The not reading the sequences thing probably comes from there being several ways to use a list like this. People who are already familiar with most of the stuff can use it as a handy index to find that one thing they were looking for or the subject they wanted to refresh their skill on. People just browsing randomly can pick something that sounds interesting and go off reading that. People who don’t know the stuff and figure they need to learn it look at the length of the list, do some quick estimate of the amount of text involved and go “goddamn fuck it”.
It’s a lot of stuff, it’s immediately obvious it’s a lot of stuff, and there are few clues to the relative importance of the bits. The layout is also topic-based, which is nice for the first two groups, but doesn’t really help in figuring out what would be a good order in which to read the stuff when coming from zero familiarity.
I thought about something like an university curriculum, where you would have units like Background Reading 1, with a well-picked set of definition articles for common concepts and introductionary sequence posts, followed by Background Reading 2 and so on. These would be composed with the assumption that many people will read through Background Reading 1 and stop there, and the same will happen further in the chain, so better try to get at least some broad overview in early on.
The problem with this of course is that it would be a lot of extra work (someone’d have to decide on unit contents in addition to putting the index together), wouldn’t even work with things that can’t easily be chopped up into bits such as online textbooks, and it’s not clear if it would be that much more useful than the current sink-or-swim style.
The not reading the sequences thing probably comes from there being several ways to use a list like this. People who are already familiar with most of the stuff can use it as a handy index to find that one thing they were looking for or the subject they wanted to refresh their skill on. People just browsing randomly can pick something that sounds interesting and go off reading that. People who don’t know the stuff and figure they need to learn it look at the length of the list, do some quick estimate of the amount of text involved and go “goddamn fuck it”.
It’s a lot of stuff, it’s immediately obvious it’s a lot of stuff, and there are few clues to the relative importance of the bits. The layout is also topic-based, which is nice for the first two groups, but doesn’t really help in figuring out what would be a good order in which to read the stuff when coming from zero familiarity.
I thought about something like an university curriculum, where you would have units like Background Reading 1, with a well-picked set of definition articles for common concepts and introductionary sequence posts, followed by Background Reading 2 and so on. These would be composed with the assumption that many people will read through Background Reading 1 and stop there, and the same will happen further in the chain, so better try to get at least some broad overview in early on.
The problem with this of course is that it would be a lot of extra work (someone’d have to decide on unit contents in addition to putting the index together), wouldn’t even work with things that can’t easily be chopped up into bits such as online textbooks, and it’s not clear if it would be that much more useful than the current sink-or-swim style.