Unexpected Pleasure
Now I am sure that when you see this title and who posted it you are thinking, here we go again.
Well that's not the case. I just noticed I have been awarded the "Legendary Question Badge" for "Lazarus 1000+ posts".
What is pleasureable is that this post is in excess of 2 years old and all the details are still there for members to search and research.
This just goes to show the extent of material that this site holds on file for members to enjoy. I have in the past had requests from members saying "Eddy, I now have the information I require, so can you now delete my post". Why would you want to have it deleted? When these old posts rear their heads, I love seeing them and reading what I have said. To be fair, I can't remember 95% of it but it makes interesting reading for me anyway.
As an example I noticed that Lazarus said,
I thought that, being the grouch I am, I was going to get just a few nice comments, but not so many and so fast. I must be getting old, hehe.
The part about being a grouch, "many a true word said in jest", hehe.
In conclusion, I don't think we realise how complex and vast this site is in order to retain all this material. May it continue for many years to come. Who knows, in the future my great, great, great grandchild may be saying to someone in the family, you will never believe what our ancestor posted here.
3 Answers
I thought it was a post about sneezing
The part about being a grouch, "many a true word said in jest", hehe.
This may be a bit off-topic, but his choice of "grouch" was unfortunate. A stickler for, or obsessive about would have been more accurate. "punctilious" and "meticulous" are two more words that might be used but, as Lazarus surely knows the original meaning (from the Latin) of the latter was "fearful of making mistakes". The modern meaning has coalesced with "punctilious" to be, simply, paying great attention to detail.
I have known others (not many but some) who have displayed similar encyclopedic knowledge of a field. However, for me, even more surprising is his willingness to explain (over and over again) certain points of grammar/usage. (Returning to the topic) an examination of the past several years of posts would show that he has often responded scores of times to certain recurring questions and not by copy-and-paste of a previous explanation but with a response tailored to the most recent incarnation of the "same old question".
As Eddy points out, we have a substantial repository of asked-and-answered questions. Probably, fully 50% of the "new" questions asked each day have already been posed (and well answered). So, why do they keep recurring? I suspect that, first and foremost, few users make a search of topics before asking a question. Secondly, blame attaches to the many (majority, perhaps) of questions which have titles that in no way suggest what the question is about (e.g. "Help" or "What's this mean?" or "Translation problem." One could, I suppose ask that the administrators review and supply key-words for each question (Note: I am not volunteering for such a task)
An alternative would be to enforce the kind of regimen that is used (I think) by WR. i.e. Posts must have meaningful/relevant titles, and questions about word/expression usage must have, at least, a full sentence of context. This approach does, indeed, avoid many of the problems of ill-formed questions but it is, somewhat, at odds with the accepting, "We're all one big happy family" image that SD tries to project.
Given the current state/sophistication of search engines we have an insoluble problem. We could require meaningful titles and questions (which would require human intervention/editing) or we can settle for having good/relevant answers which require that someone reading a new question remember and reference the prior post.
Heidita appears to have recently spearheaded an effort to collect articles with a common theme and to have encouraged members to make reference to these threads. That still requires a lot of human intervention.
Ideally, One would like for the situation in which, when someone asks a question that has been asked and answered a hundred times (of which there are many threads), there would be an automatic pop-up, directing the person to the previous threads.
Eddy, you have called attention to something that I marvel at almost every time I read a post. The absolute mind-boggling world we live in and the fact that we are able to sit down in our own home and interact with people from everywhere. It is so breathtaking.
