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  • Cajoling editors into leaving E1 writeups which have been 'superseded' by lengthier 'Content rescue' writeups.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.

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