Agree to not go too aggressive in general, it could also strike down users
who like Jena as a tool (remember we have command lines and servers!) or
have been recommended Jena, but who have not before used Java as
programming language before. Here, tutorials and examples is what we should
point to.
Then there are the obvious school examples, which seem to ask us the actual
assignment rather than Jena questions. It is fair for us to dodge those,
but perhaps in a less hostile way. Many students and researchers I have
interviewed in the Big Data community say they struggle to post their
questions on mailing lists for the tools they use, as they get hammered
down for basically not being geeky enough. Consequently they don't come
back when their skill sets have improved and they could potentially have
contributed back.
Also remember that students have perhaps never before used a public mailing
list and already struggle to separate what is RDF, what is OWL, what is
Java, what is Jena, what is just a bug in their own code.
I think we are friendly (perhaps sometimes too helpful!), but I wouldn't go
to a "go away and talk to your teacher" route, but rather in general
respond with what is expected of a good question and what the poster should
try first. Point to gist.github.com or similar as a way to paste code
rather than getting it in the abstract ("I tried setting the literal")
helps a lot.
Also I think we can reply shorter (but friendly) as a bounce, rather than a
complete reply to help them with the more obvious assignment side. We can
point to tutorials for coding as well; Software Carpentry has many great
starting points.
On 23 Oct 2016 7:43 pm, "Paul Houle" <[email protected]> wrote:
> I find this thread disturbing. Many people in the RDF community have
> worked a long time and it's just recently that the uptake has broadened
> (people are looking at JSON-LD and starting to understand what it means,
> not what any particular authority says that it means, but what it
> actually means.)
>
> I do believe that problems should be made reproducable and as a group we
> could industrialize that. For instance, a test project that can be
> forked in github would be a great place to put in a query, put in a
> graph, and then put in some rules at which point they could ask good
> questions.
>
> I carefully read the answers to the bad questions because I am intensely
> curious about strange details in Jena that trip people up.
>
> --
> Paul Houle
> [email protected]
>
> On Sun, Oct 23, 2016, at 06:07 AM, Colin Maudry wrote:
> > Dear Jena developers,
> >
> > Upon Andy Seaborne’s suggestion, I would like to share with you a
> > concern we have with certain posts shared on [email protected].
> > In the last couple months, we have seen certain users repeatedly sending
> > questions that are either:
> >
> > * hardly related to Jena and Fuseki
> > * very basic questions about RDF or SPARQL
> > * betraying the lack of common knowledge in Java programming and
> > coding good practice in general
> >
> > What’s worse, these users, in spite of repeated remarks, keep on being
> > very vague in their questions, requiring the most patient subscribers to
> > ask many questions just to obtain a decent understanding of the problem.
> > A problem that is, again, often not much related to Jena or Fuseki.
> >
> > As a subscriber, I’m tired of their consistent failure to propose clear
> > and concise questions and I wish the patient people who answer them
> > spend their mailing time on more interesting threads. I also fear it
> > makes certain subscribers silently go away because of this “noise”.
> >
> > I first thought of publicly complaining to these users, but I thought
> > that the managers of the Jena lists should discuss it and take the
> > appropriate measures.
> >
> > My suggestion is to:
> >
> > * inform the subscribers of an upcoming enforcement of the publishing
> > rules (relevance, clearness, completeness, etc.)
> > * stop answering the vague/off-topic/badly presented questions
> > * if they insist, remind them the topic of the list and good practices
> > in problem reporting, and warn them of a possible ban.
> >
> > Thanks for your attention,
> >
> > Colin Maudry
> > https://twitter.com/CMaudry
> >
> >
>
