I've often come across interesting Perl articles that I thought others might find useful (such as mod_perl in 30 minutes) and considered posting a link to it here. The question that immediately comes to my mind is where should I post it? Perl News doesn't allow for user submissions, and the only other section that seems even close to appropriate is Meditations.
There are occasionally articles posted to meditations, but it is often seen as xp whoring and inappropriate for the section (maybe because it's not a meditation). I think this does deter people from bringing our attention to interesting articles. If there was a separate section for links to articles, possibly with voting disabled on them (or no xp going to the submitter) we'd end up with a lot more people submitting articles.
So what say you? Should we assume everyone will find articles on their own? Should links to articles continue to be posted in meditations? |
Re: Perl articles section
by metadoktor (Hermit) on Apr 12, 2002 at 00:46 UTC
|
I previously recommended that Perl Monks link Perl News to http://use.perl.org. Granted, that wouldn't cover good articles on perl.com but it would at least make Perl News more useful.
Yes, I could also see Perl News accepting submissions.
Still I like receiving the occasional note on Meditations that points to a new DDJ article (or some other website or magazine) on Perl but I'm pretty sure that many who read this site already read perl.com.
metadoktor
"The doktor is in." | [reply] |
Re: Perl articles section
by vladb (Vicar) on Apr 12, 2002 at 00:26 UTC
|
You are right. Many a times posting Perl news articles that are accessible on numerous other perl/technology sites is (sometimes rightly so) considered as xp whoring. Unless there's an exceptionally good article that has significant bearing on daily activities of the monastery dwellers, I see no reason for duplicating an article here or making up a node containing nothing more than a link in it, occasionally accompanied by a few words.
To me it seems like there's no real need in doing so, cjf. Why would we want duplicate content when most likely many of monks here would still notice and read the article some place else? What I don't like, sometimes, is when monks borrow articles from slashdot submissions (or other sites) and post them here, in hopes of... err... getting extra xps, for instance. Simply no need. If i'm a perl hacker, odds are overwhelming that I would have seen the article once or twice before noticing it on perlmonks.
In any event, this is only my personal opinion ;).
|
"There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." -- Confession of Faith
|
| [reply] |
|
|
I tend to disagree, maybe strongly.I often don't have time to track or scan all the sites I want to, or used to, so many times I will miss an interesting article. More and more, I spend more time on PM, and the occasional recommendation or link by another Monk is usually a welcome thing. I'm guessing that's true for many. Personally, I still read a huge amount of sites/mags weekly, subscribe to over 15 daily email newsletters, etc. and most days there's just noise, no meat. Often, I forward article links to many people in my address book. Others return the favor for me. So, seeing reading rec's is often a valuable resource. Separating the wheat from the chaff is increasingly difficult. Maybe it's just me, but I appreciate pointers from Monks. (Just random PR links would p**s me off though...)
| [reply] |
Re: Perl articles section
by Rich36 (Chaplain) on Apr 12, 2002 at 14:10 UTC
|
What about having a place to post news articles that doesn't use xp? Those who are genuinely interested in sharing relevant information would have a forum, while those who are just xp whoring wouldn't have any motivation to post useless pieces of information.
Rich36
There's more than one way to screw it up...
| [reply] |
Re: Perl articles section
by BUU (Prior) on Apr 12, 2002 at 02:14 UTC
|
How is posting an interesting link 'xp whoring'? I mean, if lots of other people have already seen it and its old, then no one will ++ them right? You are even free to -- them. That being said, what about those people who dont check 20 different news sites every day? I personally, generally find articles that are 'reccommended' by someone to be atleast mildly interesting, rarely are articles that are really boring recommended, think of it as kind of an 'editors choice' type thing. Making broad assumptions about all the other users, (possible) to their detriment, is bad.. That being said, i have two views on the idea of xp for sending in articles, one being that xp will encourage people to scour the web to find interesting and insightful articles to share with their brethren. The other view is that people will attempt to 'xpwhore' and post lots and lots of non-interesting articles (from whereever). | [reply] |
Re: Perl articles section
by RMGir (Prior) on Apr 12, 2002 at 16:08 UTC
|
Not a bad idea...
We could steal the concept of the MLP section from Kuro5hin.
MLP stands for "Mindless Link Propagation" :)
--
Mike | [reply] |
Re: Perl articles section
by mattr (Curate) on Apr 18, 2002 at 15:10 UTC
|
This is not whoring. It's called intelligence. Why should a hundred monks have to scour the same articles? The power of the Internet is to magnify one person's brainpower, and leverage the efforts of a community, whether it is news gathering or building a software library or whatever. I think the effects of gathering a few brain cells together in one place for an extended period of time is enough reward that we could just disallow XP at all for such a section. But don't disallow voting, just use that mechanism to select the best meme/solution/link and make sure it goes to the top of the list.
This is one thing I was trying to get across in a node of mine the other day. We need a persistent mechanism (even a Wiki would be good) that allows PM as a community to maintain long-running topics to which multiple people can contribute information. While such a facility could include a discussion, the main point would be to accumulate and organize knowledge on a certain topic.
Here is a simple, low-security example of something that would work right away, an absolute minimum just to get the ideas going. The scenario is that a scratchpad is made available to the public, user "articles". The scratchpad starts with a line that says "Unfiled", and each person who adds to it writes the article title and a link, under the Unfiled heading. Other people can come and add more links, or help organize things by adding new topic headings or by moving a contributed links under a topic heading. It would be nice if someone could back up the contents of the scratchpad every hour in case some jerk erases the whole thing.
I'm working on systems like this and would be willing to contribute to one. | [reply] |
|
|
