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[WELCO] Välkommen till Frågor och svar ( Questions and answers )

User avatar
Basler Biker
Switzerland

[WELCO] Välkommen till Frågor och svar ( Questions and answers )

Post by Basler Biker »

The Swedish forum has been set up to allow a clear split between

  • discussions - language related (the main forum)
  • questions and answers, (subforum)
  • translations. (subforum)

So now that the three subforums exist, let's use them properly.

Recommended use of the Swedish Q&A subforum:

  • submit questions on which you expect a clear answer
  • 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.)
  • 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.
  • or just say "Thanks" to another reply that gets your approval

By having a Swedish Q&A forum, separated from general discussions, we shall aim at collecting
a clean set of "Questions" with correct "Answers" given and reviewed by natives and fluent speakers.
Or even good answers given by learners, why not !!

With the help of you all, the Q&A forum shall become the new extended "Tips and Notes".

PS
In order to make Q&A of practical use, for posters as well as repliers, we would need three more features,
and so I asked duome if these could be implemented somehow (well, technically everything is possible...)

  • possibility for the topic owner to mark one or more replies as "This answered my question" = "This solved my issue"
  • a search option "answered"/"not answered yet" to find topics which are still waiting for a correct answer.
  • sort order of the replies by "This answered my question" on top, then by number of "Approvals" in descending order.

BB - Basler Biker - Positivity and constructiveness will prevail
Native :belgium: :netherlands: / fluent :fr: :de: :uk: / learning :sweden: / fan of :switzerland: (bs/bl)

konstig

Re: Välkommen till Frågor och Svar

Post by konstig »

I understand why you want the Q&A forum to automatically produce a neat list of useful answers, and I support that intention, but I'm not sure that your method is up to the task.

First of all, is it really reasonable to expect learners to know whether the questions they want to ask have "single clear answer" or not. Simple grammar issues can of course be expected to fit fairly well into the Q&A forum, but beyond that your guidelines are a bit unclear. Add to this the assumption that the learner, who actually had to ask the question in the first place, is supposed to be the judge of which answer is right (even though that is only a requested function at this point).

My gut feeling tells me that a system that relies this much on learners, including absolute beginners, in the process of creating the intended list of neat and useful answers is inherently flawed. I think we need another kind of mechanism here.

Furthermore, for me as a native speaker, these guidelines might actually make me less inclined to answer a question. If I am supposed to avoid discussion, but someone else has given an incomplete answer, I might just avoid the question altogether.

Another issue is the name of the forum. If we are supposed to limit ourselves to a certain subset of questions, that should be reflected in the name.

Unfortunately I don't have any real solution to this conundrum. The only thing I can think of is an actual editor, either a native speaker or a rather advanced learner. Imagine this: discussions are allowed, but someone actually reads through them and selects the best answers, quoting them in a post that summarizes the entire discussion, and preferably appears at the top of the page when someone finds the post six months later. Theoretically, the same editor could also choose one of the posts as the best answer (as opposed to letting the learner be the judge).

An example: someone asks a question and user A1 responds with a good, but partial explanation. I add to this another piece of knowledge and we discuss this in two more comments. The responsible editor quotes the post from A1 in its entirety, adding a summary of my post, with a short quote (because let's be honest about it, my post would obviously have been way too long). And this editor's selection, so to speak, is what a new reader would see first.

I'm not sure that this exact system is what I want to see implemented, but my gut feeling tells me that we need an editor if the goal is to produce a clean and useful language Q&A.

Native speaker of Swedish, reluctant user of English, passionate student of (Mandarin) Chinese, occasional reader of German, casual participant in the green owl's French class.

User avatar
Basler Biker
Switzerland

Re: Välkommen till Frågor och Svar

Post by Basler Biker »

konstig wrote: Fri Feb 18, 2022 12:31 pm

... my gut feeling tells me that we need an editor if the goal is to produce a clean and useful language Q&A.

Very constructive feedback, Konstig !

So for all Q on the language itself

  • we need a native editor indeed.
  • the editor may need to choose the best answer(s)
  • the editor may feel the need to combine 2 or more answers in a single "best reply"
  • we may need to cleanup unnecessary other replies

For Q concerning an issue stated by a person, only that person can decide whether the answer "solved" his/her issue.

I hesitate to see a split "Grammar" and "other" Q's, because if it's about language, the only thing it can be is grammar.
Unless it's pure vocabulary ...If it's none of those two, then it's "general" (may be language culture, language habits, whatever...)

Feel free to descibe in depth how and what extra "measures" would be required to make it work.
Also let me know how to better describe the "aim" in the sticky "welcome" announcement, so that
all our noses point in the same direction.

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.

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)

Don't hesitate to give even more input, because this site is just under construction...and the site admins will
for sure see what they can do to make it all possible.

BB - Basler Biker


BB - Basler Biker - Positivity and constructiveness will prevail
Native :belgium: :netherlands: / fluent :fr: :de: :uk: / learning :sweden: / fan of :switzerland: (bs/bl)

konstig

Re: Välkommen till Frågor och Svar

Post by konstig »

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.

Native speaker of Swedish, reluctant user of English, passionate student of (Mandarin) Chinese, occasional reader of German, casual participant in the green owl's French class.

User avatar
Basler Biker
Switzerland

Re: Välkommen till Frågor och Svar

Post by Basler Biker »

Hej Konstig.

The proposed improvements of the "How to Q&A" 2a and 2b, and some deletions, are applied. Thank you.

We still need to see how we can come to some "Final version" (edited, approved) of a given Q&A topic.
Like the former "Notes and Tips" ... this shall be stable at some point in time.

Not sure right now, it's open for discussion, and I read your view on it - taking into account the new phpBB based system - how to best achieve this "good contents database" with minimum manual effort, maximum contribution by the community, attracting experts, and with maximum effect for finding previous topics by promoting a search-before-you-ask attitude.

BB - Basler Biker


BB - Basler Biker - Positivity and constructiveness will prevail
Native :belgium: :netherlands: / fluent :fr: :de: :uk: / learning :sweden: / fan of :switzerland: (bs/bl)

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