Re: serving the needs of Lojban learners

[Matthew Faupel <matthew@CPD.NTC.NOKIA.COM>]

> I jst posted a long and rambling message.  For those who got bogged down on
> my rambling, I REALLT want to hear from the inactive subcribers to Lojban
> List as to what you would like to see done tro serve your needs better.

As a definitely inactive but nevertheless long-term subscriber, I think that
I'm a prime candidate for responding to this :-)

My inactivity is simply because I don't have enough time to learn Lojban
properly (I'm learning Spanish and Finnish at the moment, and that combined
with a lively social life doesn't leave sufficient time to do Lojban
justice). I still subscribe because Lojban is both an interesting project in
itself and also the most "professional" attempt I've seen at developing a
conlang.  Some of the side discussions raised such as the recent one about
degrees of truth and falsity have been illuminating too.

My comments on the solutions mentioned by lojbab:

A newsgroup: I'm neutral on this as far as advantages and disadvantages go,
but tend to go against it as our newsfeed seems to be very conservative on
its uptake of new newsgroups, and so I might not be able to receive it.

A lojban announce list/A lojban text only list: I'm not sure that this
solves very much - I for one would subscribe to all of them just to make
sure I didn't miss anything important :-)

A lojban web page: As proposed, it sounds like a nice way of setting up
penfriend type relationships for beginners, but it loses the ability to
raise comments on texts i.e. to branch off from an original lojban text to
discuss grammatical issues that it highlighted.

The thing that gives me the biggest problem with the list as it stands at
the moment is not the throughput per se, but the [dis]organisation of that
throughput.  With my mail reader at least, there is no threading of the
articles, there is an awful lot of quoting of previous posts and there is
almost never a summary once a thread has run its course.  And there is the
usual problem of threads' topic changing without the title changing.

I guess my ideal solution would be some sort of web page that allowed the
creation of articles and then provided attributed editing of those articles.
The home page would look something like:

    Title                                   Last edited  by
    -------------------------------------------------------------------
    ni, jei, barely, almost                 17 Nov 1995  Jorge Llambias
    Purple Lojban                           16 Nov 1995  lojbab
    ....

reverse sorted by date and possibly subdivided into folders related to
Lojban text, grammar, newbie questions (thus forming a sort of auto-FAQ)
etc.  The articles themselves would be editable so that you could insert
attributed text at the end or (more technically challenging) at any point,
e.g.:

    LB= Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
    AR= And Rosta <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>

    LB: Poet and semi-Lojbanist Michael Helsem created the work zirjbo

    AR: Why "semi-Lojbanist"? I believe he's the author of the only
    AR: published book written in Lojban.

    LB: Because almost nothing that he wrote would pass for even very bad
    LB: Lojban.  Michael is a poet who believes in poetic license, and he
    LB: ...etc.

The advantages of this (for me) would be:

  - Threads would be clearly defined.
  - No wasted space through quoting.
  - I could wait until a thread "settled down" before reading it, without
    having to worry about losing some of it.
  - It would be possible to see when a thread had died and thus some kind
    soul could then write a short summary of the salient points (perhaps for
    inclusion in ju'i lobypli).

This is sort of an extension of the archiving web page idea proposed by
lojbab.  The problem is, software to support this probably doesn't exist :-(
If we do stick with a mailing list, I would ask: please keep quoting to a
minimum and please post a summary at the end of long threads if possible.

Cheers,


Matthew