[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Jules Bean]

Jim Burton wrote:
> Very timely! It's sad that haskell-cafe has so much noise now.

I disagree with that characterisation. I don't mean to be pedantic, but 
I don't think haskell-cafe has lots of noise. I think it has lots of 
signal! Quite different.

We don't have a problem (in my perception, at least) with the quality of 
either posts of responses. Not a general one, anyway. The only problem 
is that the volume is increasing; which is a problem if that makes it 
hard for valuable contributors to keep contributing.

 > As well as being nice, can't you sometimes tell people to RTFM?

The problems people have with haskell are often conceptual, and the 
manual doesn't help them, because they don't (yet) understand the 
language well enough to understand the manual.

I very, very rarely see a question here about 'how to use a library 
funciton' or similar which could, in fact, be easily looked up in a 
manual. People do quite often respond to posts with links to the online 
library documentation, which is great.

 > Or, You've asked that before,

That's certainly a fair thing to say, if it's true. I don't see that 
happening very often.

 > One way of protecting the community is to protect this list from drowning
 > in noise and being a bit rough with newbies who don't do any research at
 > all before asking is perfectly acceptable in my view.

I disagree with that on two separate levels:

(a) I don't think being rough with newbies is the right response.
(b) I also don't think it would achieve the goal you state. Being rough 
with one newbie will not, in my experience, particularly prevent the 
next question asked by the next newbie :)

All IMHO, obviously.

Jules