekery Times has published a report on the decline of proper anchor texting. Then, when it appears in the Related Links section, you know exactly what you're dealing with.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I'm sorry, but this is the most pathetic exuse for allwowing half-literate, barely comrehensible articles on slashdot. So if it's on the web you can basically treat it like a dumpster, right? No wonder the Web generation has such poor writing and comprehension skills. Thank you Taco! Btw, my native language is Russian, and I have been living there my entire life, and I find it really sad to see native speakers abuse their language to such degree AND have enough arrogance to offer exuses.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
One minor thing that irritated me when I had my first Slashdot story accepted was the fact that it was edited. It may have very well been posted somewhere that my submission would be edited, but it was not clear to me. Now, the edits were good ones, but I had no idea they were going to be made. It seems like if the front page is going to say "markmcb writes," then I should have written it or at least consented to any edits.
... at all. Though this may increase the chance of their submission getting rejected should they submit a poorly written post, it does give them some freedom and ownership rights. I think this is an important part of our news submission page and one that Slashdot should consider.
I tried to implement a solution to this when I coded OmniNerd. When a user submits a story on OmniNerd there is a box they can check to allow the moderators to edit freely. If they uncheck the box, we do not have the freedom to edit their text
Mark A. McBride -- OmniNerd.com
This is why I have always been of the opinion that someone should just make a site that all blog or forum style sites can link to where it is just an infinite flame war. The moderators of the site could sort of "chum the waters" by posting as random nicknames articles that are heavily biased and filled with tons of spelling/grammar errors. Then /. can just add a "banished to the infinite flame war" moderation.
Look, I'm not trying to pick nits here, or target any submitter/editor specifically, but this is an example of how "proper anchoring" via 2-3 word snippets turns into what I consider to be confusion:
...
*********
Google's GTalk Supports XMPP
Communications
IceFox writes "On Google Gtalk blog Mike Jazayeri announced open federation for the Google Talk service."
***********
In the above post both "Google Gtalk" and "open federation" are hyperlinked. Now, from the text, how am I supposed to know where to go for the announcement? "Google Gtalk" is linked back to the announcement and "open federation" to a description of "open federation". One links to a description, the other to an announcement despite both being nouns.
This is just a simple example, there are quite a few other articles which contain a number of links which I spend half of the time trying to find the "main" reference.
A large number of articles link on "bad", "good", etc. with no idea of what follows.
I understand there are some topics that don't spawn from a main article, but for those that do, why not avoid this confusion and add either a main reference URL to the post for the article or "Article here"-type reference? That seems to be clearer to me.
If the comment is not about the new motherboard chipset, that comment at least should not be modded 'insightful', and in many cases, ought to be modded offtopic of flamebait.
I see what you did there.
What are you doing here then? Go to Digg and don't come back.
If people cannot handle a misspelled word or two, I just have one thing to say: I don't think you'll make it.
If anything, proper spelling and grammar can help keep the comments on topic. All too often the discussion will deviate to squabbling about loose vs. lose, to vs. too, etc. I'm sure somebody will even attack this post by pointing out some minor flaw.
Thankfully, in most cases the moderation system takes care of those irrelevant back-and-forth grammar wars, but the real issue is that there should be no cause to start that war to begin with. Moderator points are better spent modding up positive comments, rather than modding down the static.
I didn't care too much for the low-hanging fruit comment. Why provide fodder for off-topic ranting? A few more minutes grooming the summary can go a long way in terms of providing clarity and keeping discussions on-topic.
I offer myself as a voluntary part-time Slashdot story spelling and grammar checker. I don't know how your story queue works technically, but given access to it I would happily correct all spelling and grammar mistakes in the posts before they go live. If you're interested, that is. As a reference you can check my posting history. It should be free of mistakes except for the rare typo -- and I can distinguish to/too/two, their/they're/there, your/you're, its/it's and affect/effect, as well as spell the words "the", "definitely", "grammar" and "independent" correctly.
Don't take this personally.
Leadership starts at the top. If people at the very top aren't doing 100%, no one below is going to do any better. It just goes downhill quickly.
If you look at the position of 'editor' in any other organization in any point in the history of editors, editors make sure that the text has correct spelling and grammar. If you aren't doing that, are you really doing your job? I know you say that you repair articles for sense, linking, etc. -- but if you still allow these stupid, easily fixed errors through, how do I know you are doing anything at all, other than clicking an 'Approve' button? It just smacks of laziness and not taking the site seriously. Which, hey, if you don't care, why should I? I'll stop previewing my articles, trying to make insightful, interesting points with facts and good logic. I'll just troll the site. After all, if the editors aren't keeping the place clean, why should I?
I think the slashdot editing policy worked when this site was still in someone's basement or however it started. However, if you are seriously asking for people for money, get your act together. No more dupes, no more spelling errors, a lot less grammatical errors.
Yes, we are saddled with a stupid, ancient, crufty spelling system that is in serious need of revision. No, it is not going to happen anytime soon. Just buck up and start looking up words. It doesn't bother you, but it doesn bother others, a lot.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
While these above points are important, there is one issue I feel Slashdot must address properly: the context and background provided along with the story summaries.
Too often I see stories that mention a particular person or a particular piece of software without actually giving any context. For example, there was a recent story about Blender which didn't mention what Blender actually is. Now, in my case I knew perfectly well that Blender is an open source 3D modeller and renderer, but there were too many people posting comments in the thread saying "Err.. what's Blender?".
I feel that it is important for a story summary on Slashdot to provide the basic information a user would be looking for. In the Blender example, a user shouldn't have to click on the link simply to figure out what the software does. If the fact that Blender is a 3D modeller is briefly mentioned in the summary, the user is in a much better situation to decide whether or not to click on the link. This is important, as users usually skim through the headlines and summaries on the front page to decide what interests them.
Now, in many cases the summary doesn't need to provide any background. Your typical Slashdot reader would know that GNOME is a desktop environment, or who Richard Stallman is. But in other cases, I think it would be very good if the Slashdot editors can add a few words of background if the original submission didn't have any. They can use their own discretion to decide what needs background and what doesn't.
It's a comparatively small point, but it's one that's been irking me a bit. I feel a lot of users will agree with me on this, and there should be no reason for anyone to post "BTW, What on earth is (X)" type comments.
grammer nazi's
"grammar Nazis"
Please take this as constructive criticism. Slashdot is great - but all things have room for improvement.
The only problem I have with Slashdot is that sometimes the article summary (both the one-liner and the submitter's summary) don't accurately summarize the article. It's often something subtle. The summary would be something like "Security hole in X causes billions of dollars of damage" when the article actually said that an analyst estimated up to a billion dollars of damage could be caused by a well-written exploit (i.e. no actual damage had occurred, but the potential is there).
This is a major problem because readers often don't follow the links (myself included), and thus get bad information. Then the information gets passed around the water cooler, etc.
I haven't ever emailed you to alert you of them, so it's my fault as part of the community. However, by the time I read something, it often has already scrolled off the front page and the damage is done.
Also, just for some perspective, I think the most basic spelling and grammatical errors are as annoying to many readers as linking "here" and "article" are to you (and me). Maybe someone so annoyed could submit a patch for spelling and grammar checking.
"Of course some users like to email me to tell me how much Slashdot sucks, how fat and lazy I am, and how the most terrible thing in the history of Slashdot is the fact that the 4th story down contains the word 'to' when it ought to contain the word 'too'."
I know what you mean. Here is a prime example:
"Many submissions are to long or to short. So I get out the scissors and start looking for sentences to cut."
to is a preposition
too is an adverb
two is a noun
Slashdot is not the Wall Street Journal. It is not The New York Times. Slashdot is an informal meeting ground. A town hall. A pub. A bulletin board in the quad on campus. Here people might not properly capitalize a proper noun. They might transpose letters in 'thier'. They might use jargon that isn't in oxford. And all of that is OK with me.
Oh really, Taco?
I remember the last little "IRC Forum" you had. It was in an unmoderated session. Someone asked you about K5 and you said that K5 was basically a "high school newspaper" and that Slashdot was "the New York Times".
Don't believe me? The logs are out there. I'll find them if you try to deny. I'm sure someone else here has them.
Its amazing how people like you are so shifty with your logic. Saying whatever is convienient for the time being but having no actual values other than your self-interested deceptive ones.
(Sorry, I'm reposting this under my user name. For some reason my earlier attempt got posted as AC.)
While these above points are important, there is one issue I feel Slashdot must address properly: the context and background provided along with the story summaries.
Too often I see stories that mention a particular person or a particular piece of software without actually giving any context. For example, there was a recent story about Blender which didn't mention what Blender actually is. Now, in my case I knew perfectly well that Blender is an open source 3D modeller and renderer, but there were too many people posting comments in the thread saying "Err.. what's Blender?".
I feel that it is important for a story summary on Slashdot to provide the basic information a user would be looking for. In the Blender example, a user shouldn't have to click on the link simply to figure out what the software does. If the fact that Blender is a 3D modeller is briefly mentioned in the summary, the user is in a much better situation to decide whether or not to click on the link. This is important, as users usually skim through the headlines and summaries on the front page to decide what interests them.
Now, in many cases the summary doesn't need to provide any background. Your typical Slashdot reader would know that GNOME is a desktop environment, or who Richard Stallman is. But in other cases, I think it would be very good if the Slashdot editors can add a few words of background if the original submission didn't have any. They can use their own discretion to decide what needs background and what doesn't.
It's a comparatively small point, but it's one that's been irking me a bit. I feel a lot of users will agree with me on this, and there should be no reason for anyone to post "BTW, What on earth is (X)" type comments.
If you are paying for editorial skills, make it worth it.
Or, make Guest Editors, based on karma, and you dont need to pay for editors.
Or, change the name of editors, to something else that doesnt resemble the "act of edit", maybe something like... Guard, so something like that...
Maybe you will not save big bucks, but you will save some bucks..
Â_Â
Does nothing for the "to/too" problem.
Best Slashdot Co
I absolutely agree that the content of any communication is far more important than the format, however, like it or not, the way you present a message or information will invariably be one of the first things the observer uses to gauge the validity of the data. A few grammatical errors or minor spelling mistakes probably don't matter all that much, but if you write something useful on a scrap of paper in crayon using broken English, people will simply not trust it. (Yes this is an extreme example but I'm sure you readers can extrapolate a less extreme scenario.)
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
(An old rant of mine. it was originally written to address the habits of forum posters, but most of it applies. Yes, I know the grammar isn't perfect.)
"I got a reely importent point to make with regurds to the pollitikal sityewation."
Guess how much stock people will put in my opinion if I start my diatribe with such a statement?
That's right. None.
Thanks to the internet we can be bombarded with thousands of opinions daily. Weblogs, message boards, and Usenet give the average person a podium from which they can reach the masses.
You have the attention of many people when you post in an active forum. So you tap the microphone, prepare your thoughts, and weigh in.
"I dont think ur rite, lol!"
Well done, Potsie.
Look, I realize that North American schools have left a great many of you with substandard language skills. I know that the spelling of many multisyllabic words is beyond the grasp of at least a quarter of the population. In some cases it's not even your own fault, although for many it comes down to a lack of study and poor parenting.
I just can't help but think that when you are online, your words are your avatar. They help to determine what people think of you. If you can't spell, use numbers for words, make acronyms out of everything in sight, and think that this means you are "plugged in" rather than uneducated, then be prepared to be ignored by anybody who doesn't come in at, or below, your literacy level.
Want respect? Learn to spell. I don't care if you're out of school. Education doesn't end when classes are over.
I've heard people say, "Well, spelling and grammar shouldn't matter. It's the idea that's important." To them, I say, "f you can't grasp the basics of language, why should I pay attention?"
Take care when you communicate in writing. Use punctuation, capitalization, and real words. Acronyms should be reserved for organizations and industry terms.
We're a society of substandard communicators. Do your part to help raise the bar.
Cranky
Can't we rate articles?
You can't just say you do a good job, when you have no data. I think by now, most people go to slashdot for the comments, rather than the articles. So traffic isn't sufficient feedback to think you're successful at your own particular job. Just an option to rate articles, the ability to sort on perfect '5' articles by date, that would be all it takes.
I know it would take a bit of work on your part, and I appreciate what you do already, but rating articles makes a lot more sense than the categories. Though I do like that I can't see all your Left Coast loony articles whining about Bush. I mean, I like being able to block your 'politics' section and I don't want that to go away.
These ratings also make more sense than posting an apologetic for your job every year or so, like this article.
"COW"boyneal, scuttle"MONKEY" to start with, and there are some who read like a menu.. TACO, and would you like some fries with him? :)
A a further side note to anyone who ever wants me to look at anything on Slashdot. If you e-mail me, include the URL. A comment mismoderated? A user who is misbehaving? A story with a typo?
I'd like to register a complaint about the user Anonymous Coward.
Now I don't know just who the hell this fellow thinks he is, but let me tell you that he is more often than not one rude, obnoxious, ill-tempered, argumentative son-of-a-bitch who doesn't have the slightest clue what he's talking about.
He arugues over the most obtuse, silly, niggling little things.
He insults people at the drop of a hat.
He keeps posting the same tired old jokes over and over, even if they're not funny.
Seventy percent of the statistics he quotes are made up on the spot!
Rarely does he have anything insightful to say. Occasionally he's funny but this is overshadowed by his constant rudeness and downright bastardly behaviour.
In conclusion I think that CmdrTaco ought to revoke this fellow's posting priviledges immediately if not sooner.
This is of course my opinion and while you may disagree with it it is nonetheless correct which you would understand if you bothered to get off your big, fat, pimply ass and come up out of your parent's basement and experience the real world and sunlight you brainless smacktard.
...is that CmdrTaco's Karma needed a little boost, and oh man, he just got like ten billion +5 insightfuls!
Why not introduce spelling and grammer level moderators. They could trawl through the forum at their leisure and correct typos, gramatical errors etc.
For the sake of where they misunderstand the meaning of a post and mis-diagnose a gramatical error, the original poster could have the option to "uncorrect" and force a post.
That way those who want to be heard a certain way can do so, those who are pissed off about spelling or grammar problems can spend their own time sorting it out for everybody's benefit. Meanwhile the people who are busy posting content and information (who may not be as well educated or as observant of their own errors etc) can get on with what they do.
So far as I can see, that way everybody is happy??
There is an ERROR in your post.
If your business is in words then proper spelling and grammar are part of being professional.
I've corrected the subject too, like the humourless Nazi I am.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Slashdot is a for-profit site, and Taco et al make their livings from it. Since Taco is unwilling to learn English fundamentals, hire a proofreader. At least try to act like professionals. All of his other advice on article selection and blurb-writing is good, and the success of the site speaks for itself. So why is paying attention to grammar and spelling so difficult? Is this just another case of pasty flabby geeks trying to act butch in all the wrong ways?
we will end no whine before its time
The communications could be regarded as a eulogy and death knell for /.
All the "slashdot is dead", "Digg revolution" articles may have finally 'dug' their way under Taco's skin?
What the hell, Taco? Why are you trying to make it okay to let spelling and grammar errors slide by? If you look at any journalism outlet, the summary job of the editor is to make sure these mistakes do not get through, and that there are ZERO spelling and grammar errors. NONE. If you are letting errors through, then you are not doing what they are paying you to do, end of story. It would be one thing if this were some guy's blog, but slashdot asks for money, and sells advertising, and claims to be a journalism outlet, although simply cutting and pasting from original news sites and calling it original work is plagiarism, not journalism. How many times have we followed a link just to read the slashdot summary as the first paragraph of the cited work?
If slashdot weren't such an entertaining moderation war all the time, I wouldn't even bother to read it.
You missed a dot on your second sentence. Don't worry, I'll let it pass just this once.
Man, I gotta use that for my sig at work for every e-mail I send!
The fact that the editors are willing to devote a whole story on how to format, but no article on how they fact check, indicates to me the editors don't have their priorities right. Formatting vs Grammar? Who cares. Write an article on your fact-checking practices, because that's your biggest issue. Then worry about the formatting and grammar.
I am a spelling and grammar nazi. There/their/they're and to/too are the basic errors which rile me the most. You/your/you're is another set of words which I think are fundamental to the meaning of a sentence and the correct usage thereof should have been taught at primary school level.
Reading Taco's article however, I think he makes a fair point about the standards required in a Slashdot submission. It may be owned by OSDL, but the feel and character of Slashdot is its own. I think Taco is perfectly reasonable in looking to the value of the content first and foremost, a damned-sight more reasonable than you are in insisting he make no more than one typo a week.
Also unreasonable is the implication you make that 'no typo's per week' are made by the BBC News website, when, pedant that I am, I see missing words and the kinds of contextual spelling errors your average spell-checker would miss, at least once a week on their site. And I still like them as well.
Having read through most of the comments to your post and thought about it a bit, I have to say you ./ folks do it right: The sight always has something of interest to read and interesting/insightful/funny comments which make me think/ponder/laugh.
./ being more interesting when it was Linux-centric but now think I was wrong: It's very enlightening to see what the MS Windows users in living in the land of de nile have to say about things.
The one thing you've done right which would be _so_ very tempting to change is the level of inclusiveness. For example, I've whined in the past about
In summation, I keep coming back day after day because it's an interesting place where tech people come to yak on tech topics of the day. I don't care so much about minor grammatical or spelling errors as long as I can determine what the user is trying to communicate and they have something to say. I was an English major and the grammar/spelling Nazis need this clue: It's the content of what is being said that is important, so please keep your petty pedantry to yourselves or send a private email to the poster.
Many thanks for the years of worthwhile reading and interesting discussions.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
>I'm not talking here about "Should a story be posted" or
>"I have 9 submissions about the same thing, which is best."
but you should. or at least "I had 9 articles about the same thing already, is it really best to post another"?
Today I try to address what things I think are important before I click 'Save'. The heathen admits to using a WIMP interface!!!! He clicks!! He clicks!!! Someone, get this man a shell prompt!!!
Slashdot goes to a readership in the hundreds of thousands. So a little care is justified, and expected, I think.
And while I wouldn't normally mention it, it's "grammar Nazis".
Slashdot is not the Wall Street Journal. It is not The New York Times. Slashdot is an informal meeting ground. A town hall. A pub. A bulletin board in the quad on campus.
Sorry, but I don't buy it and nor should anyone else. Irrespective of how how one would like to consider Slashdot, it is a text-only medium. And at the risk of being redundant, I'll point out that in a text-only medium, all anyone has to go by is the text that appears on screen.
If an article submitter or poster makes glaring errors, none of us has much choice but to consider the possibility that either he/she is under the age of 12, is an illiterate that never graduated high school, or is someone that simply didn't consider his/her audience worth the trouble to write something worth reading.
On the other hand, if I were to be pedantic, I'd criticise someone's spelling Perl as PERL, or perl, but it's easy enough to attribute that sort of error to laziness, or simply not knowing. The same can't be said of the spelling and grammar mistakes that appear regularly in both submissions and posts. And how many of those are from individuals whose first (and only) language is English?
Here people might not properly capitalize a proper noun. They might transpose letters in 'thier'. They might use jargon that isn't in oxford. And all of that is OK with me.
Hardly a capital offence, but it is sloppy, and merits correction. So, yes, it's Oxford and not oxford.
"I want a Slashdot story to be focused, directing your attention to the URL in question. It needs to be not *to* long, not *to* short. Links should be clear. Spelling and Grammar are secondary issues."
-1, flamebait.
Poor Taco.... Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda stepped off the bus and was led into the yard of the Main State Correctional Institute. He had been given ten years for participating in a stock fraud. Five with good behavior. Years spent basking in the glow of a CRT had been hard on him. His body was frail, his skin pallid. He knew he could never make it through ten years in the general population with his virginity intact. He had to get into solitary. As soon as the burly guard unshackled him he made his move. Exhaling a feminine "hmmph" he weakly slapped the guard. He was quickly taken to the ground, receiving a swift kick to the ribs before being restrained. As he was dragged to the solitary confinement cell he felt nothing but relief. "At least in solitary," he thought "I'll be safe." Unfortunately for Rob he had picked the wrong guard to mess with. The next few days were uneventful. The time in his cell he spent evenly between sleeping, reading a "Perl for Dummies" book he had gotten from the book cart, and masturbating furiously. His self-flagellation was interrupted on the fourth day. The burly guard he had attacked earlier stepped into his cell. The gleam in the guards eye and the mean grin on his face made Rob's pecker quickly shrivel in his hand. "You fucked with the wrong man when you fucked with Michael Simms," said the guard. "The inmates here call me The Asshole for a reason. Now come with me, punk." The guard led him down the hall to one of several empty shower stalls. He roughly threw Rob in the stall and locked the door. Rob was petrified. His mind raced as he imagined the myriad of different tortures that could be in store for him. His worst fears were confirmed when the guard returned. In his hands were a short black dress, black stilleto heels, and a curly blonde wig. "Strip down and put this on, bitch." Rob did as instructed and was pleased to notice that the dress fit well and the heels gave him a nice slimming effect. The burly guard admired the drag queen. "The GNAA is gonna love you!" The guard left the shower stall, only to return minutes later. He opened the door and led 20 large black men into the stall. "Rob, meet the Gay Nigger Association of America. GNAA, meet Rob. I'm sure you all will get along fine." With that the guard slammed the shower door closed and walked away laughing. The men approached Rob, backing him into a corner. The apparent leader stepped forward. "No matter what I'm gonna fuck that purdy lil' ass of yours. Now I can fuck it dry or you can lube it up for me." Rob knew he had no choice. He kneeled in front of the leader, who began to slap his face with his 10 black inches. Puss from syphilictic sores quickly covered Rob's cheeks. When the leader was sufficiently aroused he placed his throbbing cock up to Rob's lips. As soon as Rob opened his mouth the leader violently shoved his manhood to the back of Rob's throat and exclaimed "Swallow my shit you cracker bitch!" Rob gagged as he was violently face fucked. Just when he was about to pass out the leader pulled out, turned him around and shoved his cock into Rob's ass. Rob began to scream in agony but his cries were quickly muffled by one of the other gang member's cocks. They rode him like that for the better part of an hour. When one man finished another quickly took his place. Just as Rob was getting used to the throbbing pain in his anus the men stopped. One man lay down on the floor and Rob was told to get on top of him and take his dick inside him. Exhausted and humiliated, Rob had no will left to fight. As soon as he inserted the penis another man came up behind him and began to force his cock into Rob's already filled anus. Again his screams of agony were muffled, this time by a smelly black anus. For another hour he was violated in this way. When the men were finished with him he couldn't walk and his mouth was filled with dingleberries and ass hairs. Before they all left the leader had some parting words for Rob: "Thanks for that sweet piece of ass, punk. We'll see you again tomorrow. Oh by the way, we all have AIDS." It was going to be a long ten years for Rob.
"What I think matters before I click 'save', and what I don't."
The first thing that followed was an advert. I guess we all know what matters now. ;P (I kid, I kid. Because I love...)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
how could you possibly be an editor? For shame.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I'm something of a grammar Nazi myself, but over the years the internet's worn down my edge on most minor things. A "to" when there should be a "too" still jumps out at me, but I don't really care, as long as it's not something repeated over and over. I think Taco's sentiment towards grammar is probably correct for the focus of this site: it's secondary to content.
That said, I've seen mistakes on this site so egregious that I almost feel embarrassed for the author. The one that sticks out in my mind is Hemos's review of The Yellow Machine storage device. Some of the most horriffic errors were eventually corrected, but in its original form the review was jibberish (I quoted some of them). Hemos is not a random Joe Slashdot reader, he's someone who gets paid to work on the site, and I assume a pretty smart guy. If he'd taken the time to read his own writing before posting it he would have had to have caught those glaring problems with the story and fixed them before it went live. This again goes to the "do the editors even read this site?" argument that people drag out when dupes pop up.
A lot of it boils down to people who (whether they admit it or not) care about this site, and the apparent lack of caring by the people who run it when those types of incidents occur. Though I mentally complain about minor errors, I tend not to point out pedantic things, but glaring errors that can be caught by simply reading what you've written are tough to excuse.
rooooar
Ugh, I hate to do it, but....
Mod this up please. It's a really good idea.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Slashdot is big. It isn't anyone's blog now; it's a corporate news site. You report the news and let people form their own opinions. You don't say "Python 2.5 released. BTW, what kind of drugs made Guido think indentation was better than braces?" (a made up but not atypical example). First, because it often comes across as juvenile. Second, you have a knowledgeable audience. Okay, not everyone is all that smart, but a good many are. As such, these comments often seem out of place, like you're reiterating a classic misguided layman's point of view in a scientific journal ("Is that Columbus crazy about the world being round or what?"). There's no intelligent thought behind them. They're just little bashes at things to incite people to comment. That works apparently, as often a majority of the comments are about the ignorant nature of of the tag. Plus they're juvenile...oh wait I said that already.
I completely agree, and this is my thought as well. But on top of that, when I'm reading through an article, trying to focus my thoughts on what it's saying, my attention is diverted to the spelling and grammar errors that pop out. The human brain thrives on patterns and catching anomalies. While I have the utmost respect for Rob and have been a long-time Slashdot reader and participator, I think this subtle point was missed. With all of the attention on length and content, with the desire to keep the reader's attention focused on what matters, it seems like it's a deliberate decision to avoid dealing with what could easily be an even larger distraction.
:)
On the other hand, as already stated, Slashdot is not the New York Times. It doesn't try to be. I'd just rather not be constantly reminded of that by what are perceived as quality control problems.
But certainly, you can't please everybody. There will always be things to complain about, and Rob I think should try harder to not let it bother him. I suspect with the growth of Slashdot over the years, the quantity of complaints has reached a critical mass. Hopefully articles like this will curb that somewhat. Maybe he needs to hire someone to weed out some of these types of e-mails he gets?
In case you are reading this, Rob, keep up the good work and don't feel obligated to change anything unless you want to.
Taco,
0 1&cid=14499999
Last time this came up, someone suggested randomizing the top level threads in order to promote better discussions.
I'm a subscriber, and I think its dumb that I can get to the story early before you can even comment, write a thoughtful comment with links and thought.
But then my post gets slammed at the bottom of the list and few see it.
So, I just do what I just did with this thread a bunch of times. Find a random saying more at the top of the threads, copy and paste a quote, and then but in line.
I cannot predict my moderation or replies to my posts, but I think that some are pretty good that don't get enough eyeballs because of this behavior.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1743
I believe that is one of them.
Firstly, I'm going to thank you for the existence of Slashdot. Something over 100,000 people found the site before I did, but I've been a reader on and off for a few years, and Slashdot is my homepage on at least one browser. Whatever might be said about the signal:noise ratio, it's good enough for me to keep coming back.
Your point about it taking little time for a reader to cut+paste a URL when mailing you is a valid one; it saves much more time (that time happening to be yours) than it takes, and the time used is spread across all those who mail you, so each gives up very little. It's also a basic courtesy when taking up someone else's time to try to make things easy for them.
A similar argument can be applied to why it's more important than it might initially seem to work on grammar, spelling and typos. If it takes 5 minutes to check these for an article, or an hour, that might save a second or two for each of 10,000 or 100,000 people who might read the piece of Slashdot's front page. If it saves a second for each of 10,000 people, that's 30,000 seconds, or around 8 person-hours that it's saved. If it's a couple of seconds, and 100,000 people, then we're talking 200,000 seconds, or 55 person-hours. The typos often do make me do a double take, and make it hard to understand the meaning of a piece straight away. Even "its" or "it's" affects readability.
That's not even to mention that the time lost in dealing with complaints probably exceeds the time it would have taken to avoid them in the first place by eliminating the recurring errors (fix "its/it's" and "to/too" and most of the rest probably wouldn't disturb me) -- sure, people will still complain about things, but they'll complain about slightly fewer things.
Maybe you could offer grammatically correct versions to paid subscribers, and continue to torment the cheap *******s among us who read Slashdot for free?
I like that you are getting more involved. I like the way it makes Slashdot seem like there are people behind it and not just "Google News for geeks".
I don't know if I agree about your assesment about it being merely blogish, though. While that may be what it was in the beginning, it think today it isn't. Like it or not, it's gained a bit of that journalistic veneer. Not because you or the other editors set out to do so, but because the way you have behaved has led people to feel that way.
You're not the NYtimes or the WashPost. More like a local newspaper. Lots of reprints from the big boys, but also some helpful content that applies to us on the "fringe".
Complaining may give people a feeling of control over something they admire, but can hardly participate in. The "low hanging fruit" of bad grammar and spelling, dupes and "unworthy" strories are things we would all do, but I suspect many of us would have far more that slashdot, who have been at it lot longer.
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
If the year isn't included because of space limitations, maybe the year could replace the hour & minute after a few days or months.
Yes, I know you can look at an article's URL to get the year. But is that an interface idea you'd like to see gain popularity?
Also, speaking of years, how about publish dates for books reviewed on Slashdot?
What is far more likely to get my goat is when we see an article where the text is naught but the opening paragraph of the linked web page. The one that particularly got me recently were a spate of "Firefox is less secure than IE, experts say" posts whose authors apparently held browser crashes to be less dangerous than arbitary code execution. Without any comment, it looks like the editor has just cicked these through on auto-pilot. With a little editorial comment, there's at least evidence of human involvement.
Of course, I may still not agree with the commentary, but I'd sooner see it there than not.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
See, and *I* find it ridiculous that people don't pay attention to what they write. Sure, I make mistakes in JEs or comments. However, were I writing for publication (article submission, a "State of Slashdot" article), I'd read over it a few times to make sure it was clear, all words were spelled correctly, et cetera. I guess it comes down to pride in what you do, even the little things. When I come across a misspelling or typo, it takes me out of what I'm reading enough that it breaks the continuity, and that's a shame, considering that it could be fixed with better editing or attention to detail.
Since we appear to be having the grammar discussion despite CmdrTaco's request, let me just defend the editors on one point. You claimed that:
This is a stylistic point, and the accepted style varies with location. If I (as a reader in the UK) submit a story, the "correct" punctuation for me may not be the "correct" punctuation for a reader in the US. If I've taken the effort to write a story carefully and submit it with correct English grammar, I would consider it rude if an editor took it upon themselves to americanize it.
Some things are simply wrong. They are annoying. They affect readability. And yes, a few seconds of an editor's time saves annoyance for thousands of readers. (I note the irony that CmdrTaco asks for URLs in posts because three seconds of our time translates to three minutes of his.) But at the end of the day, I think he's right: the meaning is more important than avoiding any given spelling or grammatical error.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
In Soviet Russia, /. asks you!
The president has been kidnapped by ninjas!
Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?
The 14th paragraph starts, "A a further side ...". Looks like a typo to me. Might want to get a fraking editor to read over your posts! :-P
- Kevin
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
With all due respect, I'm troubled by the fact that so many articles are rejected by the "editors". It seems to me that there are simply not enough articles. Perhaps the editors are being too selective? How do we know how much better it could be if these same editors insist on always only doing it their way. This isn't my idea of an informal discussion, or even a campus bulletin board, unless said board has an over vigilant monitor. Personally. I feel the the editors demonstrate poor management in trying to over-control the slashdot community.
As for the format of a typical article, I wonder why you don't post better guidelines? Perhaps the editors could create a page that actual lists your requirements and has a clear example of a well formatted submission? As well, would some feedback be too much to ask for, even just once in awhile? After all, it is impossible to improve without feedback, no?
By the way, I really wonder if you've ever considered the number of man hours you just so casually discard on a daily basis? As well, have you considered how much more informative slashdot might be by know, had you encouraged submissions and developed a working system to manage the subsequent volume?
I hope you can take the the time to consider my polite points and I hope you can see why I'm so disappointed in the status quo.
Words to men, as air to birds.
That article is WAY too long; much longer than the average /. entry. In fact it was so long I fell asleep halfway through and forgot where I left off, but I seem to recall that something was mentioned about some submissions being too long. This is a prime example of that.
/. which would check for spelling errors (I'd suggest a threshold to let a few typos through) and then prompt the user to check before submitting? The user could then elect to ignore the spellcheck and submit anyhow, but at least some attempt would be made. It would be akin to saying "hey dumbass, drop the kiddie speak or go back to Fark" but in a more productive manner. Allowing an override would let posts with technical or brand name terms or acronyms to go through, or for the lazy to continue to post but only after seeing a polite request to clean things up a bit.
(Taco, I'm kidding. I'm KIDDING!)
The advice in that should be applied to posts in threads - all too often u hav 2 deal w/ stoopid kiddie speak (including the invariably crappy spelling and grammar), and then you have the other extreme: the grammar nazis who have nothing of value to say but just HAVE to jump in to say "oh my fooking god, you have a typo. You have NO idea what you're talking about since you can't type!"
Obviously there are many here for whom English is a second language, but with people for whom English is their primary language, one would expect some semblence of proper grammar and spelling.
Here's a suggestion for you Taco (I'm being serious now, not kidding): could you embed a spellchecker on
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
What irritates me far more than misplaced commas or misused apostrophes, though, is the attitude that correct use of language is either pedantic or pointless, and that anybody who evinces displeasure with (or corrects) sloppy writing can be simply dismissed as the same.
When attempts are made to hide sloppy writing under the pretense of pragmatism (i.e., "only the message matters"), sloppy thinking is often found underneath as well. Don't forget, too, that crummy grammar and spelling can sometimes alter your message so that it is misinterpreted by its recipients.If you're not losing any sleep over spelling and grammar errors, that's fine by me, but don't dismiss proper language usage as worthless. You only make yourself look stupid, impolite, or both.
First, I want to thank you for taking the time to post about and discuss the issues that a lot of Slashdotters complain about. I think that if you and the other editors take the time to learn what the community wants, you'll be able to make Slashdot many times better.
You wrote in the article: Now let us talk about one of my secondary concerns: spelling and grammar. Let me be clear. As you are probably well aware, I don't think these are as important as the things I mentioned above.
You wrote in a reply: Where we simply disagree is on style. I think Slashdot is informal, and therefore typos don't matter that much. Obviously a good number of readers disagree. They print out pages and mark them out with red pens and post in the forums that we are awful. But I don't think that a stylistic decision like that is really that important in the grand scheme of things.
I just finished reading this whole discussion at +4. It seems to me that about half of those comments were asking (or telling) in some way that you should fix grammar and spelling. I won't discuss the same things that the other posts did regarding professionalism and complexity of the issue--I think they do a fine job.
Instead, I want to try and show you the big picture. Several posters (not to mention a lot of moderators) feel that spelling and grammar are important. I know that you feel these are secondary issues, and you are entitled to your opinion--especially when it is your board. However, I would like to mention that it looks like it's an important issue to a lot of people here: not just the complainers, not just the lurkers, but actual participants and even subscribers. I think that your level of professionalism can easily sway the number of subscribers, and I would be willing to bet that in years to come, Slashdot will come to rely on subscribers more than advertising.
All I am asking is that you evaluate your concerns and preferences carefully with what the community also thinks is important. You don't have to change anything (obviously, it's your website), but I do ask that you at least give it some good thought.
It's not your only chance, though, to put in your own words. There's the discussion forum, too. For my part, I don't have a problem with an editor editorializing, but the more it seems like a one-way line of communication, the worse it's likely to be received. When I add my $0.02 to the forum, and someone offers thoughtful criticism, I often reply... either to defend, or to stand corrected, or even to say that I regret that I don't have time to pursue the matter. This sort of interaction is what makes a community.
The problem is the perceived attitude that we should be interested in the editors' opinions, while they have no interest in ours. I don't think that's the actual attitude; editing is time-consuming as it is, and being an active participant in the forum for each story you post isn't realistic. But if people come to expect that there will never be a follow-up, they will have as little sympathy for the editors as people as they do for the talking heads on the evening news.
For this reason, I was particularly glad to see you begin this series of articles. I'd like to see Slashdot's culture change for the better, and I think there's a good deal of potential for that to happen... but it'll require more interaction like this. When the editors don't participate, they seem high-handed and aloof; when the users grow cynical about the editors, they treat them harshly, and, to judge by appearances, create a siege mentality where the editors are even less likely to post.
I think that this touches upon a similar issue:
Discussing spelling is often rather trivial (though really bad spelling errors can be hard to ignore), but it's a particular case of something more interesting: discussing the article itself, and Slashdot, rather than the topic of the article. People hold off-topic discussions about Slashdot because there's no actual forum for it... again, creating the perception that the folks running the site don't care what the users think. I think this perception is the single most damaging social problem, here; if it's not true, more's the pity.
Incidentally, while it's not a matter of great importance, I, for one, appreciate good grammar and spelling; it shows that someone took some care. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to divide the tasks you're already performing: have some people sifting the submissions, and choosing the stories, and have someone else editing the chosen submissions. The person editing would deal with a much smaller volume of material, and could not only be a bit more careful, but also be in a better position to recognize duplicates which got past the first person.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
It's the Slashvertisments that has really lowered my opinion of Slashdot, you know, garbage like the XBox watercooling device as shown on Hexus gaming and the **Beatles_Beatles** nonsense. There's already enough ads on the site quite frankly. If you're trying to wring even more revenue out of the site, consider making a advertising section that readers can filter out (or maybe leave that option only open to subscribers) but don't try and sneak that crap by us. It's depressing when my favorite website tries to pull a fast one on it's readers.
My advice to you CmdrTaco is to forget about Digg or MetaFilter (they'll never catch up to you) and focus on integrity of the writing and information.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Hello World.
If you never heard complaints about your site, no one would be reading it, or it would be so banal as to not spark discussion, let alone meta-discussion.
"Damned if you do", "Damned if you don't" in this case is better than "who are we talking about now?"
That situation comes from a site / product / etc. being in a better position than when it started.
Relax and enjoy the entropy; it's a good thing.
I presume you meant 'intra-office' here, not 'inter-office.' The first means 'remaining inside the office,' while the second means 'travelling between offices.' Sending out inter-office communications which contain spelling and grammatical errors is impolite at best, since it means the recipients have to pause their automatic parsing of the sentence and try and work out what was meant. At worst, it can cause ambiguity or incorrect comprehension. Imagine receiving this from your CTO:
For this to make sense it requires a comma, but the position of the comma defines the meaning. If you don't bother about spelling, punctuation and grammar then you may well end up conveying the exact opposite idea to the one you intended. A trivial example of this would have been writing 'inter' instead of 'intra.'I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I find it really amusing that people put so much time and effort into nit-picking posts for spelling and grammar mistakes. The primary language of this site, after all, is English. It takes only a cursory view of Shakespeare or Chaucer or other historical prose to realize that spelling and grammar normalization in English is a relatively new 'feature' compared to its incorporation in other languages.
On top of that, a language originating on an island in Western Europe is now the predominant language on several continents in different hemispheres (as well as in it's non-trivial area of origin). That is a lot of land over which a lot of changes can evolve. New words will appear and other words will deprecate as the language evolves.
Whether you like it or not, eventually the language will evolve out redundancy. One immediate, clear area of redundancy is the amount of homophones. If you look at many older, time-worn languages, you will find that they often will use a single sound to represent many different ideas or things which must be determined by the context. This is then carried over into informal written language. Many languages also have both a strictly formal and informal version, written and spoken.
There is no real need to have two/too/to when to will suffice. This goes as well for your/you're/yore, its/it's and many of the other "common mistakes" that are so widely ballyhooed in the forums.
In conclusion, no one reads your post and thinks to themselves "Wow! That is some excellent grammar, and not one homophone mishap or vowel transposition. This chap must be from Oxford." You do not win friends or inspire people by achieving 100% correct comma usage. No one will remember you as "The poster who ingeniously displays semi-colon dexterity". We do judge people by their ability to communicate, however, the norm is to accept the minimal acceptable standard ("Can I clearly understand it?") and lay judgment on those who clearly fall below ("3R337 5P3A|"). If you find that you truly cannot accept or understand a person because of a single misuse of one of the variants of "to", then I suggest you would do well to spend time with a language therapist.
Slashdot is an informal exchange, not a doctoral thesis or job application.
- From a dyslexic former elementary English teacher who, in informal settings, could care less about spelling and grammar.
Still, isn't it possible to use the or tags? For those that need the acronym's meaning, they can hover their cursor over it for a second. For those that know what it means, the flow of reading isn't interrupted.
grammer nazi's
"grammar Nazis"
You correct his "grammer" but you leave "stayed inter-office" (intra- not inter-) alone? Bah! You should have your jackboots revoked!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I read this piece because I thought there might be something in there of some tiny interest about how /. works.
There wasn't.
To me, this series of pieces looks like ego-boo or attempts to start flamewars on slow news days.
Why don't you put this stuff in a topic - "How Slashdot Works" - and let people check it in Preferences if they want to read this stuff? Read their posts if you think you'll learn something.
I really don't care that you don't bother to do a spell check on the synopses (although you should) or whether you add your comments to the end of a submission.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Thanks for playing!
not seperate. God damn.
Just sayin'.
I expect grammar and spelling from the mainstream. I don't expect it from Joe Random in some mailing list. Slashdot exists somewhere between these places. I just choose to think it exists closer to that mailing list than some users do.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I'd just like to say:
Slashdot sucks. You're fat and lazy, and the word 'to' in the fifth paragraph should be 'too', TWICE.
It's supposed to be funny - and the 'to'/'too' thing really is true! (intentional?)
I think most people don't mind dupes, but some people really really really do. The solution is clear: have a way to mark a particular story as a dupe (perhaps a "Dupe" button and if enough readers click the button the story is counted as a dupe), and then in a reader's preferences, have an option that says "Hide all duped stories."
I personally would have it show all duped stories because half the time I didn't see the original. (Or the original was from, say, two years ago.) The "Dupe" button would give all the dupe-hating readers something to do instead of clogging up the discussion with "This is a dupe, lolz cmdrtaco you r teh sux0r!!11" and those who still wanted to participate in the discussion the second time around would be free to do so.
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Given the accepted fact that nobody is perfect, dupes happen.
I understand it is difficult to remove a story once posted and sometimes a new fruitful discussion actually comes in the dupe.
So how about this:
* I'm conviced that, once a dupe is detected, 500 people will mail the editor about it.
* Slashdot makes another category: dupes
* once a dupe is detected, it gets listed in the dupes category
* Users can put in their prefs whether they want to see stories in the dupes category.
As far as I can tell, this would solve the problem without code. Whiners can easily be told to edit their prefs, no stories need to be yanked. Everyone happy
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
It is your right to tell me to "screw off" if I suggest an improvement - after all, I am free to take my dollars somewhere else if I don't like your site (hereinafter "Product"). Having said that, I like your Product, but I'd like to offer my opinion:
my most-important-link rule
I agree with you.
Next is proper anchor texting.
I agree with you.
I should not be allowed to post my views. I consider this opinion to be simply ludicrous.
I agree. Again, if people don't like it, your readership will go down. Right now your Product is wildly popular, so this is not an issue.
spelling and grammar. Let me be clear. As you are probably well aware, I don't think these are as important as the things I mentioned above.
I disagree with you. Your Product consists of one-paragraph stories, and you only post 50 in a day - they deserve to be properly written and spell-checked. The way I see it, so many people are asking for better spelling, and it would result in a better Product. Are we all wrong? You are under no obligation to improve your Product, but in today's competitive world, if a better Product comes along, you may lose customers. That's up to you.
doesn't really matter much. People found other things to complain about.
Yes, some folks are annoying. I tend to take it with a grain of salt: if one person complains about everything about your Product, then your Product is not for them. If everyone complains about the same thing, then ignoring those complaints is being short-sighted (or close-minded).
We get millions of e-mails a day, and everyone complains
We don't care - quit your whining. Every job on this planet is hard. You are offering a Product, and if delivering said Product is too much work, you have many options:
a) quit
b) make processes more efficient
c) hire more staff
d) delegate: levrage the power of your community. Have the community edit articles. You can make it work. What? No money to modify Slashcode? Have call for contributions. A code camp to improve Slashcode. A fundraising campaign. I'd gladly contribute $10 towards making Slashdot a more community-driven site. Right now.
D.
I think that articles are harder to read and understand for non-native English speakers if they contain spelling and/or grammar errors. For example a non-native speaker might not easily understand that "to" happened to be a typo and that it should have been "too". This might leave one wondering what the article was supposed to say. Therefore in the interest of the non-native speakers reading slashdot, it would be great if spelling & grammar errors could be fixed while an article is being edited.
My "correct" anchoring would be:
7. The Geekery Times reports a decline in proper anchor texting.
Linking just The Geekery Times implies that it's a link to The Geekery Times' home page, not a story. CmdrTaco's solution, decline in proper anchor texting implies that it's something about a decline in proper anchor texting, but it could just as easily be a link to CNN.com. For example, how would you link:
"NASA reports a decline in space tourists."
What if the link is to NASA's web site? What if it's a link to a blog talking about NASA's report? What if it's a link to CNN.com with a AP story about NASA?
Currently, I think CmdrTaco would just link decline in space tourists in all three scenarios, which IMHO is a little confusing sometimes.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
I've seen enough comments about submission editing and anchor text mangling that dada21's idea to post original submission text should be considered. Link from each article summary back to the original text in the submitter's journal. If the content of the article comes into question, the original is automatically available for comparison.
Along those lines, I'd like to see less emphasis on the sumbitter via the "SoAndSo says" format. Every post has a submitter that is both easily identified and visually separated from the content. Why should articles be different?
1) Make the spelling and grammar so obnoxiously bad (retaining the value of the story, of course) that people with nothing better to contribute to discussions than their ingenious spelling insights will spontaneously combust.
2) Make a separate thread for each article for complaints about the quality of Slashdot. Then delete that thread at the end of each day.
3) Create one obscured grammar-nazi-bait article each day. Have it be about colored bubbles or something relatively unimportant. Go nuts with bad grammar in that story and watch the other threads suddenly become more interesting!
Just another note to say "kudos" for posting these editorials. There are a lot of people who are overjoyed that CmdrTaco is having open discussions with "the common people," so to speak. I think these editorials of yours have the potential to really help out the Slashdot community.
:)
Thanks!
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Republicans working for slashdot? now I know you're joking!
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
"When you hit a grammatical or spelling error you cause a pipeline stall."
Do i have above average reading comprehension skills or something? I parse typos just fine into the words that they are supposed to be based on the sentance that they are in. A typo or a mispeeling hardly ever throws me for a loop.
I dont get why everyone cares so much about spelling and grammar. It makes NO SENSE. And, IMHO is generally used to discredit someones post, not on the basis of their ideas, but rather on something trivial like they forgot an 'o' on the word 'to'.
GET OVER IT PEOPLE
I went too the store.
and
I went to the store.
For all intents and purposes, that is the exact same sentance. The rest, semantics and petty complaints by petty minds. I am also of the opinion that if the onyl thing you can complain about in someones post is their spelling, then i take that to mean that you implicitly accept all of thier points, as you only can basically nitpick their arguments.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I still spend too much time reading Slashdot, though no longer posting stories to the site. I wrote up a little thing (long ago -- itself quite flawed, but I hope useful nonetheless) about how to make a story submission which is likely to be accepted on the site. No promises, but ... whaddya want, this *is* Slashdot :)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
My biggest complaint with posts is when the submitter simply copy and pastes the first (relevant) paragraph from the story. That's redundant; I generally decide from the headline alone if I'm going to click through on the linked article. I read the submission text to get the submitter's brief analysis of the article itself, not an article teaser.
There's also this wierd effect when I read the paragraph again in the article. It's like an unexpected echo that throws me off from the article's topic.
I fail to see how you are damned if you *try and* correct your spelling and grammar.
Whereas, I am distracted by such errors - even the non-English-speaker above is! - and it is time-wasting to have to see all the comments pointing them out in between what you term "relevant" comments. Not to mention the numerous occasions when the grammar is so bad it actually states the opposite of what was intended.
Stop the discussion before it starts, improve Slashdot and just fix em.
With a comma: it might mean "It needs to exist, not to pine, not to ???."
I'm at a bit of a loss to think of a meaning for short as an intransitive verb though. Of course the adverb needed to modify the adjectives here is "too".
At least the Cmdr seems to be consistent in using "to" for "too".
They're at it again. I hope you don't take all the whining and bitching TOO seriously because that's what Slashdotters do best. In between the occasionally truly inspiring or insightful remark, they like to complain about shit...politics, videogames, sex, whatever. Throw it up there in an article, and they'll complain about it or complain that others are complaining about it or complain that it was even posted at all. With all the grammar Nazis lurking here, you'd think this was a Shakespeare forum. Must be a lot of lit majors out of work and lingering around here. You said it right when you compared this to a to a pub. Do people watch their grammar in a pub? Not in any of the ones I've been in. I mean, we even have people in here bitching about geekspeak, and if you can't use geekspeak here than where?? Seriously, don't spend too much time or effort trying to make people happy in here because a whole lot of them never will be. They come here JUST to spout out all that grief. No reason for you to make yourself a target for it just so they can feel better or about themselves or whatever other trivial reason they like to run their mouths (figuratively speaking, of course).
The point Taco is trying to make here is that accidentally using "to" instead of "too" isn't that big of a deal.
it is too!
Seriously though, it might be that grammar and spelling aren't important to the script kiddies and those that spend all day texting on their phones, but to many people these errors are a distraction and reduce readability. If you are getting paid to edit submissions then you should do a reasonable job of it.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Clean, and lean...
:) ]
Yes there are occasional duplicates, many errors, microsoft hating, etc.
But, hey! This site is fun to read, and given that many complaints, it means many people are actually reading these "stinky stories" in order to moan, right?
Anyways, congrats to CmdrTaco for his hard work and patience!
[ Actually I'm posting this without looking at any other comments
All this crap about spelling. As a non native english speaker who have been on the internet for about ten years or so, I can for one say I am fluent enough in english as well as badly spelled english to not even notice most mistakes in slashdot articles. I read these articles to get the message, not to find better ways of saying what they already said.
Problem is that all the people who get a kick out of yelling loud is yelling, while those who don't mind.. mostly sit quiet. Well, I for one say this is a great site, and would like nothing changed. Sure, there are dupes rather often, but it is not a problem since I just skip over them to the next story.
Whats this bullshit about spelling mistakes not being professional? well.. this isn't professional, this is slashdot, where we go to get away from our professional life.
So... I suggest now that all those who think this is a load of fuzz over nothing... make your voice heard. Don't let CmdrTaco be pulled down because of a few loudmouthed idiots. (Sorry, I just had to say that, my freak list was getting way to empty.)
Taco, I for one applaud you. Now... give us the moderating option of "-2 speeling Nazzi" and we will help you keep the discussions in line.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Secondly, if someone in the pub was talking with as poor grammar as many of the submissions here, I would at the very least make a joke at their expense on it, probably yell at them, and if I was sufficiently drunk, hit them. I don't think I'm a big complainer - I've never bitched about a Roland whateverhisnameis article, a "slashvertisement", or an opinion on the end. Bad grammar just makes the article harder to read. It isn't a question of not being in the dictionary - I'd quite happily read a submission on the lines of "'sup dawgs, me and me homies foun' this pimpin' site about....". It's genuinely confusing, requires me to read the sentence again, think about it, figure out what they're actually saying. Which is irritating. An ungrammatical submission is, to me at least, far more annoying than any of the things you list that you do correct.
I am trolling
Let me start by saying I like the site, think you're doing a good job and don't care if you change it based on what I, or anybody, says. That said, I have been an editor of one sort or another for 25 years or so, and I must take exception to how you're defining your job if you're calling yourself an editor. You are, in fact, the first editor I've ever heard of who thinks spelling and grammar aren't of primary importance. I don't want to sound snippy, but if you're going to say spelling and grammar are of secondary or tertiary importance, you need to come up with a new title. It's as simple as that. Perhaps article aggregator.
In editing (and maybe in everything) you have functional obsessions and dysfunctional obsessions. Spelling and grammar are functional obsessions because they speak to clarity, which is central to good communication. They also help define how much credibility you have, which your readers use to decide everything about your site. As someone else already noted, if you can't catch to vs too, humans who know the difference will inevitably start to wonder what else you didn't understand or chose to overlook. There's no way around it. It's human nature. It's like asking someone to not question a meal served up by a short order cook with cigarette ashes on his shirt or snot dripping from his nose. You just have to wonder what else is going on.
Your obsession with link wording, on the other hand, sounds like a dysfunctional obsession to me. Unless you think your readers are reading the link text without reading any of the surrounding text, it doesn't matter much what the link text says (as long as it remains coherent and relevant, of course).
Think about how readers approach a story. They read the headline, which should tell them at least half of what they need to know. It certainly puts things in context. Then they read the lead sentence. I doubt anybody's clicking links before at least getting through those two things (OK, unless they're easily outraged and the headline is "MS disses Linux again!"). By the time they've read the headline and lead, they have enough context to know what to expect when they see the word "here," or "at CNN," or whatever as a link. It doesn't matter a whit nor a tittle if relevant words are used as link text or the phrase "the article" is. None. Not to the reader. It matters to you, so you spend time fixing that problem when you could be spending that time fixing the most egregious spelling and grammar mistakes. So it's dysfunctional. It robs you of time you could be using to do things that matter more to the quality and health of your publication.
Sure, it's a matter of opinion, and hey: it's your site. But if you want to be an editor and a professional, and you want your site to be as respected as possible, you'll value the fundamentals of communication over a pet peeve that most of your readers won't notice either way.
Now, all that said, I certainly agree there's almost always a better way to construct the sentence than to have it end "the article," or "here," or whatever, just so you can have something to link against. But to spend time rewording sentences because of the link text while ignoring glaring spelling and grammar mistakes is a poor use of your time.
Again, nice site. I'll be refreshing a dozen times a day either way.
But isn't it also important to improve the signal to noise ratio? I don't particularly care about grammatical errors and I can skim over them. What annoys me is to read the comments and the first 20 are complaints about your grammar and then all the follow-up posts about how the complaint post has 10 errors of its own.
Yeah the moderation system works to limit the problem but it seems that an even a quick check with automatted tools prevent much of the problem in the first place.
The Anti-Blog
...perhaps the strangest defence of grammatical sloppiness I have ever seen. A chasm is opening between those who think of spelling and grammar in terms of objectively discernable conventions and those who believe in The Tone.
Today the only option we have to deal with this is to moderate offtopic. A harsh punishment indeed.
Yes, we could fix grammar and that would cause a few people to stop posting a few comments about specific problem. But it doesn't solve the REAL problem, which is meta discussion. Giving users a place to discuss the meta, without distracting the bulk of readers who couldn't being to care about the typo/grammar/conspiracy theory about submittor.
Likewise, I need to be aware of meta discussion, especially during the early moments of a story where a glaring error might arise, even tho I would guess that the vast majority of readers consider them offtopic.
We plan to address this in the moderation system soon enough. But it's a non-trivial problem. In fact, it's sort of at the very core of our redesign plans. So please be patient.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
For the love of god I hope so
Fist in a jar of mayo
Slashdot was spawned from what today would be called a blog. To be more precise, it came from MY blog. Where I posted almost nothing but my own opinions. But more blatantly, I could simply rewrite the entire thing, say exactly what I want to say, and post it as an anonymous reader. Or as a made up nickname. I don't do any of those things. I simply add my 2 bits at the end to the occasional story. Not only do I think this is desirable on Slashdot, I think it's essential.
I see these two statements as somewhat contradictory. If /. were supposed to be a serious, well-run site where interested users can glean interesting, well-formulated ideas, I could understand wanting to suppress the sort of metacommentary seen in the comments. But it isn't. It is a blog that is interesting, and good enough that people keep coming here, and the community is a part of it. The editors can post dupes and error-laden stories all they want, why shouldn't people be able to comment on it? It's not a matter of "the editors desire scrutiny" so much as "the editors are asking that we hold the readers to a higher standard than they themselves are held to."
There's not much to worry about, though, because this story won't really change anything. The editors will continue to do an adequate job (because there really isn't any incentive to do a superlative job, and they probably spend most of their time fighting off trolls anyway), and commentary on the quality of editing will often be modded up when it isn't blatant trolling. If the editing improved, it really wouldn't make much of a difference, though I'd appreciate it. But without some modicum of sarcastic jackasses, /. frankly wouldn't be as enjoyable.
English is easier said than done.
But I am a human being, and being told repeatedly that I suck tends to wear a human being down, especially when, on the whole, I think the work we do here is very good.
;-) mean to update existing slashsites to the new code. Thanks for your great work :-)
This reassures me. It happened to me too many times as a non-profit specialized slashsite manager. Some % of surfers complain no matter if you're trying your best or not. Everything has to be contextualized. Sometimes it's jealousy, sometimes it's good comments shared in a rude or inappropriate way, sometimes it's simple whining to ignore.
Some less off-topic comments:
- Our slashsite adopted an article format similar to slashdot. Trying to be succinct and remove everything superfluous, generally excluding any opinion from the article header, leaving opinion for the comments space. I believe this makes us more neutral in the views of our users.
- Spelling, since our slash "authors" are non-english natively, I can only say we're trying our best to remove any typos. It starts with re-reading everything once before clicking that save button. After, if a typo is discovered, I'll take the minute required to update the story and remove errors.
I know there's a lot of changes planned for slashdot (e.g. moderation system). My hope is your team will accordingly update slashcode itself and provide a simple (as simple as Perl can be
Animoog.org
I want the hypertext to be the most appropriate 2-3 words that tell you exactly what you're clicking on. I think that is absolutely essential. Every URL should matter, and every bit of hypertext should tell you exactly what it is you're going to get when you click that mouse button.
You (CmdrTaco) and the other editors are completely inconsistent about this -- possibly my single largest complaint about slashdot, even though I'm a grammar nazi and bothered by lots of things. If the article summary is borked, so what? -- as long I can get to the actual article. But many posts seemed to be linked in a way that obfuscates what the relevant article is.
Here's one you personally posted today:A test carried out by Pegasus Lab on account for Swedish magazine PC För alla showed that a normal PC keyboard was infected by more bacteria than a normal toilet seat. More specific it contained 33000 bacteria per square centimeter, compared to 130 on a ordinary toilet seat. The tests also showed occurrence of up to 3100 fungi per square centimeter.
You'll note that doesn't follow your standard of linking what the article is about, rather than the article provider.
How about this one that just popped up: Pennies, pipes, untold miles of CAT5 - they tie up a lot of copper. Unlike abundant iron and aluminum, copper is relatively scarce. But it's vital to electricity generation/transmission, plumbing, and other uses central to a modern standard of living. Scientific American is providing a quick overview of the situation. They report the conclusion that there simply isn't enough available....
Now surely that was not the relevant phrase. Surely the link is about SciAm's "quick overview of the situation" or their "conclusion." In this case it's the only link in the post so it's not hard to find, but in posts with multiple links it would be confusing to find a link to SciAm before actually mentioning it -- I would assume it's background.
This has gotten better in recent years; links used to be placed seemingly at random.
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
Moderation is the tool that a portion of the community uses to tell the remainder of the community which comments it feels are the most useful. The fact that R.P. comments get modded up, and so do grammatical comments should tell you something. Instead, both this week and last, we (the community) are told were are wrong because we don't share your vision.
Really you have two options; 1) limit the moderator pool to people who share your vision, or 2) live with the fact that the community and you disagree on fundementals.
The second one really is a key one - you want Slashdot to be a pub, etc... etc... The community wants a source of quality news.
digg is completely meaningless accept to people "anonymous" as they may be, posting in every story how digg had some story first, or that digg would do it bettar!!11one. heres a little hint: GOOD SITES DONT NEED TO ANONYMOUSLY PLUG THEMSELVES ALL THE TIME.
This is all i see with digg. As i understand it, digg was made by some guy who constantly drops rumors that google is buying digg or whatever. its sickening. Ive been to that site. Its compeletly different from this one and generally i would also perfer reddit in almost every way. I honestly DONT CARE wether other people liked a link or not before i click it, which seems to be the only difference between slashdot and digg. (besides the overwhelming ego trip that members of digg.com seem to be flying on)
the most amusing thing about digg.com is that these former techTV people are spamming EVERYWHERE trying to advertise and talk about how digg is SOOOO much better than everywhere else. do everyone a favor and shutup. Real sites, like slashdot and reddit, dont have to advertise. they are already cool.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
So in one place Taco says that spelling and grammar are of secondary importance. I completely agree. But note that that statement does say that they are of importance. Which means that it would be better if they were correct than if they weren't.
Then in the Update Taco says that he actually prefers some bad spelling and grammar, since it gives the site a grittier feeling. It's not that they don't get around to fix these errors, it's that they enjoy them being there. In effect, Slashdot is like pre-torn fashion punk jeans.
These two conflicting statements from the same man probably reflects two conflicting views on the issue within himself. Maybe this debate can help him figure out which side he's on and make a conscious and coherent decision on it.
You have a well-established moderation system for the site that I, unlike some people, think works pretty well. It's certainly better than the tons of other sites that have no moderation whatsoever.
In a "news for nerds site," the purpose of the moderation system is to allow the most intelligent, insightful, funny, or otherwise underrated comments rise to the top. And it seems to work. But on the other hand, the stories posted are essentially whatever the hell the editors feel like posting -- and unfortunately many of these, especially the summaries, come off as not particularly insightful or intelligent.
In effect, Taco, you are intentionally, artificially inflating the noise-to-signal ratio on the home page. You seem intent on letting the dumbasses command the floor, allowing the meritocracy to rule only in the comments area. Why is this?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I browse at -1 because that's just the kind of guy I am. But I can certainly understand why this policy could make some readers pretty peeved.
Breakfast served all day!
For me, spelling and grammar are PARAMOUNT.
Lynne Truss, author of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves", has a new book out in which she identifies, and rails against, a nefarious tendency in the modern world to off-load work onto other people. For example, if you had a problem in the old days with your telephone bill you could talk to a human being on the company switchboard who would connect you to the right department to sort out your problem. Nowadays you have to thread your way through a labyrinth of automatic touch-tone menus: "if you know your account number press 1; if your call is about broadband press 2" etc. What is happening is that YOU the user are doing the work of routing the call that was formerly done by someone in the phone company.
Careless spelling and grammar are another example of this. Because YOU THE WRITER don't check spelling and that sentences make sense, I THE READER have to do more work parsing and interpreting mis-spellings; in effect fixing up your prose as I read. The poster who talked about reading as a pipe-lining process is spot-on; bad spelling and grammar stall the pipeline and slow you down.
So can we please see an end to (at least):
* non-standard use of it's and its (come on, the standard is well-defined and well-known);
* "loose" where it should be "lose";
* "to" where it should be "too" and vice versa
This isn't hard! Make a check-list for yourself. Spell-check it. Get someone else to read it over (a sub-editor?).
Please.
It needs to be not to long, not to short. Links should be clear. Spelling and Grammar are secondary issues. Way to go, Rob.
But seriously, I personally find it a poor example when the the maintainer/boss/head honcho comes online to defend bad English because he simply doesn't master the language himself. And yes, I think it does matter. Very much so, because somewhere an invisible line is crossed where the langauge is no longer understandable. You call this, in typical nerd fashion, "parsing".
You would be upset if half the people reading Slashdot posted in their mother tongue. They make an effort to post in correct English. Why don't you?
Many submissions are to long or to short.
If I were a Slashdot editor, I would have fixed this.
I've seen some people take a LOT of heat for commenting on the story and not having read the article. /. readership can be very hostile in that way. Who am I kidding, it can get hostile out here in every way! I'm a fan of the information, but not the flames.
/. because I invariably stumble across a reference to something I have to go look up, and come away better for it. It comes at a price, that I willingly pay, which is to dot my i's and cross my t's before piping up. Failure to do so may lead to a brutal verbal lashing by some 117-lb pasty boy from Wisconsin.
I read
Granted, we all have our pet peeves and buttons that get pushed. But something about the distanced safety of the Net seems to bring it out in this crowd. Maybe we are just perfectionists. Elitists. Information snobs. Our standards are high and we simply can't tolerate "stupidity" of any kind.
When I post anything out here I try to remember two things: 1) everything I do and say can come back to haunt me in the future, and 2) the person to whom I am writing is a human being.
No sig for you!
Jesus Taco, if you can't ignore one random comment from an AC then maybe you really just aren't suited to participating in this site?
Breakfast served all day!
I don't get it. I read it once and I never went back. The summaries are too short. The comments (all 20 of them per story) are like reading only 800000-series UIDs with all the moderations reversed -- except they're not threaded, so you can't follow anyone's train of thought (if anybody had one in the first place).
Taco always writes lame articles like this. He likes to give us "his take" on Slashdot as a "movement" and all that crap. The truth is that he is truly irrelevant to Slashdot. I didn't even know he was still alive. If he died today, it wouldn't matter except he's the only guy with keys to the Slashdot office supply room. Whether he's here posting articles (or Hemos, or Cowboy Neal, or whoever else) or not doesn't matter to us. I don't bother reading who's posting an article. I don't care. It's the article itself that matters, not the lame middlemen like Taco, who by virtue of his divine editorial powers chooses it as worthy of us and posts it to the front page, along with his High School-level observations.
Slashdot is only great because of the huge number of people submitting comments. Without the million monkeys here, Slashdot is http://www.techdirt.com/. Nobody posts there because nobody else posts there. Simple as that. Nobody's here because Taco's a guru. We're here because there are 50 geniuses posting in that crowd of a million monkeys, and we might actually learn something wading through the 900 thousand astroturfing Mac users and the GNAA trolls.
Taco, you and the other editor/moderator/nazis are irrelevant. Just keep paying your bandwidth bill and we need nothing else from you. Most of the time, you're just getting in the way, either with your retarded censorship or with your idiotic banning of IP addresses for a day or two. One of you idiots banned fucking OHIO one time. ALL of Ohio, as far as I could tell. I tried getting my MOM to post here (over an hour's drive away) and even her address was locked out due to someone's bad behavior. Nice work, Chairman Mao.
I really think you're looking at meta-discussion the wrong way. My opinion: because people moderate up spelling/grammar corrections, you should take them seriously. The fact is, more people think that a comment correcting spelling is "insightful" than think it's "off-topic."
That should tell you something: we value correct spelling and grammar. While you may think we're abusing the system, I think we're using the system to tell you something. The moderation system is designed to highlight comments people think are worth our time. Well, we've decided correctness is worth our time.
Finally, I found it pretty disgusting reading your earlier post that you kept spelling and grammar mistakes in the editorial just "to prove a point." What point are you proving? That you like cultivating an unprofessional image?
"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."
So you just think 'meta-discussion' on slashdot is boring? Can you elaborate?
I agree that having a meta-discussion routinely is a bad idea. If you say that meta-discussions usually devolve into predictable pro v. con sides I would agree.
But that doesn't mean it is not valuable. Just by reading a discussion thread about 'cmdrtaco is unfairly linking to his friend's sites' in post about new microprocessor research I can learn alot about websites, if I was new to the internet.
I've learned alot by using slashdot, and to get rid of meta-discussion, which sometimes is critical of you and others, would make your life easier, I think it would reduce the educational value of meta-discussion.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Maybie y'all cood wirk on yer spellin, eh?
Even I knows tha diference betweene to, two and too.
Whay can'ts ya git it rite!
This "link on the 2 or 3 best words" thing is stupid, or at least half the time it is done stupidly. I hate trying to click on three different links on a /. story to find the damn article that is actually being discussed. I don't give a crap about the other times it was mentioned in /.
Why should we have to guess? Why is it so wrong to say "here is the article" instead of this pin the tail on the URL crap.
Sorry to be insulting, but the largest number of complaints here are, by far, against your "stylistic decision" to not care about spelling and grammar. Really, browser this topic at +5 and take note of just how many people are complaining about the poor grammar and spelling. I find it insulting and unprofessional that you feel you should be able to ignore them. My mother language is not English and you would certainly be upset (or I would get modded down ) if I continually posted comments in my language. Yet I make an effort to post good English. Why don't you?
Slashdot is NOT a mailing list or a blog. Slashdot has a far larger number of readers than any blog or mailing list. That excuse that Slashdot should be similar in style to those is just pathetic.
Truthfully I think spelling/grammar are part of the larger problem of 'meta' discussion on Slashdot.
Meta-discussion is not the problem. A certain amount of off-topic discussion is a sign of a healthy, thriving community that has common interests beyond what is tacked up on the board as a talking point of the day. Treating off-topic but unoffensive dialog as counterproductive helps degrade a community. (On the other hand, a community that has degenerated to not having a topic anymore is much worse.)
Meta-discussion that comes from anger is the problem. The anger comes from what many in the community perceive to be a lack of respect for the user base by the Slashdot editorial staff.
Ever since Slashdot added subscription, I've had the following signature:
"I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without dupes, typoes, and articles the editors didn't read."
My whole complaint can be summed up in a single word: Professionalism. Style matters. Fact checking matters. Giving the perception that you actually read the front page of your own website matters.
I know that mistakes can be made. (Lord knows I post mispelled and ungrammatical posts constantly due to slipshod proofreading combined with letting my thoughts get ahead of my fingers.) I know that slip-ups happen, and that you have to read hundreds of submissions every day. It's easy to forget a previously posted story (by another editor) when you're seeing the same story again and again in the submission queue, but there's such a thing as standards of journalistic integrity and a sense of responsibility to the user base when your running something as big of a phenomenon as Slashdot is.
I love reading this site. I don't see myself not reading and posting to Slashdot any time in the near future. However, I won't part with one red cent from my wallet for the site as long as I feel that the editors don't take their jobs seriously enough to make their posts presentable.
That's the major problem. We feel that we aren't being treated with respect and taken seriously. I expect poor grammar from my boss' bosses 'cause I consider them to be overpromoted intellectual light-weights. I don't expect a site for News for Nerds to involve people who can't spell and quite frankly find it unimportant to bother trying.
It's a matter of feeling like the staff here really doesn't give a damn, so why should we? The problem isn't the meta discussions; it's the source of the anger that generates them.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
From Taco's update: Simply hiring a copy editor to purge these changes fundamentally alters the personality of the site, and my opinion is that alteration is for the worse.
To the best of my knowledge nobody is asking you to hire a copy editor to clean up the comments made by readers. We are simply asking for a certain level of professionalism in the main story summaries that are posted by the site admins (I refuse to call you guys 'editors', as you clearly have some animosity towards anyone who actually performs an editorial function).
This guy's the limit!
I, wearing my worker bee hat, am interested in reading about this meta discussion. But I think that most users would find it boring. A sidetrack. Worthless. And today, the system forces the meta discussion to be read in-line with the "Real" discussion. And I think to them, that is boring. And most days to me it is pretty boring too. I think Slashdot is about the joy of technology and how it impacts our lives. I don't think Slashdot is about Slashdot.
I don't think I said it's not valuable. At the very least, the simple fact that I'm writing this sentance right now should at least throw some credence behind that.
But in the grand scheme of things, I think differentiating between "Meta" and "Ontopic" discussion in every discussion would be of tremendous benefit to everyone.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I also like the words to tell me that I may, in fact, click here. That's why I, for one, would make the link from "Article" in a sentence "Article about quantum computing" because I wouldn't want the whole 4 words to be the link. Also, when "quantum computing" is the link, then it's not clear when I'm clicking on it whether I get the newsworty article or a definition of QC.
Yes, "here" and "CNN" are the wrong anchor words, but "article" isn't.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
This is sad.
/. sucks.. Woah!
Seeing some people basically say they're not paying because the quality of spelling & grammar at
I got SD feed on my google/ig and click a post when I find an interesting title.
Not for the sake of clicking or for the "community" - I see something that already interests me, click the link that brings me to Slashdot where I quickly scan the summary, so I can find out if this is what I thought it was about. If so, I RTFA.
Slashdot is not my life. I just want to read the story from the link I saw and gtfo. As long as I can make some sense of what the summary says, I don't need anything else and click the link. I'm honestly shocked people would focus on such irrelevancies and actually even spend time to mail anyone about it for reason other than trying to be helpful. I care about my "speling and grammer" when _I_ write something people will read. But I have enough brain to understand sentences with misspelled words and enough extraslashdoticular interests to pay attention to what's important.
and make the headline the hyperlink to the page? dark green links and black text, brilliant.
"Disclaimer: English is not my native language, I really miss most spelling errors, I don't care about correct spelling, not even in my own language. But the only way to avoid spelling meta discussions really is to avoid spelling errors. Sad, but true."
Why is getting the intended message across without errors, sad? Does bad spelling and grammer enhance the message, or confuse and mislead? What other "declining standards" are we going to use to justify apathy? Poor math skills next because that's the way everyone else does it? A science section were few can even understand the subjects posted. Maybe we shouldn't throw stones at Taco so much, till we mend our own three "R"'s.
i know this may be posted somewhere else in here but....i think that cmdrtaco should add nyud or some other similar service to the url that way we can forestall all the "down already" comments.
This place is very much a non-formal virtual meeting place for people to just shoot the shit and unwind. If they make mistakes, so be it - as stated, content is more important than presentation, and really there's more important things to be doing than correcting non-critical spelling and grammar mistakes.
Slashdot has always *been* this way, and (I am guessing) pretty much always will be. If it's too much for you to bear, perhaps you're not part of the target audience (polite way of saying "piss off" :D).
The site never was intended to be "professional" so to speak, and the spelling errors, dupes, etc are all just part of the character for me.
It's like visiting that old pub with plenty of quirks - it's not perfect but it's got plenty of character and interesting conversation...
Going after spelling/grammar errors and holding them up as a "symbol of how unprofessional this place is" or such is just entirely missing the point.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I apologize if my meaning here is coming off that I think grammar doesn't matter. That isn't quite true- I think that it doesn't really matter that much ON SLASHDOT. Because we are an informal place. A glorified melting of a mailing list, a blog, some emails, a bulletin board etc. All stirred up together.
I get the feeling that you consider correct grammar and spelling to be a formality - something to be observed on appropriate occasions and ignored on others. The problem is that grammar and spelling are not formalities. They're tools to communicate effectively. It's not the difference between greeting someone with "Yo! Wassup?" and "Hello, how are you?". It's the difference between conversing in an overly soft voice and speaking clearly. The former may still result in your being understood, but at the cost of more effort and annoyance on the part of the listeners.
Can you also make sure that it's not impossible to tell where the link to the story is?
You'll usually get stories like this:
Did you ever want to eat mashed potatoes without using your hands? Stupid Shit tells us that they have such a device that runs on Linux but violated the GPL and infringed patents blocking the DMCA from geek overlord insensitive clod Mircosoft sucks geeks don't have girlfriends. (there should be a slashdot loren ipsum)
that tends to be pretty confusing. the links aren't always in the order that I put them in and it gets pretty ambiguous. Sometimes the first or last link in that paragraph will be the Real Link.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
The sheer number of complaints probably indicates there is indeed a problem. Trying to browbeat the moderators into submission will not solve the problem: take the extra 5 seconds to edit the stories you publish (I mean come-on, you publish on average - what --- 10 stories per day? The stories are never more than a paragraph in length (with the exception of book reviews - that are usually well written from what I have seen). You can't tell me it would burden you to spend an extra minute out of your day to edit 10 paragraphs.
Another solution that would allow you to continue your 'way', while helping the readers would be to modify the slashdot code to provide a means of reporting typographical and content errors (perhaps display these in a box next to the article) to bypass the complaints being 'inside' of the story - yet keep readers informed about points of contention for those who care. Just a thought.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
See that in the subject line? Ugly. Yes, you are 100% correct that it is not the point of the story. Yes, I agree completely that you have the priorities straight. Yes, people do blow the issue all out of proportion, some people need something to complain about, or they need to calm down and take a stress pill. There is *NO* excuse for being rude about it. It isn't *that* important. However, you can turn it around: if the story is what is important (and, I say again: you are right it is), the spelling/grammar problems are an *unnecessary* and easily-avoidable distraction from it.
Nobody is expecting perfection (well, maybe some unreasonable people), and I certainly do not get there, but, sheesh, it is bad sometimes. When it gets to the point I can not even parse the sentence and its meaning, then I think that is going too far, and it implies that some of the articles did need a little more attention to this issue before going out.
It's easy to fault. And I really don't like saying what I have above -- after all, I'm not paying for this. It's your site to run as you see fit. But, it is an issue that sometimes mars an otherwise good story. I notice, but I push on and I almost never bother to post something about it (a waste of bytes and time), but somebody else always does, and their articles pile on top of the initial distraction. If the errors weren't there, then, yeah, people will complain about something else, but at least the odds are a little better it might be a complaint about something more substantial than a stupid spelling/grammar mistake. As you say in some of your emendation to the original article, really, the moderators should take care of this with an "OffTopic", though sometimes it is probably hard not to resist a "Funny" in there if it is a really *good* typo.
I guess I'm saying that I, personally, would welcome investment in a little more scrutiny of articles for these types of problems -- just the *really* obvious ones -- even with the acknowledgement that this is a minor issue compared to the substance of most of them.
It's your site. Don't do it. Stay the course. I'm wrong. All I'm saying is, I would notice if the effort were made to correct more typos, and I'd like the result. If it came down to deciding whether it would be worth it to do that if it meant sacrifices elsewhere? Well, that's why you're the editor and I'm just a reader. I don't see the whole picture.
I do appreciate that you took the time to talk about this and other issues from your perspective. It is a great site. Thanks.
Republicans?
Yes. You knew that, right?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Dear CmdrTaco,
It's great that after almost 10 years you're finally giving us some real info on how the inner, mysterious workings of our beloved Slashdot operate. Unfortunately, you do so with an entirely defensive point of view and tone, as if you're tired of explaining all of these things to everyone a million gazillion times. Except that, from what most of us can tell, you haven't.
So I'd like to offer some counter-points to a few of the issues you raise, but from the other side of the fence: a daily Slashdot reader and sometimes poster.
Picking which stories to post is a big part of our job, matters of style and formatting matter too.
From our perspective, picking which stories to post is the ONLY thing you do. Slashdot does not post all that many articles per day (say, like one an hour?). I'm sure there are tons of submissions each day, and that just choosing which ones to post take up the vast majority of the editors' time. However, this shouldn't mean that basic grammar, minimal fact-checking, and dupe-checking are to be overlooked. Perhaps at any given time you should have one editor browsing through the submission queue who hands off potential submission to another editor that does the actual editing. Might not be feasible for some reason or another, but it's just an idea.
Since I want my articles to be around the same size, this is my chance to put in my own words. I'll try to add a joke or opinion.
CmdrTaco, we HATE this. There's nothing wrong at all wrong with wanting to comment on the story, but for crying out loud, put you comments where the comments go. Since you have the power to post comments, you also have power to post your own comments very early in the thread. Believe me when I say that we, your readership would prefer this. This way, you can be seen as an active part of the Slashdot community instead of just some editor on the other side of the glass. People can use their friends/foes score modifiers to either view your comments or not. And I don't think you have to worry about not getting a +5 on almost every single one. Believe it or not, many of us do want to hear your opinion and wit, just not necessarily as part of the article.
Slashdot was spawned from what today would be called a blog. To be more precise, it came from MY blog. Where I posted almost nothing but my own opinions.
We may not say it all the time, but CmdrTaco, we love Slashdot. Really, we do. Or we wouldn't be here otherwise. It may have been your personal blog at one point, but you have to acknowledge that it is not your personal blog anymore. It's a news aggregation site frequented by what, millions? We're not going to tell you that you can't add your opinion (see above), but we're mainly irate that Slashdot never seems to have any emphasis on professionalism or improvement, so we feel that it must be our job to TELL you that we want to see those things. You may percieve it as mindless complaining (and much of it may in fact be mindless complaining), but honestly all we really want to do is help.
Of course some users like to email me to tell me how much Slashdot sucks, how fat and lazy I am, and how the most terrible thing in the history of Slashdot is the fact that the 4th story down contains the word 'to' when it ought to contain the word 'too'. That missing 'o' is the greatest travesty on-line today! It's hard to take that seriously. Especially when people are rude.
We have to put up with grammar and spelling nazis too, just probably not as often as you.
People found other things to complain about. It's almost as if some percentage of the population wants to complain. And they will find something to complain about no matter what.
This is going to happen. A good percentage of the articles that are posted contain comments that ARE mostly a whole bunch of complaining. Then again, what exactly do you expect when you post articles that have a "Post your comment here!" button right below them? We're a culture of
I think the reason people are making such a big deal of the grammar/spelling is that it seems like such a simple thing to fix.
I think that it strikes a lot of us as odd that you're so vigorously protesting having to proofread and link-check probably less than 100 lines of printed text each day per editor. As an undergrad student, I might have to write and proofread more text than that for an in-class essay assignment, in just a few minutes, without the benefit of electronic aides like spellcheck, and I'm not even an English major--nor am I (directly) making a living from the resulting product!
To outsiders like us, both of the following appear to be true:
A) there is little work involved in being a Slashdot editor
B) the editors often fail to do even that little bit of work, or rush through it and do it poorly
I'm not saying that that's how things actually are; I'm saying that it's how things look from the perspectives of most of the Slashdot users. It looks like you're wasting more time on this flamewar than it would take you do just do the proofreading for a whole week. And that, I think, is why people are getting so bent out of shape over it.
Look, I'm really not trying to be mean. I'm trying to explain to you why everyone's so up in arms over it, and why that topic sort of took over the discussion here. Given how limited a user's view of the system is, these conclusions are probably very wrong. But, that doesn't mean that we won't cling to them, failing any new information.
I think that if you'd respond to and refute points A and B above, (almost) everyone would be satisfied. Hell, I'm not even upset over it, I'm just curious. I don't mean this post to sound mean, but it probably does anyway. Sorry.
Sweet merciful shit, this is probably the most inflammatory post I've ever made, and I'm posting it in reply to Taco himself. I must be feeling masochistic today.
Your write. After hall, "for" and "from" have always be in interchangable. "I got this hat for the game," is identical an meaning two "I got this hat from the game." "Too" should of been the same, for it as semantically identical too "two" end "to".
Great job CmdrTaco! It's great to see someone that is more interested by the content than the form!
Still I have a question. I always thought that "too" was written with two "o", but often people write it with a single "o", why?
Is "to" the correct spelling in some countries?
Is "to" the correct spelling in some school?
Is "to" some kind of an abreviation?
Is "to" the accepted spelling on the internet?
Is "to" simply a bad habit, or is there more to it than that?
As you can see, I'm genuinely interested by the origin of the spelling of "too" with a single "o".
Yes, everyone's favorite headache.
Specifically, I find that
My dream moderation system:
Thanks for reading this.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Well, here's a thought.. let the moderators AND the original poster flag a given post as "metadiscussion", and give readers the ability to filter out any post so flagged or modded.
:)
I would not want to see such posts automagically shunted out, tho, because very often the most interesting discussion winds up being somewhere down a meta chain.
Personally I care much more about how interesting posts are than whether they're nominally to topic.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I have a different opinion on where the links should be placed in this example. I know, it's just my own perspective, but I'd just like to share it. I think the link should be placed on the word "article". In this case the "sticky widget" sounds like a dashboard widget that can be downloaded from a website. So as I see it, the word "article" should link to the article about it on CNN, and the phrase "sticky widget" should link to the home page for the widget discussed in the article.
The same can be said for any article about technology that has a homepage on the web. The word "article" should link to the discussing article, and the word or phrase describing the technology should link to the homepage for it. It would be more useful for the reader to have both links available in the summary on Slashdot, rather than having to navigate to it from the article linked to. It just feels more intuitive in my opinion. "Article" links to the article, and "sticky widget" links to the sticky widget.
And on the topic of criticism about articles, I don't pay much attention to it. Considering this site coined the term "Slashdot effect", the editors are getting "Slashdotted" constantly with article submissions and must have such an incredible workload to sort through. Measuring the editors' abilities against the collective scrutiny of the massive Slashdot readership is unfair. Pointing out factual errors is fine and actually helpful, but plain old negative criticism is unwarranted unless it is done with really witty and entertaining "(Score:5, Funny)" sarcasm.
--
Jokes about CmdrTaco...there goes my karma!
Which reminds me... since the switch to CSS, polls are no longer visible to those of us using a non-CSS browser and low-bandwidth option.
Otherwise, after a short period of breakage and confusion, everything seems to be back to working for us texties.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Obvious spelling or grammatical errors instinctly make my brain try to parse the various possible meanings, and distract me from the message of the article. This kind of meta-thinking impacts the benefit of the time I spend reading the article - and furthermore triggers a mind reaction labeling the editors as 'Sluggish', 'Careless', 'Unprofessional' etc. And (I assume) all the editors are even writing in their mother tounge? Many of us reading and commenting are not, and these ambigous typos make the articles harder to read.
Having worked 10 years for a computer magazine, I know how important it is to weed out the mistakes. Get rid of those trivial typos, get the grammar focused on the issue at hand. And then, if possible, go over it even one more time to make it even clearer. OK, joking, I'll never expect the last step from /. - I'll take non-optimized language for the fun of the game :)
The comments, then, are a free for all discussion forum. I'm prepared to ignore this kind of mistakes in the comments, for instance while moderating. In the parent article, I'll say slang and jargon - fine - it's part of the game. But editors who don't care enough to get their 'to's and 'too's right should, IMHO, get their act together.
BTW, many of the persons who complain about spelling etc. are sincerely trying to make /. a better place. They know that these sluggish mistakes irritates people and would like the editors do do better.
Phew, hope it helps :)
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
Flagging meta discussion is a core part of our plan for the new moderation system.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
A problem I've often encountered is wanting to submit a story, but lacking the writing skills to make a summary that doesn't show too obviously that english isn't my first language. (That sentence was obscured on purpose.)
This is especially true about polls. I've been wanting to submit a poll, something along the following lines:
NSA uses...
1) Secret backdoors
2) Beowulf clusters
3) Social engineering
4) Quantum computers
5) Alien technology
6) Psychic children
7) CowboyNeal factors primes
I think such a poll could spawn some interesting comments, but I'm no expert on the matter so I don't know if the options are sensible, nor do I have much confidence in my sense of humor. Certainly, if other people could see it before it was posted, they could contribute significantly.
Any suggestions for how to solve this problem? I'm quite opposed to the idea of sending "raw" submissions to the editors, because stupid submissions reflect poorly on slashdot and more importantly, me.
I'm not surprised you "read" three or four pages a minute. It's obvious you must be doing something wrong in order to have read tens of thousands of pages of text and still fail to notice that "nazi's" isn't the plural of "Nazi" even though almost every single one of those pages must have contained literally dozens of plurals. I wonder how someone can fail to miss the pattern after being presented with tens of millions of examples.
-- SIGFPE
Cool. One can hope it'll make the offtopic police happy, at least temporarily :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I went too the store.
and
I went to the store.
For all intents and purposes, that is the exact same sentance.
Perhaps.
But if coming from someone with English as Second Language, (or heard by such person) they may be trying to say, "I too went to the store."
Not the best example, but hey, it's yours.
I've seen similar situations happen innumerable times. It can make a hell of a difference.
i.e. She says, "Dest". Is that Desk, Dust, um... what am I missing ... what's the context?...
Not a great example, but hey, it's mine.
But if one thinks "Correct speeling is for teh weak", I have to figure one has not much interesting to say.
and to complaing about a missing apostrophe.
WTF? Is it too hard to spell/grammar check? Moron.
Is Slashdot not a commercial venture? I see an add for Barracuda at the top of my screen so I would say yes. Rob, your customers are telling you to fix your grammar mistakes. You seem to be confusing meta discussion with squeaking wheel. You have the job title "Editor". To most of the English speaking world, that means your expected to have excellent grammar and spelling. You are held to a higher standard than someone just making a comment or even the original submitter.
I also don't see metadiscussion as the problem you do. You need to do your job right and take pride in it.
And yeah a Posted as anonymous because of limitations on posting and moderating. I am swv3752 not that you could not probably figure it out if you really wanted.
It's too, it's not bloody 'to'. It's just miraculous to me that someone can get a job as an editor without ever having been to school!
--LWM
Excellent information, written like someone who badly needs a few remedial English courses. Get up from behind your computer and learn how to write, jerkwad.
Their just jealous of your low UID. ;-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Don't say "The article about Novell" because there might be 3 in the last 2 days.
Two of which are dupes.Informal it may be. But I for one go to great lengths to see that my posts exhibit good grammar and spelling as well as at least half-way rational thought. Why do I care?
Well, these posts will be available for a very long time. I was once involved in a hiring decision at a company I worked for, and at one point someone Googled one of the candidates, turning up a huge trove of Usenet articles on alt.x-files. The posts made the person look like a complete doofus, and not simply because of their subject. They were riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, and their character was entirely juvenile, even though they had been posted by a 30-year-old woman. Stuff like, "David Dookuvnee is awsome!!! LOL!!!!"
Now, this might well have been questionable as far as hiring practices are concerned, but once you have something like this in your head, it can really poison your attitude. I've never forgotten it, and it has made me a much more careful person. I say either put in due diligence or make damn sure nobody can trace you.
// This is not a sig.
Maybe for the time being (while waiting for the redesign) non-trivial meta comments could be obviously labeled as such in the subject. There are many ways to do so, but if perhaps just one particular way got popular (and I submit my own suggestion in the subject of this very comment) it'd be a little easier for the useful meta comments to make their way to the ears of the editors and a little easier to skip over for those who really don't care.
Yeah, but he's an amateur. You just reinforced his point ;)
Truthfully I think spelling/grammar are part of the larger problem of 'meta' discussion on Slashdot. Every Slashdot Story will have some percentage of Meta discussion. Comments claiming that this particular post was a "Slashvertisement". Another saying that the submittor is a troll. Another saying that the article is a troll has a typo or the source site is unreliable.
Today the only option we have to deal with this is to moderate offtopic. A harsh punishment indeed.
But it doesn't solve the REAL problem, which is meta discussion. Giving users a place to discuss the meta, without distracting the bulk of readers who couldn't being to care about the typo/grammar/conspiracy theory about submittor.
The problem is that even if something is "meta," it is still relevant to the story somehow. At least one of your examples (that the source is unreliable) is incredibly important, even if it might be classified as meta. If we have an article about some new gadget, and it turns out that it was News of the World who published it, a comment about the likelihood of the gadget not even existing is not irrelevant, or even considered meta, to the great majority of readers. After all, who want to discuss an imaginary story?
Besides, as you have noted yourself, the system tends to deal with this stuff. If people don't see it as off topic, it won't get moderated as such. And mostly, it isn't.
Some editors are a program. This is a Turing test. Awesome isn't it?
Lysdexics of teh wlord, Untie and Lure!
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Many submissions are to long or to short.
...Many submissions are too long or too short...
And many use "to" instead of "too"...
Fuckin dumbass taco....
But Slashdot clearly distinguishes between the comments and the stories--I can moderate comments, for instance, but not stories. I can post comments directly, but not stories. Please understand that this is the basis for our complaints about spelling and grammar.
We all understand the community feeling and I doubt many people would demand that you copy edit every comment posted. We like the free flow of the community so much that we even put up with the GNAA and goatse stuff, let alone spelling errors in comments.
But the stories clearly occupy a different sociological space from the community of the site. They are the basis for the community discussions, not part of the community itself. In other words consider the story posting as existing in a neverland between the story itself and the community of Slashdot. To the story owners (say, CNN for instance), it's part of Slashdot. But to the community of Slashdot, the story posting is an extension of the story itself, not an integral part of the community. Emotionally, our response to the story posting is much closer to our response to the story, than it is to our response to a comment. Look at it graphically:Now imagine yourself living in this "lineland." If you live on either end, the other two appear to be pretty much the same thing (or at least very closely tied). So while the story posting looks like part of Slashdot to an external viewer, the story posting looks like an external object to those of us over here in the Slashdot community. That's why it fundamentally does not make sense to us to apply the same (low) quality expectations to the story posting that we do to comment postings. To us they are very different animals, and it makes more sense to apply the "story" level of expectations (i.e. those of a published professional story).
As you (correctly) note, the most important thing in the story posting is the story itself--not other links, not search engine traffic, not who posted it, etc.
Please--you changed your mind on the nofollow links for story submitters. Please change your mind on this. Spelling and grammar errors distract from the purpose of the story posting. And because the stories occupy a separate space from the site community, the errors do not add to the community feeling at all.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Include the URL. Don't say "The article about Novell" because there might be 3 in the last 2 days.
Yes, there might. But the second two will be dupes of the first one.
>>Many users routinely email me to complain about such errors. I'm usually fairly flexible on these matters. If the error is blazingly bad, I will often correct it. .... As an aside, for awhile we actually had an editor reading Slashdot articles and correcting grammatical mistakes. Turns out it doesn't really matter much. People found other things to complain about.
So slashdot has the highest percentage of complainers as a populaton?
>>Another note about URL formatting. An interesting thread spawned in there about what text makes a proper hyper link.
Haa! Something to complain about. Busted. Eat your own dust and link to this thread. Is it THAT complicated? Is it?
"Next is proper anchor texting. I fix the hyper text on the vast majority of submissions. People link the word 'Here' or 'Article' or 'CNN' and I find that very frustrating. I want the hypertext to be the most appropriate 2-3 words that tell you exactly what you're clicking on. I think that is absolutely essential. Every URL should matter, and every bit of hypertext should tell you exactly what it is you're going to get when you click that mouse button."
I have found your linking choices style far less than intuitive. Would be a good subject for an "unscientific" slashdot poll.
"Now sometimes a sentence doesn't parse to me. "
I can see what you mean.
--Murray Barton
1. install spell checker as plugin and make them run it before they post a story \ commengt just like 'preview' is obligatory ...
2.
3. no profit but better slashdot
... that no matter how hyperbolic one is in their approach to irony, there are always going to be those that still just can't get it.
taco is a douche.
Heh Heh, he said "seperates".
I think I failed the test in high school where they described irony.
:wq
My question is: Is this optimum? Highly formatted articles may be easy to parse quickly and give a great deal of uniformity to the site. But they may also appear repetitive, formulaic and boring. A blog and not a newsite. Worse, the style requirements require rejecting fresh articles when too much editing is required.
But SlashDot has been remarkably successful, and it's difficult/dangerous to tamper with success. Still, some explicit consideration of how much stylistic diversity should be posted is always in order. Editors can still decide that status quo is the best choice.
I have pretty good vision, and a nice big monitor. I've tried various fonts, including some anti-aliased fonts. But still I have a lot of trouble reading the italicized text of articles.
Would you kindly consider not italicizing?
Also note that the italicized text is always double quoted anyway.
For every three seconds it takes to fix the spelling of a common word (its it's their there they're to too your you're etc.) it takes three minutes amortized over the slashdot faithful to moderate gripes off-topic and wastes valuable moderation points that could have been applied to outright stupidity instead. I don't get the logic here about leaving "low hanging fruit" to appease the born complainers. Not only does it set a low example for think before you post, it also sets a low standard for the use of moderation points.
What I would really like to see is some sort of scoring on the stories themselves. Many of the articles linked to are just uninformed drivel and can be safely ignored, while others are real gems of informative or entertaining prose. IT would be nice to be able to tell one from t'other before clicking on the link. A scoring system would also give you a good guide as to what we want to read.
Lastly I'd like to see a finer grained scoring, perhaps -1 to 10 instead of the current -1 to 5.
Finally, in consideration for little sites being destroyed by the /. effect you might care to consider changing the direct links to those which point to a cache Google, for example.
You would like Slashdot to retain a loose communal feeling
Or, in normal Slashdot (mis)usage, a "lose communal feeling"...
You actually have to stop and re-read the sentence to understand it?
People misspell lose as loose (and you're as your and it's as its and to as too, and so on) often enough that if you can't tell what somebody means by the context, I can only shake my head at you.
Given that those words are homonyms, how are you able to tell what people mean when they speak to you out loud?
Don't get me wrong: I am as pedantic as the next guy when it comes to matters of spelling, grammar and style, but I've rarely misunderstood anyone -- certainly not to the point of having to stop and manually parse a sentence -- based only on these very common errors.
Unless you're an inexperienced speaker of the language, or are otherwise unable to comprehend alternate or irregular spelling, I have a hard time believing this trips you up as much as you say.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
It's hard for some of us not to look at grammatical or spelling errors and wince
You would get along well with Lynne Truss, the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
I hate to post so late, 'cause I'm significantly increasing the risk that it's been said and I've missed it...
/. that people found most annoying was solved. People were then able to turn their attention to the next-most-annoying problem.
/. out of sight. Fix what people complain about, and then look to their new complaints for the next problem which needs to be addressed.
Here are the steps:
We fixed up spelling and grammar (hired editors).
People started complaining about other things.
Therefore, people just wanted to complain and weren't bothered by the spelling and grammar.
Here's an alternative conclusion:
With the spelling and grammar fixed, one of the problems with
Wash, rinse, and repeat, and you have a way to improve
well, this cements it. now that slashdot has explicitly stated that it will actively cling to bad editing, i'm out of here for good.
this stance says, "we don't *want* high standards;" this is intellectual laziness, the slacker ethic.
slashdot won't miss me; i know that. but neither will *i* miss slashdot, and, as more and more productive users abandon the site, the lower its already-embattled quality will sink. it won't be too long before slashdot is nothing but trolls.
later.
p.s. don't waste your time flaming me; i won't see it. i mean it; i'm never coming to this website again.
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
...not the spelling, grammar and urls. IMHO. Keep up the good work tho dude. :-)
First, I'd like to say that, whatever it's faults, this site has always been regular reading for me ever since I discovered it. The stories are (usually) interesting and informative, and at least give me an idea about "the world" that you don't see elsewhere.
;) )
However... I'm an English student and I notice the typos. Constantly. It's annoying, but I'm not unused to it. (And besides, all language is merely a collection of fundamentally useless floating signifiers anyway
So... Taco doesn't want to be flooded with comments bitching about his inability to check stories, and a lot of people don't want to see typing errors on this website, for whatever reason (grammar-nazism, scanning problems, 2nd language problems). Why don't we just shift this to the person who submits the story?
If the story is largely written by the users anyway, then why not add a simple spellcheck to the "preview" option when posting. A simple hook to a or ispell would do. Show the user what they might have spelt wrong, and give them the chance to correct it if they wish. If they want to make the decision to keep the typos, for whatever reason, they can. If they want to correct the spelling, they can.
If this is a place that is concerned with telling multiple stories then I see no problem in letting the user choose how to spell words. After all, I wouldn't want someone to correct my colour, dreamt and realise to color, dreamed and realize, but I might want to know that I spelt "necccessity" wrong.
Surely, in this situation, everybody wins? Or at least doesn't lose too much...
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
I see the spelling errors, parse the grammatical errors, and I don't look back. Anyone who feels it is neccessary to post a message regarding "to vs. too" has a mental problem. They want to pee on it and make it their own? Be superior? Who knows? But, I HATE it. It is one of my pet peeves. The same applies to dupes, grammatical errors, and other such BS. Having to listen to those totally unproductive whiners is Slashdot's biggest problem. If you are too stupid or too intolerant to deal with inconsequential errors in a mature way (ignore them, that is) then you fit into the category that
I'm going to repost my post from the other day:
Spelling generally doesn't really matter that much, in terms of making yourself understood. IRC is rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, but its users still make themselves understood.
However, only educated people who have spent a fair amount of time studying and reading (and thus, are probably at least reasonably well-to-do) are likely to be able to avoid spelling and grammatical errors. This means that there is an highly-visible tool that allows people to judge someone's rough socioeconomic status. Not surprisingly, people use this tool (perhaps even unconsciously). Also not surprisingly, people try to game the system, to come off as being more educated than they are, by having a few words of French or Latin or whatever to quote. It also means that parents of kids are likely to push them to have correct spelling and grammar so that they can pass informal, unconscious "test" for education level.
None of this is to directly solve a problem with grammar. It's just to deal artifacts of the way we judge people.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Why not have a -1 Meta moderation that doesn't affect Karma? People who want to see the meta discussion can change it to 0 or +1 in their preferences. Since it doesn't affect karma people won't (legitimately) complain about you supressing meta discussion.
We were once willing to go nuclear to avoid secret prisons, torture, and indefinite detention. What happened?
McCarthyism, AKA human falliability, AKA repeating the same mistakes ad infinitum. Or did you make the same mistake as the rest of the general public and assume that we are facing new problems with superior decision making skills to the people who lived before us? Because I think we've made that mistake before too.
See also: History
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
*Sigh* I guess its inevatable. Someone has to do it...
You must be new here!
*Gasp* there, I did it.
This sig is neither interesting, nor humorous. Including meta-humor.
Thank's, that made my day.
It looks like you're introducing an example with the phrase "like IE". Would you like help?
* Introduce an example with the word "like"
* Introduce an example with the phrase "e.g." (exempli gratia)
* Introduce a clarification with the phrase "i.e." (id est)
Don't say "The article about Novell" because there might be 3 in the last 2 days.
... and they'll probably all refer to the same thing!
Sorry, browsing at +3 I didn't see any similar comments marked funny. Maybe it's not. <shrug>
Some constructive suggestions:
Could one not provide the Slashdot editors with pushbutton-simple or fully automated tools, that check for both broken links, and, more saliently, for overt paragraph copying from linked material as submission text ?
It seems to me, with respect, that one could easily code some straightforward editor admin features up to pull the link's pages and regex for obvious pattern matches, in a rather short development time and pushbutton manner, displaying the results of the checks. Or in an automatic manner, auto-invoked for each candidate submission and displaying a couple visual bits of information for the article selector beside eligible candidate entries / submission entries.
(I am presuming the submission pool looks like some form of html listing of entries to editors.)
Would it be possible, in rejecting articles, to checkbox from a list of rejection labels, providing feedback to the submitters as to why the submission was rejected.
By way of analogy, as many coders and IT personnel know, much improvement in coding comes as much from getting feedback from colleagues and experiencing the results of design choices, as from more instantaneous errors, such as compiler messages. Slashdot lacks a feedback element to article submission.
Could you clarify why Slashdot does not allow a selected group of trusted users or spelling trolls to correct article misspellings ? Has this been considered, I am unclear why you would reject it, and felt in some way the above meta-article was lacking in not mentioning this topic.
Surely the innovation and skill of the Slashdot team is up to the task, being quite familiar with it's origins in trusting a small pool of users (i.e. editors, and the trusted moderation pool of the early days.)
I have read much this year online and in print vivisecting newspapers' failures to establish good websites, with much remedial analysis suggesting a large potential in allowing readership to correct spelling, grammar, and incorrect journalistic details. I do not propose journalistic details or major grammar be editable on Slashdot posts, nor that article summaries turn Wiki-esque, but surely there are some safe ways to improve spelling and minor grammar, via allowing a small trusted pool of spellers corrective ability, perhaps with various strict constraints on character counts, non-link text only, and so forth. So many articles misspellings only require one or two characters of editing, or an apostrophe!
Have you considered any systems by which correction of spelling, grammar, broken links, summary plagiarism, egregious quasi-advertisement entries, factual oversights, or tracking down of original source material behind the linked material, might lead to awarding the correcting user with moderation points, or with (one-time ?) heightened statistical chance for moderator selection ?
(Or, perhaps, rather than on the fist accepted correction, on every Xth accepted correction, establishing consistency of corrector merit, possibly excluding grammar (i.e. grammer trolling) from the above (partial) suggested list.)
Users careful enough to consistently catch errors would arguably make better-than-average moderators, parsing article comments with similar care, and this would, in classic Slashdot fashion, leverage the community for community-based submission review. Obviously, there are some counterarguments here, I offer it in part for it's possible inspirational aspect. I very much like the leveraging of community virtue portion of the idea.
Also... Thank you!
I have read Slashdot for many years - you are a primary news source to me. I have much enjoyed the article selection over the years.
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality." -Dante
Almost any point made in this article is a good, very sensible one; there's hope the other /. editors will regard this as a style guide and try to make equally good decisions. But as others have said before: don't short shrift grammar and spelling! But before I launch into my boring, nitpicking rant about proper writing, two other points I care about:
/. is a tad more cumbersome to read and the reading takes a tad longer. It's not perceptible to an individual who isn't conducting a scientific study on this, but over all the stories and readers the lost time adds up to a lifetime. Now, do you want to practically murder a poor /. reader with your CSS?
/. editors, you can also help here, of course. If you just fix what needs to be fixed and leave the rest well alone, you are not taking any personality away from the posts. If a submitters sole defining personality trait was his/her lack in writing skills, no one cares if that is lost!
... and a curse. And there are millions like me, a fair share of which reads Slashdot. We don't deserve your respect, but we desire a little more understanding. If proper spelling and grammar mean not
Now that we're talking about article formatting, let's talk about the visual formatting for a moment. Please find another markup for the quotes. Not for blockquotes, not for one-liners, but for the submitted text that makes up 90% of almost every story. The way it is now, the majority of the front page is in italics, and italics are simply not designed for large blocks of text. The way it is,
Secondly: Yes, the linked text ought to be "sticky widget". "A sticky widget", if you will, or even "article about a sticky widget". Obviously, linking just the word 'article' to an article is rather unhelpful, and linking the abbreviation 'CNN' to a specific article that is somewhere on the CNN site but not about CNN at all, now that's totally idiotic.
As far as the promised rant is concerned, here's what matters most for me, and judging from how many people mostly just read the front page, hardly ever opening a single article page with the comments and never posting a comment themselves, it also matters a lot for a huge number of other people:
I want to read through the stories quickly and find the links I'll want to click on. I won't even notice most typos and mistakes where letters were dropped, added or swapped around. But where the meaning of a sentence is changed or a sentence becomes nonsensical, where whole words are randomly changed to totally different words with completely different meanings (to too), where one word even becomes two other words or vice versa (it's its), I'm tripped.
Thus, an appeal to my dear fellow story submitters: Even the most active of you (with a few solitary exceptions I suspect) read/skim more than a thousand of other people's stories for every one you submit. And we all lose a second or so when we have to mentally correct a nonsensical phrase. So if we all take that extra minute to make sure our story reads well, we get back that investment of time when reading other people's submissions and in the end, everyone wins.
Dear
Of course to many people this doesn't matter; maybe they're even in the majority. Some of them have plenty of time to determine the originally intended meaning of every garbled word ont he fly because they're reading so slowly anyway. Others simply are more verbal thinking types and to them, written words are just a notation for the sounds you make/hear when speaking/listening. This is for you: I know that pedantically distinguishing between 'to' and 'too' means nothing to you. I know that even in your weirdest dreams you wouldn't be writing a silly rant like this here. I know that a misplaced apostrophe will never make you want to punch someone in the face. I envy you for that. But I'm different. It's a gift
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Digg does spell checking (and doesn't add one persons opinion to every article, and doesn't ban users for modding up controversial articles). It also, as of a few months ago, gets more traffic than Slashdot.
So no, Taco, I don't think people would find something else to complain about.
(I'm reading Slashdot for the first time in about a month, having switched to digg. Before that, I read slashdot religiously every day since 1999).
One would think that Taco (and others involved in Slashdot development) would be as extra-sensitive to correct spelling and grammar as the rest of us, since in writing programs, I think each one of us gets bitten in the ass on a daily basis by getting one character wrong in an expression or reordering parameters wrongly. One would think that this would train them the same way it trains the rest of us. That it doesn't, I think, is why we're all so peeved and perplexed about this "hey whatever man" attitude.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
1. To be informed about a wide range of topics and issues that other people have noticed WITHOUT having to google them myself. I do have a life, after all, and far too many "computer-widower" comments flying past my ears as it is. 2. I like the flavour of slashdot, grammatical and other errors included. I make allowance for the different posters, editors and articles rather like the allowances I make for the vast range of users I support. 3. As a support tech I am exposed to an enormous amount of information every day that is correctly spelled and grammatically beyond reproach but is either factually incorrect (e.g. software manuals/specifications and user problem descriptions) or incomprehensible to "normal" humans (e.g. science papers). Slashdot is a relief because it brings me information I WANT in contrast to information I NEED. 4. Recommended by a knowledgeable colleague. Ta, Bryn. So CmdrTaco and team, thanks for the site. :) :) :) :) You are right, IMHO, grammar and selling are secondary to content.
I have a few, possibly tongue-in-cheek, suggestions:
- Submissions with more than, say, 3 errors are declined - too many errors where X is an automated spelling/grammar checker. (We'll talk about UK vs US spelling somewhere else.) Reduces the editorial workload and gives positive feed back to those whose submissions are poor in the first place. Buck up or shut up.
- Persistent moaners are given unpaid editorial positions since they, in their own opinion, have the required expertise and time. If you ain't part of the
solution, you're part of the problem.
- Up the priority on the project to split the on and off topic threads.
Ka kite from New Zealand (that'll fail the spelling test!)
This is exactly the kind of poor English up with which I will not put!
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
...in which environment, perfect English is often percieved as arrogant and/or anal. If you use correct punctuation in chat rooms, people think you are some kind of weirdo. (I -am- a weirdo, but at least they never figured out I am a Dachshund.)
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
As a technical writer, I am basically paid to be a Grammar Nazi.
No you're not - you're paid to explain technical matters to the layman as end-user. Your grammar must be at a good enough level to avoid distracting from the content, but it does not need to be technically perfect. This is what Taco is saying.
There are many cases where breaking accepted rules of grammar actually -helps- understanding, especially beginning sentences with conjuctions. Period followed by "But" is often clearer than hiding the "but" in a subclause only subtly indicated by a comma in the middle of a long paragraph.
I hope you spend your time re-reading documents for clarity, and correcting proofing errors you happen to notice - not the other way around, please!
BTW, "evince" is not a good choice for Slashdot, because many of our international readers will wonder what the hell it means...
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
grammer nazi's
"grammar Nazis"
You correct his "grammer" but you leave "stayed inter-office" (intra- not inter-) alone? Bah! You should have your jackboots revoked!
In Germany, to publish that whole exchange would be ILLEGAL, never mind ungrammatical...
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
I have found that the whole battle of spelling and grammar is futile. I have had the fortune of being involved in computers for 20+ years, and having been using internet email, newsgroups, etc. for nearly as long.
I too using to be spelling nazi. At some point, after a particularly heated flamewar, I realized I was not going to change the world. Fixing everyone's spelling and grammar really requires getting to every grade school and high school and fixing people before they get out into the real world.
Reaching this point is a form of enlightenment - it frees you from the petty issues and lets you focus on the real issue at hand. That is what this whole editorial is about.
Keep up the good work Taco!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
You are making it sound like the site depends on bad grammar to survive and thrive. I disagree. People will stop complaining about it, the site will look better. So what if people complain about other things? Maybe those need to be addressed too? Just because there's always something to complain about doesn't mean that those complaints are not valid.
You are confusing readers who do not have English as a first language, since these people are used to proper English. Spelling and grammar errors make the site what it is? I disagree. Not only that, but it detracts from the site, and I know several people who stopped coming here because of things like these.Clever signature text goes here.
on the whole i agree with CT. personally i think that a post/submission should range 25-50 words, just enough to whet the appetite or decide to pass to the next story, but not too much that reading the whole submission is a pain. spelling isn't important when getting the message across, but if it hinders the comprehension, you should correct or change the language for better understanding(i think this should only apply to submissions, not to comments). and since CT is the editor-in-chief (so to speak) i think taking license to trim extraneous cruft from submissions, or adding a comment is fair play, after all ,slashdot is malda's frankenstein.
if spelling is a big issue, has the slashdot team considered building spell checking into the submission and/or comment engine? this might actually make the spelling bee nazi's STFU.
lastly, it might actually be interesting to open up the submission pipeline to subscribers, so we can see what might be coming around the bend, so to speak. i don't mean any kind of story voting like digg, but more of a function so that posters won't feel burned that someone else stole their scoop. just my 2 cents...
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
As far as my work not having to be technically perfect, the company I work for generally sees such laxity as vile heresy, so while I could tolerate lower standards, it would eventually catch up with me, and I'm loath to find out what might happen if it did.
I agree with what you say about the deliberate breaking of rules to enhance clarity, though your particular example using "but" as the first word in a sentence happens to be something I find to be anathema, and stamp out wherever I see it. That's just a pet peeve, though.
Though I was happy to get this job because I am a deeply committed sadist who relishes inflicting anguish on the users I used to have to directly support, I do try and make clarity my first priority- at least I think I do. I'm going to make "clarity first" my mantra; it's a good one. Thanks; I owe you a mantra.
Regarding my use of "evince", well, I have to admit I have a love of using them thar fancy words. I am unrepentant.
Actually, the whole article is worth reading, but that section is particularly relevant here. He goes on to say that expressing yourself "clearly and well is important. If you can't be bothered to do that, we can't be bothered to pay attention. Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It doesn't have to be stiff or formal -- in fact, hacker culture values informal, slangy and humorous language used with precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some indication that you're thinking and paying attention."
'Nuff said, I think.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
The system is quite simple when it comes to losing mod points: if you abuse the system (ie. incorrectly moderate posts), then your privileges will be automatically revoked. Indeed, there's especially not a conspiracy against you involving the editors.
It's much akin to protecting a living body from an infection; the infection is noticed, and swiftly eliminated. In this case the system is the discussion forums, and the infection is somebody who moderates incorrectly (much like yourself).
Indeed, I think your signature shows how flawed your interpretation of reality here is. If your signature were correct in any way, then I would not have Excellent karma, and I would not frequently receive mod points. But since that's not the case, you must be completely wrong. It's no wonder you lost your mod points; you likely didn't understand how to properly use them in the first place!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Go away, troll.
Actually, a baseless ad hominem attack used against an opponent during a debate or a discussion does automatically prove that opponent correct. Indeed, for if you could prove the opponent wrong via facts and honesty, you could win the debate. But since you are wrong, you are unable to resort to fact. Thus you must fall back on personal attacks, which prove that you are in the wrong. And the end result is that the opponent is victorious, much like I always am when we talk, and you toss out ad hominems.
Your ad hominem attack in the parent post to this one further proves that I am correct. I am still the victor!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Let us use the proper term for such malicious discussion style, first of all. They are not flames; they are ad hominem attacks.
In order to present rational, logical arguments, one needs to build their case on fact and the truth. When one has the correct viewpoint and opinion, that is quite easy to do, as such a foundation will be readily available. Being correct naturally leads one away from using ad hominem attacks, just because one can easily present fact and truth at ease.
Ad hominem attacks arise when one party bases their argument around deceit, ignorance, bias, and hate. Indeed, people use ad hominem attacks because their stand is not built upon a solid foundation of truth and fact. Thus they use ad hominem attacks because they are in the wrong. As we clearly see, anyone who resorts to ad hominem attacks automatically loses a debate or discussion.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.