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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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'
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!
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
Amusingly enough, a professional editor DID read my editorial and correct the typos before it was set to post. I chose to keep my typos to prove a point.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
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!
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.
Ben Jonson said, "Oratio iamgo animi - language most shows a man." This is even more true in a medium where the audience can neither see you nor hear your voice. Spelling, grammar and syntax the harbingers of clarity in written communication, and act as the lighting and focus the parent mentioned. They are a way of showing your substance and intelligence to the the audience, that you are qualified and that you care what shows up on the front page of a zillion-page-per-day website. Sure we understand that you meant "too" instead of "to," but you look smarter and conscientious in your duties as an editor.
Why does my coffee mug smell like trout?
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
You're above average in intelligence, yet a simple confusion between "to" and "too" stymies you to the point of not understanding what is being communicated? What the hell are you, a human, or a compiler?
We went to spelling bees as kids, we got beat up for knowing big words in high school.
I was praised universally by all who knew me in high school. Even when I used the big words. I'm not going to spell it out for you (you're "above average in intelligence," right?) but suffice it to say I was treated well because of my attitude toward the less intellectually inclined. Refraining from berating somebody for a simple and ultimately unimportant grammatical mistake goes a long way toward alleviating the beatings.
If you don't like the articles, don't read them. Admit it -- you're addicted to Slashdot like crack. You can't help yourself. You purposefully torture your poor little brain with these horrific typos because you JUST... CAN'T... QUIT.
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.
>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"?
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
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.
Thanks - you said that much better than I could have hoped to.
The problem with Slashdot's editors, as I see it, is not so much that dupes, embarassing spelling and grammar mistakes and so on happen; it's that there's a "the work we do here is very good" attitude. Don't pat yourselves on the back, guys - invest your energy into actually *being* good. If you're unable to acknowledge that you're not perfect, you'll never get any better.
And there's another problem: you seem to view your readers as foes of sorts, at least when they criticise you and don't act all fanboy-ish. This is evident in statements "they are welcome to disagree, but at least I've been clear on the matter" - what you're basically saying is "I'm not interested in hearing any criticism". Well, that's your right, of course, but if you actually want to improve, then - again - you have to be able to acknowledge that there might be some validity in the criticism you're receiving.
That's just a free tip from me. Feel free to take it or ignore it; at this point, I still care about Slashdot enough to offer suggestions instead of just moving on. I've been reading Slashdot since late 1998; I've made literally thousands of comments (many as AC, many more after registering), and I've even subscribed in the past, but I've seriously been thinking about leaving. You may not realise (or care), but as far as I'm concerned, your ship is sinking, so you'd better stop claiming that there's no problem - otherwise, you'll drown soon.
Again, I'm not saying this to bash you. If I really didn't care anymore, I wouldn't bother commenting on (or even reading) Slashdot anymore. But I think you should try to understand *why* people are criticising you so much instead of just brushing aside all criticism as unjustified/ungrounded, and you also should stop thinking that it's just a "communication" problem where people criticise you because they don't understand you. It's not. It's not people who have the problem; it's you, the editors.
Good luck.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
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.
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.
We're hoping to get some new mojo soon tho.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
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.
But statements like yours really infuriate me because I go to great lengths to reply to as much of my email as possible. As long as its not rude, I almost always write something in reply.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I don't think it's anti-intellectual at all. I think it's about context, environment, voice, style blah bla. I'm balancing all of these things and making a call on what I think matters most.
Many people disagree. They think it makes us look childish and immature. Many others think it makes us look lazy or sloppy. I think it makes us simply look "Real". We are all entitled to our opinions. But ultimately I make the call on what I think is right for Slashdot.
And yes, we read every daddy pants email. I reply to some of them, but not all since mostly they are simple little grammar errors or flamebait. But I try. Of course we don't make every change/correction suggested.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
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.
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
You are wrong. You are especially wrong when you dare to tell another /. poster that his reading skills are below average for not being bothered by typos.
There was a study which found that the better the reader, the less likely they were to notice spelling errors when reading for comprehension. There was a famous case where they added a small article (I believe it was "a") at the end of a line, and at the beginning of the next. The faster readers (who I'm sure you're aware also tend to have higher comprehension) were less likely to notice this than the slower readers. The reasoning is this: people who read often learn shortcuts through text by knowing what words are likely to be associated with previous words. They then can spend less time on actually reading the words as long as they seem to be correct. In addition, the better readers have read more, and are thus more used to encountering spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, and have thus learnt to ignore them, while getting the correct meaning behind the text.
I wish I could find the study for you, but you've got such a superiority complex that I'm sure you quite capable of googling for it on your own.
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