A student popped up a while ago on the Mahout mailing with a very nice little magic program that would sift through email archives to find good question/answer pairs in email threads.
The results were quite impressively good. The program didn't find a lot of pairs, but the pairs it did find were uniformly pretty excellent. Maybe a secondary search index based on the output of such a program would be useful. On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 3:20 AM, Ross Gardler <rgard...@apache.org> wrote: > Sent from my mobile device (so please excuse typos) > > On 13 May 2011, at 02:31, David Blevins <david.blev...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > For me tagging and voting and (i forgot) the marking the question > answered (thanks, Benson) are the parts I would love. > > > > I write some really good responses sometimes and even *I* have a hard > time finding some of my old responses in the list archive haystack. > > Right. I always ask users to provide a patch if they find an answer in the > mailing list useful. Of course it rarely happens (even with devs). > > Keeping things simple, could we provide a feature in the CMS that simply > copies a mail from our archives (with backlinks) into the CMS system for the > appropriate project? > > A link to this could also be provided in the footer of each mail (only > works for committers). > > In the CMS we could have some magic system to build an index. > > I appreciate this has now moved away from stack overflow (I changed the > subject) but for any Perl hackers looking for something useful to do on a > weekend I would certainly use such a feature. > > This could grow to fancy tagging, tracking and more. But I believe thus is > a reasonably simple thin to do that would provide immediate benefits. > > Ross > > > > > And to avoid the "tag names can be spam" issue having so that only > committers can introduce new tags would be fine for me. It could be a file > in svn or something else equally lame but functional. > > > > > > -David > > > > On May 12, 2011, at 6:04 PM, Ted Dunning wrote: > > > >> There is another factor that comes into play. QA sites like SO also > blend > >> in wiki and trust mechanisms. Thus, highly rated users can and do > rewrite > >> questions to be more answerable/understandable. They can also rewrite > >> answers if necessary. > >> > >> Without automated karma, the moderation function has to be granted > manually > >> which is a process that doesn't scale as easily and is subject to attack > by > >> cabals. That way lies wikipedia's dictatorship of the editor > proletariat > >> and associated drop in user participation. That is fine for a largely > >> static knowledge base, but SO addresses much more dynamic topics in a > way > >> that engages the readership much more strongly. Moreover, the feedback > >> cycle essentially guarantees that the moderators reflect the interests > of > >> the voting public. > >> > >> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 5:47 PM, David Blevins <david.blev...@gmail.com > >wrote: > >> > >>> Another thought. Sometimes I wonder how hard it would be to just allow > >>> tagging and voting on top of a plain mailing list emails. A simple DB > with > >>> the messageId as the key for tags and vote count then a slightly > fancier > >>> archive view than we have now. And hey, markdown happens to look nice > as > >>> plain email. I've actually been indenting code snippets for years. > >>> > >>> I admit I like getting SO points and badges but they do not factor in > at > >>> all when looking for the right answer. > >>> > > >
