Category: Uncategorized

Just happened to me as well today.

It’s happened periodically before.

Assume bug.

For now.

The Wikimedia Language committee clamped down on “dead” languages and artificial languages quite ferociously, after an initial laissez-faire period. Because initially you could set up a Wikipedia in any language you liked, Latin, Old English, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic got in. Because the Wikimedia Language Committee clamped down, Ancient Greek got rejected even though the proposal for it was far advanced.

Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Ancient Greek

This discussion was created before the implementation of the Language proposal policy, and it is incompatible with the policy. Please open a new proposal in the format this page has been converted to (see the instructions). Do not copy discussion wholesale, although you are free to link to it or summarise it (feel free to copy your own comments over). — {admin} Pathoschild 20:12, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Same goes for Ido and Volapük and Lojban, which got in before (Esperanto would be hard to argue against), and Toki Pona or Klingon, which didn’t make it. Klingon being a pop culture conlang, it attracted disproporionate negative attention, including Wales personally wielding the axe against it:

History of the Klingon Wikipedia

In August 2005, Jimbo Wales made a decision to lock the Klingon Wiki permanently. While Jimbo has never publicly stated his exact rationale for closing the wiki, the maturation of Wikipedia and its sister projects as a whole into a vital worldwide resource meant that there was little incentive to keep a niche language that was not intended to be seriously used. Other constructed languages such as the Toki Pona language were closed at about the same time (although the Toki Pona Wikipedia, like the Klingon Wikipedia, was ultimately hosted at Wikia due to the presence of a strong community).

In fact, the Klingon letter r was removed from the Wikipedia logo in 2010, replaced by a Ge’ez character.

Old logo; Klingon <r> top right.

New logo

Mills Baker’s answer to Why should designers work at Quora?

Product Design Manager at Quora (2016-present)

If you’re working on an unsolved problem that depends heavily on design, you’ll structure your organization and roles to empower design. This is as true at Quora today as it’s been historically at Apple, with some key distinctions relating to the types of products we make. For us, empowerment means a few things specifically:

• Design reports to the CEO, not to a non-design product executive
• Design is deeply involved in both company and product / team strategy
• Design at Quora is optimized for speed and autonomy, so we can learn extremely rapidly and can’t be blocked by the necessity for endless consensus building; thus designers at Quora code
• Functional groups at Quora take one another seriously: designers aren’t handed “product ideas” and told to draw UIs for them
• We work to make design ever-faster and easier, building new abstractions that simplify work in the product (on both native and mobile)

Designers at Quora can conceive of ideas, build them in the product, test them in our Analysis Framework on millions of users live, and can ship to production at their speed.

Designers Will Code by David Cole on Emesis

Director of Design at Quora

The fact that these components all stay current with live data automates a lot the engineering work. If a designer is making a form that submits an answer to a question, the existing list of answers will show the submission as soon as it’s posted, without anyone writing new code telling it to update. This means that changes on the interaction or visual level usually require no engineering support whatsoever. And because we run constant deployment, and designers can push to production, a Quora designer can make changes and see them live on the site in minutes.

You mean, the font announced with a literal gong within Quora?

Instagram post by Quora • Feb 11, 2017 at 2:28am UTC

quora: Ringing the gong! One of our oldest traditions for product launches–this time we’re celebrating our new custom typeface [math]unicode{x1F514}unicode{x1F514}unicode{x1F514} [/math]#quora

[Why yes, Quora does use emojis on Instagram—not em-dashes, though.]

Of course this has been covered off with great erudition by Martin Silvertant: Martin Silvertant’s answer to Why is there a disgusting new font on Quora?

In conclusion, Quora has not introduced a disgusting new typeface. Rather, they are using the typeface they chose incorrectly. Quora has done amazingly by using Tiempos Text for body text, but they need some guidance in establishing a harmonious, coherent typographic system for the website.

Quora Design Team. “Guidance in establishing a harmonious, coherent typographic system for the website Sold Separately.”

If you go through her log, you will notice that Susan’s activity is intermittent. She posts for a few days, then is absent for months. In fact, her latest period of posting was her most protracted, and the first in which she posted on more than one topic.

Her being absent, in any case, has plenty of precedent.

I sat through the 1992 revival of Einstein on the Beach, which goes for five hours, and which is much more static (as hardcore minimalist music) than a symphony would be. I had no problem sitting through the entire thing—even though the opera creators imagined you could walk in and out as you pleased. And I was proud to give them a standing ovation at the end of it.

(The audience was much more restless in the 1992 revival than the 1984 revival, apparently. There was booing in the bed scene. The people booing did not stick around for the standing ovation.)

The six hour TV version of The Mahabharata (1989 film)? Not a problem.

I’ve enjoyed Mahler’s Third, which is an hour and three quarters; I’ve been puzzled by where the hell Brian’s Gothic was going, and its length at an hour and three quarters was not the reason why.

As long as the symphony is any good, I’m up for it. Just gimme a La-Z-Boy and a coffee, and I’m good to go.

As of this writing, if a comment is reported, e.g. for BNBR, it is deleted. The BNBR notification includes the comment text (though the formatting suffers).

Therefore yes, Quora does delete comments.

By having human beings review reports before acting on them.

Human beings that are prepared to evaluate the context of a report.

Not going to happen of course.

Absent dealing with any false reports at the first tier of moderation, we are left with using Appeal, escalating to a second tier of moderation. (There clearly is one, since sanctions do get rescinded.)

See: [My italics]

Tatiana Estévez’s answer to If one sees a clear BNBR contravention by one Quora user on another (but is not personally involved) should one report it?

Expecting complete strangers to understand when telling someone to ‘f-off’ is an insult or friendly banter doesn’t make sense on a site as big as this. Expecting moderators to read a long thread and try to judge the tone is not reasonable, judging sarcasm online is notoriously difficult without context.

Marc Bodnick’s answer to Will Quora Moderation explain why a particular user was banned?

• Our moderation process emphasizes rule-based decisions that are fair and consistent. Every moderation decision on the site must be based on an existing policy. All we care about are policies; we don’t make decisions based on the substantive nature of the content that a user has published.

And for claims of false reporting, see:

• Anonymous: Does the banning of 8 Indian Quorans on 2017-03-15 point to some sort of coordinated action? by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency
• Sophie Dockx: Quora Moderation is Under Attack by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency
• Dan Rosenthal: Quora is not banning nearly enough people by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

I will instead volunteer Lt. Columbo’s opinion. From the pilot episode.

You’re probably right. He sounds just too clever for us. What I mean is, you know, cops, we’re not the brightest guys in the world. Of course, we got one thing going for us: we’re professionals. I mean, you take our friend here, the murderer. He’s very smart, but he’s an amateur. I mean, he’s got just one time to learn. Just one. And with us, well, with us, it’s – it’s a business. You see, we do this a hundred times a year. I’ll tell ya, Doc. That’s a lot of practice. Prescription: Murder (TV Movie 1968)

(They hadn’t quite worked out the lack of grooming in the pilot episode.)

I see an answer here from 2010. Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose.

Yes. In fact, recent UX changes—suppressing upvote counts in the feed, suppressing visibility of Most Viewed Writer—are (presumably) an attempt to mitigate this.

Yes, people upvote answers by very popular Quora users, regardless of whether they are any good or not. Yes, people upvote answers that show up from popular users in their feed, without scrutinising whether someone else came up with a better answer. Yes, there is a widespread perception of cliquishness and high school behaviour among Quora writers—and if you google, you’ll see that perception was in place among writers about Quora in tech journals, as far back as 2010 and 2011, even before the Quill.

*shrug* Like I say. Quora, seven years on, is making a stab at mitigating that.