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.
You failed to capitalize "Perhaps," and the noun "read-through" is hyphenated.
Have patience! I have a half dozen of these editorials in various states of completition. This one was finished first, so I posted it. It's going to take me several months to get to every major problem on Slashdot. After that, we'll be perfect and I can take a break ;)
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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.
:-)
Indeed you are human, and as such you like everyone else are subject to forces which you can't control. Namely what other humans give you as feedback. Being that you have such a large audience; you can expect a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. There is just no way around it. The outside mail will be a force that you can only alter slightly at best. However as you are human, you are capable of interperting the outside world and visualizing differently. The trick is just set up your keyword filtering to dodge the flames as best you can, and maybe do something positive every-time a flame slips past into your inbox (take that moment to chuck your Thinkgeek microbe across to the next cube perhaps?). You'll find life more enjoyable once you don't really care
...in bed
I think most anyone who works in the money part of OSTG would admit right up front where my loyalties lie on Slashdot. Hell maybe I should get marketing or sales to write the article explainign all the times I've put the needs of the community ahead of the business needs. I value this site and the needs of the readers above all else, because I believe it makes long term sense to put those needs first.
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.
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And here you see the classic Damned if I Do... Damned if I Do't clearly illustrated. One hand accuses me of never communicating with the community, and then the other accuses me of bloating up the page with meta discussion!
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As for adding my own words, it varies from article to article. If i have a really strong opinion, I'd like to share it with people. I don't necessarily think I'm more qualified, but that doesn't stop me. My ego says that having done this for 8 years now, I'm entitled to get to say my bit whenever I choose. The truth is that I don't feel that need very often.
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Geekery Times is not the story.
"Reporting" is not the story. "Reporting" is sorta implied by the fact that we are linking. It means the same as "Saying" or "has an article" or "Writes". These are all words that tell you that on the other side of the link, there will be words. And thats pretty much implied on the glorious web by the fact that we're mostly a text based media.
The focus, the meaning, the point is 'a decline in proper anchor texting' which is probably what I'd link.
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This does happen. Most stories are posted several minutes and read by subscribers. When they choose to contact us with typos or URL fixes or other notes, we often include those chages.
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This is a user preference. Log in and toggle it. I choose to not activate year by default because 99% of Slashdot content is read within a few hours or days of posting... or "This" year. So the year display is redundant almost always because it's "This" year. Yup, it's annoying for old articles. Someday a user will contribute a Slashcode Patch with 2 date formats- one for datestamps in the last 72 hours and one for older content.
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As a non-native English speaker that has some grasp of English grammar and orthography, I can say grammar sloppines on /. (or everywhere else) is not only confusing but really annoying. Orthography errors just sound more than sloppy. They sound stupid.
I don't know how can you cope with this. It seems to me here in Italy we pay much more attention to grammar and words (That's perhaps we had low alphabetization levels until 50 years ago, so correct language skills are still highly respected). Typos occur, but bad orthography and grammar are often touted as symptoms of absolute ignorance.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
There are things we could do to address that: linking wiki entries, breaking down acronyms, including definitions on strange words. I think these things might add value to some, but to do so would shift our focus. It would change the nature of what Slashdot is. So it's not something I really want to do.
It's like "Footnotes". Sometiems a footnote could be pulled right up and placed in-line in the body text. Other times, it could simply be skipped and ignored. These decisions are essentially about writing for your audience.
I choose to write Slashdot as if I'm writing to my friends. Always have. My friends know certain things about encryption or microprocessors. And I think that a large reason slashdot succeeds is because many people have that shared base level of knowledge. Change that now is one of those things that I think change Slashdot on a molecular level.
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This is somethign we struggle with. When you see that happen tho, feel free to email. The problem is there is a spectrum here that ranges from "Factually wrong" to "Focuses on Some Detail that is not the focus of the article". Where the teeter totter tips on that scale is a subjective thing.
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Proofreading text isn't that different from proofreading code. Maybe it's part of the way geek brains are wired. Reading a paragraph and noticing that the author used "their" instead of "they're" might use a similar part of the brain that alarms you when you see a missing semicolon, or the wrong variable name, or "p++" instead of "++p," etc.
And when I see sloppy but functional code -- written by someone else, of course ;-) -- I instantly question the compentency of the coder, whether that's fair or not. Having the same reaction to poor grammar/spelling is understandable, since most of us have been reading English longer than we've been reading code.
Obviously, there are different levels of formality (in spoken as well as written English), but deliberate slang, jargon, abbreviations, etc. are different than errors (which are either accidental or a result of laziness or ignorance). Non-native speakers do get some slack, but their English is often better...
Still working on the time machine.
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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.
I think that slashdot is stylistically more akin to a mailing list or blog than to the NYT or WSJ. We are informal. Which is what I want Slashdot to be. Casual. To hire a copy editor and purge all these things from Slashdot changes the tone of the site. It shifts us to another place. Some people think that change is good. I think that change is bad. This is a place where a dozen voices are heard on one page. Some will make a typo. Others a grammar error.
To be sure, one of the jobs of a traditional editor is to give a publication a unified voice. My decision with Slashdot is that our "Voice" is a little more schizo than the mainstream media.
You are welcome to disagree, and your points are all valid: some people can't see meaning through grammar error. But me, I'm used to mailing lists, bulletin boards, quickly jotted emails, badly written comments in source code etc etc. This is a stylistic decision.
Yes I could hire a copy editor. Yes every typo and grammar error could be removed. And I think that the tone of the site would be different. I personally don't believe that particular change to be an improvement.
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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.
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Our plan is to expand this functionality in the future. You guys are going to be really pleased when we finally have time to complete all the crazy stuff we have planned. There will be a lot stronger feedback mechanism in place in the not so distant future.
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In most cases a thousand+ eyeballs vet a story before it hits the main page, and in many cases the story that DOES finally hit the main page has had corrections made.
How is it then that yesterday Slashdot posted two stories about Google buying a radio company. Both articles were on the front page simultaneously. How could 1000 eyes miss that. How could two eyes?
Google Jumps into Radio Advertising
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday January 18, @06:31PM
Google To Buy Radio Advertising Firm
Posted by Zonk on Wednesday January 18, @02:46AM
Every time this happens (a few times a week), the comments are full of people saying they DID email "daddypants" before it went live.
And occasionally I email and find that it bounces with an error similar to the below:
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
pipe to |/home/pudge/bin/send_remark
generated by pudge@andover.net
I think that slashdot is stylistically more akin to a mailing list or blog than to the NYT or WSJ. We are informal. Which is what I want Slashdot to be. Casual.
There are differences between casual and formal writing that go beyond spelling and grammar. When I write a journal entry, it's strictly casual, but I still go back and correct typos and look up the spelling of words I'm not sure of. It's informal without being careless. What you are talking about seems more like the difference between casual and sloppy - and I am surprised if "sloppy" is really the impression you want people to have of Slashdot.
I'm used to mailing lists, bulletin boards, quickly jotted emails, badly written comments in source code etc etc. This is a stylistic decision.
This attitude honestly baffles me. It is one thing to excuse the occasional mistake - it is another entirely to think mistakes make the site better or friendlier in any way... It seems to represent a kind of anti-intellectualism I come to Slashdot to avoid.
I have one question - does anyone read the email sent to the daddypants address before stories go live? I used to occasionally send emails pointing out the worst mistakes, but often they weren't fixed, so I stopped bothering. At one time, I remember there even being a text box so that subscribers could submit comments to the editors without having to send an email, which seemed like a great way to get quick feedback from people who actually read the site and care. My suggestion would be bring that back, and you won't have to pay for a copy editor.
We have plans to solicit more feedback on accepted articles (good, bad, typo, dupe etc).
It's not a bad idea to give some random percentage of users a view of the future stories too, just to increase the amount of feedback we get before the general population gets it. The problem is that when you give users functionality "Randomly", it gets confusing. Witness the moderation system for numerous examples of problems with this randomness. Users constantly don't know that they have points or don't know what to do when they get them. And once they don't have them, they get ANGRY if they don't get them again. It creates a whole new class of problems!
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I meant the generic 'you', as in, 'the Slashdot organization'; I apologize for my poor wording.
I don't think it was you specifically... when I was still trying to help, it was, hmm, two years ago maybe? Articles would get posted with obvious/glaring problems. I'd send in email. The article would still be posted with the glaring error intact. And this was stuff like broken or wrong links... not judgement calls, outright errors. They'd generally be fixed later, after going to full release. I was submitting to the 'on-duty-maintainer' link or whatever it was called. (I haven't seen one in a long time, so I'm not sure what the exact wording is.)
About the third time that happened, I just gave up entirely.
Again, I don't think it was you. For a long time, you didn't really submit stories. I've never emailed you directly to my knowledge. (I did mail Hemos once, and he answered me promptly.) It was just the on-duty-editor mailbox that didn't seem to be read.
By the way, just so you know, your 'we won't fix grammar/spelling errors' policy has pushed me yet further away from the site. This was once my homepage, and I was a subscriber... neither is true any longer. It's not just mediocrity, but aggressive mediocrity.
If you want to attract the run-of-the-mill, that's a great policy. But once upon a time, you had the best and brightest here. Slashdot once held some of the best thinking on the net. At this point, I rarely see comments that strike me as unusually insightful. Your former luminaries seem to have mostly left. I now get +5, Insightfuls all the time, but the quality of my posts hasn't gone up at all. Rather, the really smart people are mostly gone, so people mod up my junk instead.
I can't prove a causative link, but the correlation seems a strong one. Your editorial policy is mediocre.. your audience quality seems to reflect that. If my posts are doing this well here, you have a problem.
Actually, I subbed solely because I like being notified of "relationship changes" (way handier than periodically rooting thru my friend/foe lists) -- since I then look up posts by my new relatives and make an effort to 1) learn what we had in common or disagreement, and 2) enter into further discussions with 'em.
:)
And personally, I prefer NON-random behaviour from sites like this one. I want to know when and what I'm getting, not be left wondering if, when, and WTF?
Mod points don't count as random by my lights; I know to expect 'em occasionally (where "occasionally" can mean 3 times in one week, then not again for 3 months). They're kindof like jury duty.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Flagging meta discussion is a core part of our plan for the new moderation system.
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