@Ho-ShengHsiao I would argue that it is possible to get a SE-format Q&A to work for MA, but it requires accepting SE's philosophy and working with it, rather than actively trying to fight it. There are ramifications to that which are not necessarily desirable, but having moderated and administered forums for years, the SE format is one of the few that, once developed, allows for a productive environment with an arbitrary group of people.

For example, my personal feelings about @DaveLiepmann's question-and-self-answer method aside, 1) I don't get a whole lot of say in dealing with it unless it blatantly goes over the edge of community-established or SE-established rules and 2) There's a mechanism in-place for handling that: Down Voting.

Well, down-voting and providing your own answer. The "answered" flag is meant to be "useful to the asker" where voting indicates "use to the community."

@DavidH.Clements My concern is that the SE rules is not nourishing for martial artists. It reinforces the particular character flaws people attracted to the martial typically (but not always) have. At the heart of it, there are some things in transmission teaching/practices that cannot be normalized.

I can go check the correctness of Stack Exchange, SysAdmin, and Development by running code. Code works or it doesn't. To do that with martial arts distills out the art and renders it down to mere techniques. That's fine for a lot of people, though it drives other people away.

@DavidH.Clements In reading your questions and answers, I have respect for your work and what you're trying to do. If you're trying to flow with the SE framework while staying true to your tradition, props to you, man. My SE Fu is not up to the task, and I got my own thrashing to do.

I am also reading an ebook that suggests an inner circle of more than 144 core members is no longer a trust network. It's a bureaucracy. I don't know how a format like SE falls into this (as the membership is wide open). I look forward to your efforts, but I think I'll resist the temptation to answer things publicly here for a while now.

@DavidH.Clements Serious question: do you harbor resentment towards my self-answers? This is news to me. If everyone here is offended by that behavior it helps for me to know.

@DaveLiepmann Resent? Nothing of the sort. There's nothing wrong with going out and doing the legwork and research for a question that interests you, or with sharing the results.

From a Q&-site there are two major objections to the practice. The first is that a lot of martial arts–especially heavily internal martial arts–have a significant component that cannot be understood from reading a book or requires some contextual knowledge.

An example of where this is useful is Mark C. Wallace's reply martialarts.stackexchange.com/a/1499/11 where he says """I can't find any citation or reference to teaching this way - that's just the way that it has been taught wherever I've studied."""

Another example is something a friend of mine who is very seriously into Tai'Chi pointed out about one of the major Tai'Chi references: The comment on the book is "It is a great book, but if you aren't smart enough to realize that you shouldn't follow its advice to put weights on your testicles, then it is probably not the book for you."

I have no problem with demonstrating book knowledge, though I do feel some humility with respect to the limits of books can be warranted (and this is coming from an INTJ!)

The second objection is in the time-to-reply. A fast reply on a Q&A site that you accept yourself can have a "chilling effect" on people who might have an answer for you based in their experience.

This is not to say that I "resent" the practice, but I do understand the objections to it.

@Ho-ShengHsiao There's a challenge with any sort of online community. Do you keep yourself small and isolated, thus not contributing to the internet or others who might come through Google as a whole? Do you keep yourself small and risk stagnating and dying? Communities–especially online ones–have a tendency to cycle members out over time, and without new blood members cycle themselves out without replacement.

On the other hand: Do you grow and see what comes, trusting in either community moderation or in individual moderators and administrators to enforce a set of rules? What do those rules look like? How is enforcement handled? You essentially lose the trust/monkeysphere aspect as soon as you get to the point where every member doesn't know every other member, which happens relatively quickly on any sort of public forum.

Essentially my point is: it's all about tradeoffs. There's nothing wrong with wanting a small, intimate community to foster the development of martial arts. You get a great opportunity to foster discussion and growth, you can control who gets in, and you can even limit it to "people I know in real life" or some other such metric. There's nothing wrong with that, and it is something a lot of us desire for our own improvement.

On the other hand, you lose the advantages of continual fresh blood, new and/or different viewpoints, public visibility so that others outside the community are helped, and the ability to move away from the isolation and lack of communication rife in the MA community. The dangers you get to guard against are groupthink, stagnation, and inbreeding.

On a SE you also have key disadvantages. The inability to directly confront viewpoints you disagree with being one of them, and a strong need to have a larger community with varying experiences (else you get some of the worst of both worlds). There is no gatekeeper on who can show up, and the rules are in place so that even as a moderator I can't really censor someone even if I think that they are very wrongheaded.

On the other hand, what happens here has visibility–the majority of our traffic actually comes through search engines–and I get to have conversations across style boundaries, and get to benefit from the experience of people who are very experienced, but who haven't come along the same lineage that I have. To me that's very valuable.

I asked martialarts.stackexchange.com/questions/948/… on May 16, and answered on the 21st. This one I answered months after I asked it. This one I answered the same day, but only after two other people had answered.

This one I self-answered after someone else stepped up to the plate.

This one I was the first answer, though I waited a day.

So I question your "chilling effect" claim, since I didn't put in the fast replies necessary, and I specifically waited until someone else answered.

(In most cases.)

As to me being foolish to trust the sources I did--I did a good deal of sifting in the resources, and I think there's a qualitative difference between listening to a taiji classics' advice to hang weights from one's testicles versus listening to its advice to, say, lift heavy stones for strength or practice one's skills against resisting opponents in order to develop skill.

I mean, Dave Newton thinks that Tim Cartmell is wrong when it comes to teaching tai chi. I think Tim Cartmell is spot-on. The reader can make the call themselves, since I provided the reference. I don't see the issue.

Quote of the day: """It is our nature to enjoy giving and receiving compassionately. We have, however, learned many forms of life-alienating communication that lead us to speak and behave in ways that injure others and ourselves. One form of life-alienating communication is the use of moralistic judgments that imply wrongness or badness on the part of those who don’t act in harmony with our values.

Another is the use of comparisons, which can block compassion both for others and for ourselves. Life-alienating communication also obscures our awareness that we are each responsible for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions"""

from "Nonviolent Communication" by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Arun Gandhi

I assume from the context that you're trying to say something about my communication methods, but I genuinely have no clue what you're referring to specifically, unless it's simply that I think that sometimes people hold wrong/misleading/destructive ideas and those ideas should be called such.