The Reading Room

TML

04:12

I have just realized it's entirely possible I have too many books on Tolkien...

Took almost 4 hours of digging to find the reference I wanted for literature.stackexchange.com/questions/373/…

Hmm - how do you guys do those fancy question boxen?

ah - a line by itself

1

A: Creation myth based on music

I have a couple of references that, if I remember correctly, indicate that the song of Illuvatar is derived from the ancient Greek concept of Musica universalis; however, I'm having difficulty locating the precise quotes at the moment, but I will update this answer when I locate them. [EDIT] OK,...

Cool. :)

Tim N

10:13

I keep tagging all of my questions "novels". Someone give me enough rep, or pipe the Wikipedia title dump into the tag creator, please.

TML

19:24

We need to get some promotion going - we're doing OK on all of our stats except users and visits. :)

Gilles

20:15

@TML Whoa, stop! Those Area 51 stats don't mean what you think they mean. It takes some experience to understand what they're saying.

Stack Overflow Blog: Does this site have a chance of succeeding?

Posted by Robert Cartaino on July 27th, 2011

Anytime you find yourself answering the same question over and over and over and over … blog post time.

This is that blog post.

This cycle has repeated itself on more sites than I can remember — When a new community approaches the end of their beta period, users start looking forward to graduation. So when that 90th day looms, anticipation starts to turn into speculation about whether the site is going to survive.

Does this site have a chance of succeeding? Is this site viable? Visits per day — should we be worried? At what point will this site grow out of the beta stage? What are the crit …

Lit's answer ratio is on the low side

For users and visits, you've got to compare with a site of comparable age, which there isn't. The goal figures are for when the site graduates. Obviously the site is still months from graduating, that's normal when it's 9 days old!

TML

I know that - it was meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek

Gilles

What worries me about Lit is the question and answer quality. It seems to be a bit worse than Science Fiction and Fantasy was at the beginning

5

and that's worrying, considering that SF&F was meant to be a fan site, whereas I'd have thought Lit would be more highbrow

TML

Was it?

Gilles

@TML Was what?

TML

shrug You said it was "meant to be more highbrow"

I'm not convinced about that

Gilles

20:22

@TML When a site is called “literature”, I expect it to be something I could show to a literature professor

TML

To be more precise, I should say "That wasn't what I had in mind when I clicked 'Commit' to a proposal called 'Books'"

1

Q: Was it a mistake renaming this site to Literature?

In a nutshell, would it be possible to rename this site to "Books and Literature" instead of just literature? If it is possible, then am I the only person who would like to see this happen? Books was the original name of the proposal. Some of the questions that have been debated as to their ...

discussion

@Adam A lot. I'm still not for it - if anything, I'd like to see if we can strive to abolish that hoity-toity feel with ourselves as an example that any such works are considered literature. – Grace Note♦

You might want to chime in there :)

Gilles

Hmmm

TML

the proposal was originally named "Books"

Gilles

@TML Right, I remember that now

I even advocated for closing Books and reopening Literature

Now we have the worst of both worlds: a site about books, but called literature

TML

If it becomes a "high-brow Literature" Q&A site, I'd really have to bow out, as I don't know the first thing about that stuff

2

Gilles

20:27

Well, it's still salvageable: the site can tackle literature. But it would be very difficult, you can't drive expertise up that much.

The problem is, what if a bunch of literature professors come along and want to start a literature site?

There is room for a readers' site. But putting literature professors and casual readers on the same site? I don't think it would work.

TML

I think I agree with you

When I got the notification that this proposal went to private beta, I had a REALLY hard time understanding how I got on the list :)

And I still have no idea why/how it got renamed.

Gilles

@TML Looking at Area 51, this discussion is the only one that looks relevant

TML

blink

I didn't...even KNOW Area 51 had "discussions"

Gilles

Heh. Also, the whole recommendations bit is going to be terrifying for whoever has to mod that site.

TML

I mean, I know about the "propose questions" feature

@Gilles Terrifying in what way?

Gilles

20:39

@TML They weren't there at the very beginning

I don't remember when they were added, maybe after you committed (that proposal sure has been a long time in commitment)

TML

I can't say I've ever spent a lot of time on Area51

Gilles

@TML Mark Rogers is a mod on Scifi, he has been moderating recommendation questions

Though our big problem was with list questions really (what are some/all works about X)

I've already ranted on that on Literature Meta

We never gave recommendations a serious chance, most of them were bad because they invited one-liner answers and not necessarily because they were asking for recommendations

TML

21:05

I saw your link over to the SF&F site, but all I could see there is that it ended up at a -1 (or -3, depending on which category you're referring to). I don't have enough rep there to see what the spread was (for example, did you only have 3 guys voting, all who were against it?)

@Gilles I mean, obviously I'm not an active member of SF&F, I have no idea how these events shook out. But it seems to me that if you have a lot of them out of the gate, and you keep the number of them high, you'll draw an audience that is interested in asking and answering such, instead of an audience that is opposed to them.

For my part, I like them. I've asked a few, and I've answered all of them where I have even the slightest inkling of related experience. I wouldn't be upset if that became the site. SE clearly would, but shrug - if the site I want to be a part of doesn't match any site that SE wants to host, then I'd rather have that come now, instead of 90 days from.

I think I may be one of the few people on earth disappointed at the shift from SE 1.0 to SE 2.0, because it means now that I have to convince SE that my site is "worth hosting", instead of just being able to say "I've got the idea, I've got the $129 - don't worry yourself over whether or not I have an audience, that's MY problem."

Now if I want to see a site be successful, I have to do a whole bunch of things I hate. Instead of just kicking back and answering questions, I have to become a marketer and promoter. BLEGH

Gilles

21:23

@TML It used to have a lower score, it's been upvoted more than downvoted since

@TML You can see some of the history if you search for “list” on our Meta.

We deleted a lot of them at some point. Look at the history of this meta question

As I wrote on Literature Meta: we ended up with lots and lots of one-liner answers, which weren't any use.

Paradoxically, now that the site is mostly clean, the pro-list movement is stronger.

It's something like this: 1/3 are strongly for list questions. 1/3 are strongly against. 1/3 are in the middle. (Not precise figures by any means, just giving the idea.)

When the questions were out there, that middle 1/3 saw them as an eyesore and was against them. Now that there's nothing to serve as a warning sign, the middle 1/3 doesn't see the problem and wants them in.

TML

And I'm always going to be in the "strongly for" 30%, so it's hard for me to see the objection.

9

Q: Are list questions allowed?

This just started, but there already seems to be a lot of questions that essentially boil down to "Please list stories that X". These questions cannot have a definitive answer, and sometimes you can simply find a highly comprehensive list on wikipedia. These kinds questions can be interesting to ...

discussion faq on-topic-discussion

as you said there

"they're interesting because they lead people to discover new works about particular themes"

@Gilles I'm curious as to which 1/3 you put yourself in - you seem to argue both sides of it a lot :)

Gilles

@TML I changed over time. In the very early days, I thought they were fun and interesting. Then (day 6) I downloaded all the question titles to sort them out, and realized 25% of the site was list questions. They felt overwhelming.

2

As time went by, I realized that there were three types of responses to list quesions:

a link to a list of works, typically TV Tropes → no value added: we're just linking to another site

lots of one-work-per-answer → a mess, the answers are typically not explained and not sorted in any reasonable way, and even when there are a lot they're far from exhaustive

few one-work-per-answer → totally useless, noone's going to learn anything from that

So now, I guess I'm still in the middle 1/3. Because I don't think the questions are fundamentally bad, I just think our site's community can't give them good answers. (A good answer is one that gives a lot of examples, focusing on the most relevant ones, explains how they relate to each other, discuss influences, …)

But I remember the deleted crap. So I'm in the middle 1/3 but remain against the list questions.

TML

21:41

Just to restate, you're saying "Even when answers are well written, they're not going to be exhaustive, and that makes them a bad answer?"

Or did I infer something you didn't intend to imply? :)

Gilles

@TML No: there were very very few answers that went beyond giving one or two examples, and occasionally indicating why they were relevant (even that was far from systematic)

You can see a few list questions that we haven't deleted

Keep in mind that these are the best ones. The ones where I thought the content may be slightly useful. And even then, they're rather a warning.

sorry about the delays, I'm juggling between rooms

where were we?

TML

No worries

Gilles

@TML First, I suspect you're going to have to be a moderator

@TML On the plus side, your chance of success is something like 95%. SE1.0 had something like 99.9% failure.

TML

You mean I would appreciate the issue more if I had to moderate them?

That depends on how you define "success" or "failure", I suppose. If an SE 1.0 site got 5 users who are really passionate about something I'm interested in, that would be a "success" in my book. If an SE 2.0 site gets hundreds of questions per day and 1M views / month, but I don't feel engaged to discuss any of it...well, I don't know that I'd say it's a "failure", but I'm certainly not going to stick around.

FTR, I pay somewhat more than $129/month to host a site with 5 users which we really wanted to move over to the SE 1.0 platform, but missed our window

If I could be paying $129 for SE to host the site, maintain the software, and so on - that'd be a huge win for me over the $180/month I'm paying now, where I have to do the server administration and I have to maintain a software solution that isn't anywhere near as slick as what the SE guys have put out.

Unfortunately, I never even knew that SE 1.0 existed until it was already gone...

One of the (what I'm discovering to be many) drawbacks to not really finding stackoverflow.com an engaging way to address technical questions

Gilles

22:09

@TML I'm curious why you don't find SO satisfying for technical questions

For me, it was a really good way. Usenet just goes on and on and on, isn't searchable (except for that brief time when Google Groups had decent search), you have to work really hard to filter worthwhile content, the same easy questions get asked over and over again, and now most of the experts have left the ship anyway.

And don't get me started on webforums. The downsides of usenet, with a crappy UI on top.

SO doesn't replace forums, but for Q&A it's really good

TML

I agree on web-based fora :)

Gilles

The site creation process… Now that could use some work. It's evolving, slowly.

TML

I have spent the bulk of my personal time for the past 15 years as administrator of various IRC channels. When someone there "asks a bad question", we don't just kick them in the stomach and shout "BAD QUESTION BAD QUESTION!" - we try to educate and teach them how to ask the right questions.

You raise a good point that it's not any more searchable than Usenet

Gilles

@TML tinyurl.com/so-hints

TML

SO has sliced out a very narrow segment of the "technical question" market: "Things that can be asked and answered in a purely objective manner"

That only covers about 1% of the things that I need in the "technical questions" arena

And most of the stuff we handle in IRC can't easily fit there, either

That's why I used the word 'engaging'

SO sliced out that piece, which is cool, no worries! But that's only helpful to people who already know what they need to ask.

Gilles

22:21

@TML If you don't even know what you need to ask, you can chat. Though SO doesn't have people on chat on every subject.

@TML I think it's more like 80%

TML

I was speaking specifically about myself, there

That '1%' is referring to what I need help with.

And it's a SWAG, of course - but if you look at my SO profile, you can see what I mean

TML, Orem, UT

3.2k 3 15

php javascript python mysql html jquery xml

I've certainly had a LOT more than 2 technical questions in the past "2 years, 9 months" :)

But when I go to write an SO question about it, I realize "Nope, I can't ask this there, it will just get closed"

Gilles

@TML What am I supposed to see? You have only two (non-deleted) questions, so what?

TML

Just pointing out the tiny segment of intersection between "Questions I have that fit on SO" vs. "Questions I have"

Gilles

including one off-topic I see

TML

Heh - see, the problem is even worse than I thought. One question in almost 3 years that was a valid question for SO. In the same interval, I've easily had thousands of questions about technical/programming topics.

Gilles

22:28

I've flagged it for migration to Unix and Linux or Ask Ubuntu

TML

I don't think Ubuntu existed at the time I asked that

I could be mistaken

I mean, the Ubuntu SE

Obviously the distro did :)

Yeah, Ask Ubuntu launched 10 months ago, that question is more than 2 years old

Gilles

@TML It didn't. SU didn't either, and the question would be on-topic there too

But it's a good question, not a duplicate on U&L or AU, so I want it to be on a suitable site

TML

Well, if you end up with any say in the matter, it should go to AU. It's incredibly Ubuntu-specific.

shrug

I need to just stop being consumed by this and wait until either the Literature.SE itself, the people who get voted as moderators, or SE staff make a determination...I just wish it'd come sooner rather than later, to minimize the wasted investment if it's going to go against me.

Thanks for your time, @Gilles :)

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