Re: A proposal to bring together the conlang communities

On Jan 26, 2008 6:10 AM, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
> Right.  Most of the fora you listed have pretty good reasons to be.
> I doubt that many people, for instance, would like to have the
> CONLANG/AUXLANG split been undone. Most artlangers and engelangers
> don't show the least desire to wade through 100-odd auxlang advocacy
> posts each day.  Many of the fora you listed are dedicated to
> specific conlangs or conworlds, and serve to discuss particular
> matters which do not interest the majority of the conlang community
> much.
...
> It is true that the international conlanging community is small
> - but nevertheless, it is extremely heterogenous.  There is not
> much a Lojbanist and a Klingonist have to discuss with each other;
> most artlangers don't want to be molested with the often inflammtory
> discussion about the optimal international auxiliary language; etc.
...
> The diversity of online conlanging communities is not so much a flaw
> as it is a virtue.  Everyone can pick the community which caters
> best to his interests.  If all of them were amalgamated into a
> single huge all-encompassing conlang community, one would get a
> monster with thousands of posts every day, of which hardly anyone
> would want to read even a tenth of them.
Fully agreed. However, I see this as a purely (and relatively minor)
technical issue, namely content filtering.

As I think I mentioned at the outset, I well understand the need to
control what content you see, so as not to get either effective-spam
or flame-fodder.

But this can be handled by subforums and tagging.

> Such a forum would have to be divided into subfora - but then we can just as well leave
> everything as it is today.
I disagree. Having one forum would mean less account-splitting, easier
crossreference, less account maintenance, and the what I'd call the
"browsing bonus". Currently, auxlangers and artlangers eg mostly never
see each others' work or even have much opportunity to stumble across
it. I agree that to a certain degree that's good - i.e. it shouldn't
be forced - but also it means that we lack the ability to have a
two-click browsing through the others' stuff.

I'm reminded of eg one unrelated forum I frequent, at JREF -
http://forums.randi.org . Most subfora have very different people as
regulars, but nevertheless one can easily stop on over and participate
a little bit at a time, or just read what they're doing. I see that as
a much healthier thing for fostering potential cross-subcommunity
interaction.

And importantly, it would make everyone participants of the "same"
group (even if the subfora are relatively heterogeneous in their
talkative members), which psychologically is IMO/IME a fairly powerful
force.

> Some people prefer mailing lists, other prefer BBs.  It's a different
> style of communication.
Again, fully agreed. But I think that this is at least in part a
technical problem; there is no reason a priori that a metasite
couldn't have both mailing-list-esque and forum-esque front-ends for
identical content.

To the extent that it really changes how people write, however, I
agree; BBs tend to be short-and-informal, mailing lists longer and
more formal. I happen to like both. But I don't see them as
*necessarily* separate methods.

> What are the needs of "all the community"?  The diversity among
> conlangers is HUGE, and the things they are interested in are
> very, very diverse.
Certainly.

I would say that most simply put, the need is to be able to talk about
X with others interested in X.

I like diversity as much as anyone (I think you could get lynched for
not doing so here in the SF Bay Area), but I strongly disagree that a
diverse scene requires a diverse number of *places*. It only requires
diversity of subfora / tagging / etc. *

> > The benefit I see from boils down to essentially two things: First, on
> > the small level, individual projects would get more attention when
> > there are more eyes looking and more organization (like tagging,
> > sorting, etc) to make it easy for them to be found.
>
> Sure; but most projects interest only a fraction of all conlangers.
By "projects" here I meant to include individuals' conlangs. Which
presumably everyone is interested in at least one of, if not the
majority of. :-)

On Jan 26, 2008 9:41 AM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
> Most of the fora you mentioned are specialized enough that
> their continued existence makes perfect sense.
Continued existence, yes; I have not argued against that. What I have
suggested is that they not exist completely *seperately*.

> but doesn't ZBB throw away most messages after a certain amount of time?
My understanding is that this is partially an intentional decision on
Mark's part, and partially a limitation of the software or of his disk
space.

I can see the usefulness of having an ephemeral subforum, but the
latter should not be considerations at all.

> On the other hand, merging them all (if you could navigate
> the political problems and the technical problems of doing so)
> would probably create a forum that's so high-traffic nobody
> could keep up with it.
Only if they had to read *everything*, which I certainly don't
suggest. That's what filters and selective reading are for. (E.g. JREF
I only habitually frequent one subforum, and occasionally read two
others; of those, I actually read through maybe 1-10% of threads just
based on their subject line.)



On Jan 26, 2008 1:11 PM, Rick Harrison <rick@...> wrote:
> JPL is not defunct, it's just taking a nap.
>
> The invention of the WWW took a bite out of the need for a hardcopy journal. Language
> inventors can write their own lang descriptions now and update them 100 times a day if
> they want. That's considerably more attractive to many people than getting fossilized in a
> hardcopy publication.
I don't believe these ought to be compared as if they are in necessary
competition.

Hardcopy journals have a remarkably more "real" feeling to them. And
fewer, 'fossilized' publications have the advantage of having a
broader and larger audience than any individual's website.

Personally I would like to see both.

> As for Sai's proposal, I echo the concerns of others who said we might be too
> heterogenous to get smooshed together like that. Also decentralized fora are less
> vulnerable to natural disaster, hacker attack, etc.
These are technical concerns IMO, and addressable through various
means as I'm sure you know.

> It's not as if we were really separated. We can look in on the other fora whenever we
> want (assuming they are in a language that we can read).
Yes, but...

Compare:
a) clicking 'forum index -> [different forum name] on http://forums.randi.org
b) googling; filtering for aliveness, topic, and popularity; joining &
being approved; and finally reading another conlanging forum

I think (a) is far more likely to be done by someone with only
moderate interest, which is the usual case, and (b) is simply too much
of a pain for anyone to do unless they have a strong motivation to be
in that particular group. I know that personally I've reached my limit
for the number of different accounts I'm willing to have, whereas I
actually do (a) relatively often.

The question is not whether you *can* do something or not, but how
easy and systemically encouraged it is.

- Sai


* FWIW as a related point to the technical questions, I have (for
totally separate reasons and topics) been considering making a sort of
metaforum for a few months now. Something that will use user tags to
on-the-fly generate subfora when there are enough users interested in
that, have mail or BB interface, full filtering (or not) ability, etc.
One that basically would be able to include everything everywhere that
anyone is interested in participating in a forum for. Clearly, the
same issues of separation, selective reading, administrative powers,
etc. are even more crucial for such a thing, and thus I've thought a
bit on how to do it and come up with some ways I think would work
well.

I think we have enough coders here (personally I do Ruby on Rails) to
be able to implement or adapt for use whatever it is we can get
consensus on, so I do not consider relatively minor technical
limitations to be impediments.

** Also FWIW, I am writing here as *myself personally*, though I do
believe (as a personal opinion, no more no less) that the ideas are in
line with the LCS's goals as well. Hopefully I've made it clear(er?)
that I am not intending to force everyone together in one big room -
more like, to have all the rooms at least in one big house, one that
welcomes people wandering around a bit to drop in on others, have a
snack, and say hello.