Salvete!
I agree with IreneY. I believe that
Textkit-users (especially new ones) would benefit from a place where important resources are listed.
User pster suggests instead to have a resource section in the forum where people can start threads about specific resources. I do not believe that that is the way to go because experience tells me that once a thread is no longer displayed on the first page of a forum, it is submerged, below the radar, off to Nirwana, or whatever you like. The purpose of a collection of
especially useful resources, however, is to provide an easily accessible and visible overview.
The idea of a sticky thread is the way to go, in my opinion. Nice idea, IreneY! As for pster's comment that the list may not be comprehensive enough, I believe that no one
really expects such a thing. Anyway, such a list is not supposed to list
all resources (at least not the way I imagine it), but rather list a few of the best ones, some sort of
Best of or
Greatest Hits. Amassing links is what other web-sites are better in. This sticky thread should be about turning
data into
information. Categorizing shouldn't be that much of a problem either, as I am not talking about a list which is
gargantuan, about 10 entries per category as a maximum. And categorizing wouldn't strictly be necessary unless the inclusion of the resource in question is finally decided on.
A "Resources" thread would be useful for a different purpose as well. To collect pointers to especially useful postings.
If we think that this is the right thing to do, we need to do the following:
- Discuss and make a decision concerning the voting mechanism. Otherwise the discussion in the "Suggestions"-thread might go on till kingdom come.
- Create a categorization scheme.
- Agree on the number of entries per category.
IreneY wrote:We can all post suggestions in the RS one and then it'll be the Admin's and Mod's job to sort through them and post them in the closed R thread.
I definitely do not subscribe to that suggestion. Both the Administrator(s) and the Moderators probably already have enough to do. For, in order to do "sort through them" they would have to visit the web-site and look at it closely enough to form an educated opinion. That is too much to expect.
As for Task 2: A possible Categorization scheme might look like this (for XYZ insert respective Language, e.g. "Latin"):
- Recommended Books
- Dictionaries: excluding online query-versions like the online version of Whitaker's Words
- Grammars: books containing merely the grammar of XYZ but not intended by themselves for learning XYZ
- Text books: books for learning XYZ
- Commentaries: readers with commentaries concerning grammar (and ideally also content)
- Antiquities: books providing information about the cultural background (both material and immaterial) of the respective cultural, often necessary for proper immersion in the language.
- Web-Resources
- Meta sites: web sites merely containing links to other sites
- Text repositories: e.g Archive.org or Perseus
- Online-Dictionaries: the online version of dictionaries like Whitaker's Words which can be queried via some sort of form.
- Learning XYZ: e.g. didactical web-sites, tools for practising morphology, word lists
- Texkit-postings
I included the category
Recommended Books/Commentaries because there exist many versions of some books, but only one or two of which are really good and containing commentaries. Such a category would make it easier to find, for example, a good version of Cornelius Nepos'
Vitae.
This is only a rough draft, of course (and to a certain degree based on user cb's wonderful posting about
"how to learn to read fluently Attic Greek").
Further sub-categories might make sense. "Recommended Books/Dictionaries" might, for example, be further subdivided into "XYZ->English", "English->XYZ", "Thesauri" (dictionaries of synonyms), "Other" (including monolingual dictionaries in XYZ, phrase books). However, how much sub-categorization is
good? Other major categories may be necessary, too (e.g.
Contemporary Latin).
As for Task 3: one might set the items/category to 10. Although in some categories less (or more) might be sensible. This number should be fluid. A good resource should not be left out just because the list is already full. On the other hand, however, it has to prevented that the list size gets out of hand.
Valete,
Carolus Raeticus