@vzn "Canadian prime minister and quantum computing savant Justin Trudeau is rumored to be at the launch party." If this Trudeau character is such a hot shot at QC, perhaps he should join this site ;^)

Or perhaps he already does, under a pseudonym

@Discretelizard pfft - you haven't seen a truly long post evidently :P

@Mithrandir24601 Its not that the post is long, I've made longer myself. It's that its too long for its structure, i.e. either length or structure should be replaced.

Or not. At least, I think a good 'editorial hand' can be of use here

@Discretelizard saw that, apparently a joke about a viral video of Trudeau who indeed did explain QC but otherwise presumably has no affiliation. however, (thinking out loud) if Trudeau could be somehow closer affiliated with the site, that would be atomic for the site....

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau expertly explains quantum computing in viral video / telegraph ← lol no wonder the ladies luv him! o_O

@Discretelizard agreed think wikipedia architecture/ design could be vastly improved. would much like to see v2.0. what would it look like? instead of neutral point of view how about multiple points of view? Wales seems not too interested in interface design, guess he thinks its finished years ago. thinking out loud, what if SE merged with wikipedia, what would that look like? think its amazing how similar the sites are in some ways... a natural combination if you ask me...

> Mr Trudeau was welcomed to the institute by renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking via recorded video.

the announcement was $50M over 5 years 2017-2021 to the perimeter institute. anyone know anyone there? perimeterinstitute.ca/subject/quantum-computing (hmmm QC big in 2013 but not later?)

interesting, Milburn gave a talk. hes author of an early book on QC called feynman processor 1998 perimeterinstitute.ca/videos/meet-scientist-gerard-milburn (a great name that so far hasnt stuck!)

amazon.com/Feynman-Processor-Entanglement-Computing-Revolution/…

lol speaking of strange/ dark/ creepy the strangeworks manifesto seems to be written in terms of tarot cards... o_O strangeworks.com/manifesto

Huh, there are separate stack exchange sites for computer science and theoretical computer science

That's interesting.

So related to the above, asking duplicates is obviously not useful, but what is the consensus about asking questions that have duplicates in a different stack exchange site? Is it equally useless? Somewhat less useless? Acceptable?

@Kiro Its just like there is Mathematics and Mathoverflow. One is for general questions, ranging from elementary to academia, the other is for questions from researchers in the field to researchers in the field about research level stuff. To be clear Computer Science is the general site, while Theoretical CS is the research-level site with a slightly more narrow scope to be only about Theory (this I think is to be both Algorithms/Complexity and Formal Language theoriy and related fields)

@vzn Yeah, I know its probably just a joke on that. Would be wild if they actually managed to get some statement of endorsement from the guy, though. Wouldn't put it past Strangeworks or Trudeau! Although inviting a well-known politician to a site were political discourse is best kept to a minimum would have the impact of an atomic bomb, I'd gather.

@vzn Yeah, the topic of how to 'connect' SE with WP is something I've been exploring myself lately. I actually have a (big, but still half-finished) draft for a very detailed question for WP how to best use content from SE on WP (the other way around is both common and uncontroversial) . I will link you when I actually post it.

@vzn Oh and in case you're interested, the reason why I recently joined WP under a different, but not very different, pseudonym, is because I wanted to translate a Dutch page which was useful for a post on SE. This site being primarly English, I thought it would be useful. It did take about a week until the translated draft was edited (mostly for formatting), checked and launched, but it did work pretty well without too much complications on my behalf.

Anyway, I really think that if we get a 'WP 2.0', they should have a real good look at the community moderation model and technology of SE. I think SE can handle many moderation stuff by good design that needs to be done by bots on WP (Usually hacks for things that the platform should do. SE doesn't have as much bot activity as WP. Most important on SE are Community-bot and SmokeDetector. And those usually take little action) or manually on WP.

what's WP?

@ItamarG3 Wikipedia. Mentioned earlier in the discussion

I see. Thanks :)

Another nice thing for Wikipedia to look at is the '3 places model' (1. main 2. meta 3. chat . One may argue that there actually is a fourth place 'comments', but let's just assume that those are supplements for 1 or 2). In principle, you can use any combination of these three places (although 2 without 1 would usually be a bad idea). While WP has some places that look like 2 or 3, the problem is that those are mostly invisible for new users and the separation is unclear.

I mean, everything is a page that everyone can edit, in the end! I can even edit the comments signed by other users on the talk page! I can edit/remove the warnings placed by mods on the talk page! Why is this even possible!

Honestly, I wish more things had that model. Not only on the internet, but in life. Workplace and school administration, for example.

Interestingly, there's a nice story about a new, well-meaning user that manages to get a community mod rather emotional because he can edit other peoples stuff on the talk page and accidentally misused it (let me see if I can I dig it up). Why give people the ability to do something that they never should do? This is both bad UX and Security Common Sense (TM)..

true (regarding the last sentence)

Also, there's a featured story (lets see if I can dig it up) on WP about a new user that got a community mod (called an admin or something on WP) to be pretty emotional, because the new user 1) didn't understand he wasn't supposed to do the things he can do on the talk page that no users except maybe mods should do. 2) Due to problems with various things, the user failed to see the mods messages that (the account merge feature is a godsend for SE. I think most site mods would agree)

3) There is no standard appeal process and WP is quick with them "don't do anything bans" as all users can do everything, which isn't needed on SE as new users can't do much (harm) on SE, anyway. (the user got a pretty clever idea of a 'full ban until you read the ban reason and click a link to unban yourself' feature. Sounds neat.)

I think things would help if the site model for WP was less based on the ideals of a democracy and more (at least, for the moderation) based on the ideals of a meritocracy (like here. Explicitly giving the users who the community thinks are valuable more power is pretty much the idea of a meritocracy.

Of course, a certain degree of autocracy (but not too much, see the "time to take a stand"-debacle for SE meritocracy vs. SE autocracy), is needed to run a tight ship (that's why there are "community managers" such as Robert employed by SE and why we have community elected site mods)

Ah, found the link to the unfortunate tale of the new Wikipedia user, mostly held back by the insufficient WP software . I have the feeling that SE is a lot more 'wiki' (in the users personal terms) than WP

@Kiro SEs 100+ sites grew organically out of a single site, stackexchange. as you can imagine the consideration of topic/ site boundaries/ scope can be (increasingly) tricky. the sites run mostly independently/ loosely coupled with crosspollination by some users. we can ref other sites Q/A easily with urls in comments etc. the meta sites typically have huge content discussing scope boundaries if youre curious. you can understand scope/ theme better by looking at high voted Q/A etc.

@Discretelizard a drama queen user with way too much time on their hands. lol heres a large collections of links/ musings on SE "culture" collected over years vzn1.wordpress.com/2017/07/19/…

@Kiro btw re that, SE has a (cross site) "question migration mechanism" but it is rather clunky/ awkward in ways and seems not used very much except by very conscientious mods. there is also a "duplicate question" mechanism within a single SE used by mods more as sites grow larger.

@vzn While you may dismiss the new user as creating needless drama, I think that the users is simply trying to help WP not to give other users the behavior he got. Also, I do think the 'mod' behaved too emotionally and badly and the new users has some good points.

Ha, nearly all Robert Cartaino's posts on meta on suggestions of "we should do this" are "don't do that (yet)".