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Shinyuu

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Shinyuu: Initially hostey wanted me to be the public person; but I believe he did a good job on writing the appeal and he can explain it better. I still support him in this idea but the appeal text below is his own work.

 

Host: Hello.

 

TL;DR: I look for help from all you reading this to make some parts of tulpamancy experience better for everyone, existing tulpamancers and newcomers. It will take you 10-15 minutes, but your effort is very important for us to continue. There's a step-by-step guide down below.

 

The problem

 

Existing tulpamancy community hubs are not as good for simple questions and answers. We keep saying that our community is scientific, yet our knowledge indexing is pretty bad. Reddit is great for discussions, monthly posts, sharing one's experiences, but asking questions is hard. Some people create new posts, some use the weekly thread, overall it's not organized well enough. It is really hard to search for questions that were answered previously, specifically because some questions are asked in the topic, some in the post, some in the comments. There are tons of useful replies that are hard to read through.

 

Reddit Tulpamancy FAQ is awesome. All kinds of good questions and answers. It's huge though, it's painful to read and not that easy to find a specific answer. Given it's a wiki it is pretty much impossible to add a comment, asking to clarify the details on one of the answers or have a meaningful discussion.

 

Tulpa.info has a Q&A section on the forum, but it has issues too. Obviously, the forum format is not the perfect solution for Q&A. People resort to topic tagging and various hacks to get the question across. Searching is complex, there's no way to vote on particular answer as one being more acceptable than the other. Reply chains often drift away from the original topic.

 

Basically all the same applies to Tulpa.io forum, and Tulpa.im as well.

 

The solution for this particular problem

 

People on the internet solved the issue with Q&A websites. If you ever did any programming in your life, you've surely seen Stack Overflow. That's the very first website of the Stack Exchange network that now spans over various topics, material and mental: personal finances & money, cognitive sciences, math, music theory or even video gaming.

 

All those websites are united by the Stack Exchange, the network that runs one of the best designed interfaces for asking questions and getting answers and thousands of people using it.

 

Tulpamancy Stack Exchange solves the problem of Q&A by promoting popular questions, great search, tagging. There will be a simple searchable place to direct people seeking for answers. There are no admins or moderators, Stack Exchange is driven by users and their reputation. In a nutshell, the more good answers you write, the more administrative power you get as people trust your opinion. This method is proven functional by hundreds of other Stack Exchange sites.

 

Why we need your help

 

I could have just went and buy some domain like tulpa.exchange and set up an opensource Q&A website on it. The point is that I don't want to create a new community. Stack Exchange is a tool to make the existing community better, it's not going to compete against reddit or forums, it will extend the ways we share tulpamancy knowledge.

 

The proposal process is very straightforward, but it requires many people to cooperate to make it happen. Stack Exchange doesn't allow to create a new hub and be done with it, they check if community can actually support it. For that they have a proposal process, consisting of three steps. We need your help, the help of actual tulpamancers to get our hub live.

 

How exactly you can help

 

I wrote a simple guide for you.

 

  1. Go to http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/97552/tulpamancy (this is our proposal).
  2. Log in. You don't need to create a new account if you have one at other Stack Exchange networks, you can also log in with Gmail or Facebook. Your privacy is safe, as you can change the name to whatever and the email is always kept private. You must confirm the email address (you'll get a mail) though, as this is how Stack Exchange verifies you actually exist.
  3. Follow the proposal. We need at least 60 followers to continue with it.
  4. Give votes (you should have 5) for the questions you like. We need to have at least 40 questions with the score of 10 or higher. A good reason to spread your votes to questions having less then 10 upvotes. You surely can downvote the questions too, if you find them unsuitable for the proposal, but please, add a comment on why you think such a question is inappropriate so that its author can react.
  5. Write your own sample questions (you should have 5 slots for that as well). You can write your own questions or just find something interesting in the FAQ and re-post it to the proposal. Please make sure a similar question doesn't exist already.
  6. Comment on other questions (optional, but highly useful). Please comment on other questions, explaining why you think it is a good fit for proposal or not. Please understand that the Tulpamancy Q&A should be useful for both existing tulpamancers and new people, so questions should be diverse in complexity. There is no need to answer the question itself in the comments. Those are only to discuss if an example question fits the Tulpamancy Q&A hub.
  7. Discuss (optional). If you have something to add to help better define what kind of questions we should have in tulpamancy Q&A, there's a "create discussion" button there.

 

This process will take time, some hubs spend actual years to get full commitment. I believe that we, as a community, can make it happen though. Not this week, not this month, but eventually. I totally understand how you might feel lazy to create and account and write stuff, but your commitment is very important for this proposal. If everyone who read this would go and vote, we'd get to step 2 in no time, seriously. Think of it as a help to the community that got you into tulpamancy and helped you. Your little effort of spending 10-15 minutes on refining our proposal will help new tulpamancers a lot. Think of how nice it would be if your next tulpamancy question had a great answer available right after you typed it in google or other web search.

 

Thanks for reading. I hope I have convinced you to help us. If not, it's all right, thanks for reading this anyways. Changes are hard for everyone, even if those are, hopefully, changes for better.

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Stack Overflow has helped me infinitely when coding websites, I support this entirely. Will contribute tonight

[align=right]The songs carried on and began to grow long as the moon watched it all from above

And the old ripened berries and the juniper fairies delivered their gifts and their love.[/align]

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I'm kinda conflicted on this. Your idea is set up very well and thought out, and Stack Overflow is indeed perfect for coding. But tulpamancy doesn't have correct answers, and I'm hesitant to use this format. While multiple answers can be upvoted, generally one is seen as "most correct", although that will almost never be the case. And people are going to see it like that no matter what we do. The top answers would likely be pretty decent, but no answer should be put over another. So it's the format that bothers me.

 

I dunno. Aside from that everything seems great and I would definitely help. But as of now unfortunately I don't see it as a perfect fit. More dedicated members tend to post first on many threads here, so using a google search that only searched the forum (add ' site:community.tulpa.info ' into the search) could work just fine. However many very old threads show up when I use that, so I actually tend to use the forum's search feature instead. I'm also wondering if stack overflow would really be a good format for subjective questions that not only need discussion as an answer rather than a "best post", but also would have to be phrased rather specifically whereas discussion can cover a myriad of similar questions all at once. You shouldn't really go "off topic" in a stack overflow answer, but I tend to give general advice along with my answers in most Q&A threads.

 

It's basically the same reason I don't support a wiki. We just need some way to better organize our threads here.

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.

Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.

My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us about tulpamancy stuff there.

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I dunno. Aside from that everything seems great and I would definitely help. But as of now unfortunately I don't see it as a perfect fit.

 

Host: As I noted on reddit, Stack Exchange has a bunch of hubs that are controversial, yet they seem to work just fine.

 

Is drinking alcohol or coke, right after eating durian, deadly?

 

Is 8% of human DNA from viruses?

 

Are certain types of fairies associated with specific regions?

 

What are the heath risks associated with grinding coffee beans a year after their sell by date?

 

What is the best way to clean your glasses?

 

All kinds of questions asked in all kinds of hubs. Some questions have more subjective answers, some have a good consensus. If it works for them I see no reason why it wouldn't work for tulpamancy.

 

Someone on reddit raised a valid concern that some things in tulpamancy change just too fast. I can relate to that with my Stack Overflow experience and questions like "what is the best javascript framework to use?" (I think such questions are now banned though). Still, when opinions change all it takes is a good new comment and a few people that would agree with it and upvote. It is not an exceptional case where the top-voted answer isn't the accepted one.

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Yeah, I had that thought between your post and mine, that the answers I give tend to change over time, which I see as for the best. New "answers" are also added all the time, too. Stack Exchange would tend to cement old answers (even multiple) over time and doesn't facilitate modifying or adding on to old information. Basically, the whole thing is too "matter-of-fact" for me. I'm just not comfortable with that format for tulpamancy, because I don't see it as something to ask-questions and give-answers about, exclusively. It needs a community, some soul, some fun and lightheartedness on occasion and serious discussion on others. It needs off topic threads that only vaguely discuss something important but are good to be talked about anyways, and honestly the reason we haven't been able to make a primary list of answers to questions is because there are extremely few examples of threads where an "answer" was reached concisely in a timely manner. It usually takes discussion - as in the reading of the discussion - to get those answers, because said answers are basically never in the format of one answer. The entire phenomenon is subjective, not just a little open-ended, and it defies strict Question & Answer format. That's why our Q&A section is for many people asking questions and discussing different answers, rather than using a voting system of some kind to put the "best answers" on the "best questions".

 

 

It's by no means perfect either, though, and I'm not even saying we do all of that. But I'm much more comfortable with this format - not as in comfortable with my personal use, but comfortable with people learning from this sort of environment. As of now we're in between Stack Exchange and Reddit - we've got the Q&A/discussion of Reddit, but a bit more permanence like SE. But none of the three sites are doing it all correctly. Though I'm here because I feel like we're the closest. And while I would "give it a chance" or something (whatever that means - it would take up all the time I normally dedicate to tulpa.info), it's not that different from our own Q&A (and General Discussion) threads. The only real difference is the ability to say "This answer is better than the others" and searchability. But I'm still sure there's some way we can add that searchability/organization here.

 

Also, that was quite a fast response given all the links. Do note that I hate arguing against something so planned out and well intended, I'm just trying to save a lot of time and effort in the long run.

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.

Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.

My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us about tulpamancy stuff there.

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Stack Exchange would tend to cement old answers (even multiple) over time and doesn't facilitate modifying or adding on to old information.

 

Stack Exchange actually does give users with a high reputation the privilege to submit edits to answers, and I think those edits can be reviewed by higher-reputation users.

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Host: I copied the links over from reddit, the discussion is ongoing there as well.

 

I literally just replied to the same concern on reddit. Let me explain why I don't think that the answers are set in stone.

 

SO and SE allow anonymous questions and answers. That basically means that one can extend any question with a better suited answer making zero effort other than typing. People can star questions they are interested in, and they will get notified about new answers. If those answers are good — they get upvoted to the top eventually.

 

I've seen that happen in practice on SO (although SO doesn't allow anonymous questions anymore).

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What, you have to have a high reputation to edit your posts? Or do you mean others', I guess that makes sense. Regardless, my point was that it does not refresh the questions, so there's no reason to go back and edit them. You aren't going to remember a couple months later an old post you realize you could have written better.

 

Unless every single answer page is treated as something to value, like one being "The Q&A on making wonderlands answer" or something. That's an awful lot to keep track of though. Still not convinced old answers will be updated much at all.

 

SO and SE allow anonymous questions and answers. That basically means that one can extend any question with a better suited answer making zero effort other than typing.

 

What does that entail exactly? As far as I can tell those pages are absolutely not conducive to asking new relevant questions or posting new good answers in old threads, or whatever they're called. The little discussions that go on under the posts would quickly become tangents just as bad as our own 2+ page threads if we asked further relevant questions under the main post. In my limited use of these sites, I don't think I ever saw/read more than three posts under the large ones. Those three have been rather helpful, but it still seems very limited in scope compared to an actual thread.

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.

Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.

My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us about tulpamancy stuff there.

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Host: That's what Rasznir is talking about. Highly reputable members can edit the questions of others, clarifying something about them or fixing basic mistakes.

 

No one says it's an easy process, and tulpamancy, as a community, is magnitude smaller than SO. It is a goal that we need to target still.

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That's an interesting concept, but no one's actually addressed my primary problem yet, which is the refreshing of old questions. Is the format of questions really so good that casual browsing may result in somebody finding an old question and updating it at their preference? I mean, that's Tulpa.info's biggest problem, old threads being forgotten. That's why it's my primary concern here. Unless SO can do that extremely well, I don't see it as a big enough improvement to warrant the change. But I have no idea if it can, I haven't actually used it, just seen it. On the surface it seems no different from if we searched for old popularly viewed threads on tulpa.info and updated those.

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.

Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.

My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us about tulpamancy stuff there.

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