Summary
This place needs more accurate summaries. Let's begin.
Background
A lot of the time when skimming through the nodegel, and certainly in more
recent times, we come upon an interestingly titled hardlink or softlink
that picks at our curiosity, a half-familiar name, or something that sounds
like something we'd been intrigued by before but never understood. Upon
following these links, however, many times we're assaulted by an
intimidating mass of text and information, which we have to take time to
read before understanding.
By the time we've read something, it's altogether likely that we'll have
forgotten why we were interested in the first place, and almost certain
that we'll have forgotten what it was we were going to do before
we had our curiosity piqued and were thus distracted.
The graph structure of E2 means that, in theory, the structure of
information can be represented in the database, and that our discovery of
knowledge and interaction with the database are coded in it's structure.
This is best facilitated by short writeups which give an accurate summary
of exactly what the topic is. The reader can quickly discover the
important points about whatever the topic is, the 256 character executive
summary, and thus have a valuable piece of knowledge in very little time.
In recent times, however, short summaries such as those embodied in E1
writeups have fallen out of favour, to be replaced by sprawling writeups
which cover topics fully, with complex internal structures and valuable
information which is internal to the writeups but opaque to the actual
database.
There is value in short writeups.
I'm a busy man... alright, that's a lie. I'm a man with a very short
attention span, and...
...where was I? Oh yeah.
I'm a man with a very short attention span, and I like to see the big
headline, bullet-point summaries of something factual before I read it. I
don't want to look up a person and discover where they grew up, who their
parents were and how their childhood was spent before discovering
who they are and why they're relevant to my life.
The mission statement
It's a bit vague, I'm afraid. Let's do bullet points. I like bullet points.
- Summarising overly lengthy nodes or indeed writeups
- Cajoling edev types into inventing a way for these summaries to
exist at the top of an e2node rather than the bottom.
- Cajoling editors into leaving E1 writeups which have been 'superseded'
by lengthier 'Content rescue' writeups.
- Cajoling noders into adding their own summaries before long rambling writeups.
- Other miscellaneous mayhem as the team leads deem necessary.
Roster
- ______________
- ______________
- ______________
- ______________
We know who we are. We don't need a usergroup. We communicate by pointing, nods and grunts, and meaningful eye contact.
(r) 2002.09.25@11:46 Great Neb says re The Conciseness Rescue Team: this
node was just a bit too long for me to read in its entirety due to my short
attention span but it sounded cool up until I stopped
I can't remember whether this was supposed to be a joke or not.