Basler Biker wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 1:02 pm
Because to be honest, we want it to be better organized than on Duolingo, right?
So let's set it up, one way or another, and see how it works. It may need fine-tuning all along to get to or goal.
I very much agree. Trial and error is an unavoidable part of the process.
Basler Biker wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 1:02 pm
For Q concerning an issue stated by a person, only that person can decide whether the answer "solved" his/her issue.
This is true in many situations. If my phone stops working properly, I might ask for help online. As soon as someone proposes a solution I can try it, and if it works I can confirm that this particular method actually solved my problems. With language not so much. What if the first explanation is wrong and the user doesn't realize it after having marked the incorrect reason as correct.
In order to establish a working system, we need to make sure that it actually promotes the things we want it to. If we want the Q&A forum to produce a useful list of language questions that can be used by future learners, the best answer is not the one that one individual likes, but the one that is most likely to benefit the majority of all learners. The two most obvious solutions are pseudo-democracy and expert rule. As long as the editor isn't swamped by a flood of questions, and is willing to listen to new ideas about how to edit things, I think expert rule is preferable.
To this I would like to add another important intention that should permeate every aspect of the new sociotechnical system. We need to promote participation. The duome forums are starting from scratch, and unlike the duolingo forums, new language learners are not going to be automatically subscribed as soon as they join one of the green owl's classes.
At a first glance, these two intentions seem to be opposed to one another. Imagine a native Swedish speaker that joins in, but then realizes that their contributions were cleaned away by a moderator because another native speaker with more teaching experience could explain things so much better. The logical response is a silent "if you don't want my help I'll just go back to learning Italian." And three weeks later, when the great teacher is too busy outside of duome to respond, all questions are suddenly left unanswered.
The real relationship between the two ideals (promoting participation and the production of a useful learning resource) doesn't become clear until we realize that without participation, there will be no resource. For your idea to work at all, we need to make sure that people want to ask and answer questions. Instead of cleaning up discussions and removing things, we need to highlight the contributions that are most useful to learners.
Basler Biker wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 1:02 pm
PS: one other company where I worked had a full time job cleaning topics and posts of all kind, turning them
into clear Q&A and FAQ entries. So maybe that's an idea too, that Q&A after cleanup and editing get moved to
an FAQ Swedish list (read-only, so probably with the reply option disabled)
This is probably the easiest way to solve these issues. Instead of cleaning up the actual discussions, the editor would use them to create the learning resource that we want.
I would also like to propose an improvement to your guidelines. It is a replacement for "try to avoid discussions" but I think you could remove "just reply to the original post ..." too.
2a. If you have a follow-up question, please do not reply within the discussion. New questions should instead be posted as new discussions within the Q&A forum. (Unless you are asking someone to clarify the answer to the original quesion.)
2b. Please keep your answers relevant. If a question makes you think of a related topic that is only indirectly connected to the question, but still interesting for other learners, it is better to create a new discussion in the main Swedish forum.