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.
It seems to me that this is the entire question: there aren't really the
kinds of problems Colin Maudry raised _except_ with these examples. And the
messages that worry me are not the initial questions that amount to "please
do my assignment" but the fact that helpful voices on the list give in
response to such questions good advice and next steps which are repeatedly
ignored.
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.
I'm not sure if this particular remark is in response to my suggestion,
but just in case, I will clarify: I don't want to tell the students to go
away, I want to tell them to ask their teacher(s) to contact Jena directly
(instead of inadvertently and indirectly by giving assignments that show up
immediately as questions on the user list), hopefully to help create a more
appropriate kind of engagement for their students with the Jena community.
---
A. Soroka
The University of Virginia Library
On Oct 23, 2016, at 5:24 PM, Stian Soiland-Reyes <[email protected]>
wrote:
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
