Topic: Campaign to improve posting quality for local boards (Read 3898 times)

Mega-locomotive and mini-culture

It's nice to read books, to watch quality movies and go to theater. Especially if you are a journalist and - isn't this right? - you should know about the world around you, since you write and talk about it. Same as it's a must to know to use a computer and, as much as possible, know your own language.

Science and technology as well are part nowadays of general knowledge and, in case of journalists, they are also part of their professional culture.

Do you think that a newscaster should know the weight of a locomotive? Certainly not, especially thinking that there are many types of them. How about the size? I'm asking this because once we were told on TV that a train derailed once and a very powerful crane was needed for lifting the 1000 tons locomotive. Very powerful, indeed... Someone slipped an extra zero there, but how could the poor newscaster know, since he has no idea about size?

A while back I was thrilled to hear about a hug underground lake whose depth was 7000km. This was pretty impressive, since it was beyond the Earth radius...

Another time we were informed that an athlete run the distance of 1500m in 12 minutes and 100 seconds.

And not only the numbers are an issue for some, but the words as well. As a consequence, we are being told on the news that a citizen made an accident "for" the excessive speed or - rarely, indeed - that a child was happy "because" of the gift he received.

The truth is that such way of phrasing is inevitable if you read only one book...

I decided to post here as well a short essay which I posted initially inside the Romanian version of this thread (I will get back with other posts I made there in the short future.).

Do we still know to write?

Audiovisual sector is obsessed with ratings, but nobody seems to wonder if a TV turned on means also that someone is watching and if he likes what he sees. Wouldn't it be more interesting to know how many watched again a TV show?

It would be also interesting to see, in the activity of Post system, which is the ratio between bureaucratic papers (taxes, contracts, forms) and personal letters. Didn't letters disappear from your life as well?

We are receiving daily many emails, text messages, messages on Fb, on WhatsApp etc.. But there is nothing inside our Postal Box - excepting bills and offers for self-tapping screws. For years, we don't know anymore the handwriting of the ones we love!

Think about what formidable literature was built based on postal correspondence! What letters were exchanged, be them perfumed or with vitriol, and which proved to be prose or philosophy of highest quality! How many nuances, flourishing, sarcasms or elevated exchanges of ides!

Do you realize that if today an important person will publish his messages exchanged with one or more acquaintances, for not altering the reality we should expect to find there abbreviations of 1-2 letters or even digits and, from time to time, an emoticon...

Similar, all the post cards for Easter, Christmas or birth days became so systematized and prefabricated. "May this day...".

What if you'd write a letter today? "Dear friend...".

What is culture useful for?

A few years back, European Union launched a digital library which offers online access to two million symbols of European culture from last 2000 years. Movies, photos, paintings, audio recordings, printings.

Who has time for such thing?! Oh well, the respective website was blocked, just after launch, because of the immense number of visitors: more than ten million per hour!

Let's translate this: within each hour, ten million people of this planet haunted by the financial-economic crisis, by the global warming, by local wars, by terrorism - found time and interest for seeing what's about this huge step forward of the culture. Extrapolating, we are talking about almost a quarter billion people per day. In a bit more than a month - all almost six billion residents of the planet.

Of course, many people still don't have Internet access and more than sure, in poor countries, the event was not heard of and, even if it was heard of, people had other problems. But this does not change the nature of this event, which was sensational: it means that in decent countries the interest for the digital library was that big, that people accessed the website or tried to, at least a few times!

And this brings into discussion an old question: what is culture useful for?

An answer has been given years back by the main character from Ileana Vulpescu's Art of conversation: A colleague asks the zealous student: "What's your benefit if you study so much?". And she answers, "To understand how world functions.".

Thank you both for your replies @GazetaBitcoin and @1miau. 

It is my pleasure to make some contribution to this nice campaign you have started. I hope my translation can be found useful which would make me really happy. 

Hello. First of all I liked the campaign you have started to improve posting quality. I would also like to apply with a translation in Turkish which I have already posted on my local board as well. 

I tried my best to customize my translation for our local board. I mentioned the issues I identified on the board and added some important topics to read as well.

I'm leaving the translation here for your review: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/mesaj-kalitesini-gelitirme-amacl-kampanyalar-5483884

I disagree with this, at least with what I have seen and been told, but if truly one is banned immediately with a few errors that could be guided and corrected without a warning, then that is cruel. I can't however side with anyone outrightly as I've seen a whole lot of users with powers getting intoxicated, nonetheless, if such issues are raised, I think that such an account could be reopened.

Because locals always tolerate tiny mistakes. Let's say a new user registered today and copy-pasted some random article in our local thread, in the past days, we were used to asking him to edit it and add the source or delete it. Do you see the tolerance here? Global members would go ahead and report their posts and they would get banned without having a single chance.

I tried my best to customize my translation for our local board. I mentioned the issues I identified on the board and added some important topics to read as well.

Newbies in the examples you have described definitely deserves to be guided. But I was talking about deliberate plagiarism or using AI to "write" posts. When someone does this, it means that he is aware of what he is doing. Does he need any guidance or advice? Will it be a discovery for him if other forum members warn him that this is unacceptable? I doubt all of that. That is why I see more use in just reporting such users to moderator. But of course I am not talking here about some users making mistakes, but who are ready to learn and are thankful to the guides which over users provide to them.

I am not only talking about the violations that are in the forum rules. Some other things are not listed on the forum rules but these are frowned upon. There is a thing called ethics and we all should be ethical. Let's talk about how our locals react when they see someone violating forum rules. Let's say a newbie just registered and wrote something that violates the forum rules. Usually, we don't report that post. We try to correct them instead because I believe not everyone reads the forum rules before they register here. But if they continue doing it by ignoring our messages, we report them.

Some other things are not listed on the forum rules such as merit abuse. Cheating with multiple alts and many more. Sometimes it's obvious that a account is alt account and who control that. But we cannot report without any kind of evidence. But, when something is going on for a long time and a big number of users joins that, we should do something even if we do not have any proof. I did what I wanted and luckily it worked.

So, it's of high priority to create awareness.

Let's say a newbie just registered and wrote something that violates the forum rules.

Maybe it is the case with your local board. I would not say that is a common thing for every local. For example, in russian local, where I constantly write, the situation is different. Sure, the members there show support and give reasonable advice, but you also come across lots of sarcasm and irony, even intolerance sometimes. I am sure most of local members would not hesitate to report some newbie who is violating forum rules.

Spammers/abusers will always try to spam/abuse, that's in their nature. But we don't report them straightway. We tend to give them fair warnings/advice's/2nd chances, but when things gets out of hand we take hard actions against them. That how it is with our local board. That's what LB did for our local board. And surprisingly they stopped.

My personal perspective is that nobody is born a quality forum user/writer. When I first joined this forum, I made many mistakes, but these guys (LB and so on), helped me, guided me. So I want to do the same as they did.

Because locals always tolerate tiny mistakes. Let's say a new user registered today and copy-pasted some random article in our local thread, in the past days, we were used to asking him to edit it and add the source or delete it. Do you see the tolerance here? Global members would go ahead and report their posts and they would get banned without having a single chance.

We have tolerated many more things in our local thread and that is the reason they were able to abuse every single feature of this forum. Someone has to stand up against them, and I thought it was the perfect time to step up. Luckily it worked and they stopped doing what they were doing for a while.

I don't understand which opportunity the try to find in Local Board in this case. If they leave it once they ranked up, why write and spam there in the first place? I got to, that it is easier and more comfortable to become a part of the community through the language which is your native and with people who have common roots with you. But it is not impossible to fill in even without local support at all. For example, I found out the existence of local Ukrainian and Russian communities after quite long time, when I was already familiar with main rules and customs of the forum.