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Re: [lojban] CLL 1.1/ CLL 2.0. What is your opinion in the current situation?



On Sunday, December 30, 2012 6:05:03 PM UTC+4, lojbab wrote:
Jonathan Jones wrote:

>     It is enabling Robin to get his job done, with as little possible
>     demands on his limited time.
>
>     The main job right now is editorial, and we haven't come up with a
>     way to farm out editorial tasks.  (Perhaps if the original byfy
>     structure had been organized around CLL chapters rather than
>     selma'o, we might have learned how, but the original focus was on
>     making decisions, not on documenting things to any consistent
>     standard, and the documentation never got done.)  As such, we are
>     stuck with having one editor attempting to get things done in his
>     limited spare time.
>
>
> Perhaps crowd-sourcing? I had some success with that when I wanted to
> get human audio for all the gismu. I had started out with the intention
> of doing that work myself, but after about 180 gismu, I got sick of it,
> so I parsed it into chunks and sent an announcement on the group saying,
> basically, "I don't want to do this anymore! You guys do this now!". As
> of today, all but ~100 gismu have been done, and 50 of them are my fault.
>
> Possibly something similar could be done in this scenario? It takes a
> bit of setting up the "chunks", but I can tell you, the chunk setup is
> much, much, MUCH less work than doing the work on your own.

I could be misunderstanding the concept of crowdsourcing, but I think
that is what the old (failed) system was.  The crowd were the byfy
members (basically anyone who wanted to work), and the chunks are as
defined on the byfy page.  There was a volunteer "shepherd" assigned to
each section who would attempt to consolidate the crowd's efforts.

The only problem is that the "crowd" never did anything.  Generally, if
anyone did anything, it was the shepherd acting on his/her own.  The
crowd mostly argued with each other, and so much effort was spent in the
discussions that no one had any time left to actually do any work (and
people like me with limited Lojban time can't even manage to keep up
with the discussions - I still have some 23 messages to go through in
the "Polysemy of nai" thread that I actually tried to participate in,
and it ended a week ago - but the really major discussions could
generate more than 100 messages a day).

These discussions for the most part were more or less the same kind of
thing that happens on Lojban List itself.  Lots of quick back-and-forth,
and you need to read all the messages to understand the context what any
given posting is talking about.

The other problem is that the writeups weren't in themselves usable as
sections for CLL.  They were selma'o and cmavo definitions, perhaps
suitable for an annotated dictionary that does not exist.  (To be
accurate, the predecessor for CLL was something called the "selma'o
catalogue, and the byfy writeups weren't all that bad as submissions to
such a catalog.  But the catalog gave way to CLL, remaining only as a
quasi-appendix "index" chapter at the end of the book.  The byfy chunks
were producing annotated selma'o catalog entries, but no one was turning
those into CLL text).

^ ^ 
That's very interesting. I'm sure CLL and the dictionary must approach each other.
vlasisku has short links to CLL chapters mentioning them (probably from the index you are talking about).

However, I can't imagine a book being a dictionary at the same time.
And a dictionary being a reference grammar.
I've never seen such dictionaries for any languages. Have you?
But this is something that must be discussed further.

 

----

John Cowan came up with a concept called "The Elephant" which would
allow crowdsourcing of ideas and their documentation, with the added
proviso that it would be organized in such a way that people could
easily find preceding discussions on the same topic, so that we wouldn't
end up with the same discussion being repeated every couple of years
with only nuanced variations.  But no one ever implemented the thing.

----

The closest we ever came to a workable system for dealing with concept
documentation was just before CLL 1.0 when John Cowan and I instituted a
change proposal system for the YACC grammar (which also effectively
entailed the most major changes to the CLL text).  To talk about a
change topic, someone had to write the thing up FIRST (typically a
screenful of text), and then discussion was more or less confined to the
pros and cons of what was written up - an alternate proposal would need
an alternate writeup.

But it didn't work either because only Cowan and I ever did actual
writeups.  On a couple of topics, a few people wrote things akin to our
writeups but with no standard form, and we used them anyway for purpose
of discussion, eventually massaging them into standard form.

The current system needs the same thing to do any sort of crowdsourcing,
with the "proposal" including the actual CLL text, as well as some sort
of rationale for any changes.  But no one will do this kind of work;
they just kibbitz about everyone else's work until no one is doing any
work to kibbitz on, just engaging in back-and-forth.

It'd kinda be like Wikipedia if almost no one ever edited anything, just
engaged in back-channel arguments about the most controversial edits
that others have made.

(Another version of crowdsourcing was used in the Alice in Wonderland
section.  People could check out a section, add to or change it, and put
it back.  There was a good group effort for a while, but the translation
got finished because xorxes did the bulk of it by himself.  This is more
or less what we've been reduced to in the CLL update, with Robin doing
all the work.  But at least in theory, Alice was a crowdsource.)

lojbab

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