Introspection is always a good thing, and with that in mind, the suggested topic today – what could we do better at WUWT? Some background first.
I get lots of requests to change things, do things differently, or if you listen to some people, just shut down altogether; because they simply can’t tolerate an opinion contrary to their own views that gets as much attention as WUWT does.
One of the great things (or not so great depending on your viewpoint) about running a successful enterprise like this is that it now has other blogs dedicated solely to taunting that success, much like Obama has invoked taunting more than half of the citizens of the United States who have a different view from him on climate change. I see such blog spawn ( I need to update that page as there are more now) as a measure of success; flak, target, and all that.
A few caveats about things I can’t change right now that I often get asked about:
1. I can’t offer comment editing post facto, to do that I either need to spend $500/month to use the WordPress Enterprise feature (which I tried on invitation and decided it was not worth the price tag) or run on a self-hosted server. Since I don’t have time to chase down script kiddies and bot attacks like Lucia does, staying on WordPress.com is the only real option.
2. I can’t do research for people. Every day I get emails asking me to do research for questions, or go to some blog/newspaper/magazine and offer commentary to counter somebody in comments. I simply don’t have the time, I’m sorry.
3. I can’t change what ads popup on WUWT. They are entirely controlled by wordpress.com. That said, they are also contextually based on your browsing behavior. If you are getting ads that you think you should not be, chances are you’ve been pigeonholed for some reason. Clearing your browser cache/cookies always helps. That said, there was a rogue advertiser this past week that attempted to do re-directs. Alert readers alerted me, and I alerted the wordpress management who booted the advertiser.
4. Climategate 3 file dump: lots of people have looked at it, searched it, and scoured the output – there was nothing new there of any value.
Now that I’m asking you to air your opinions and ideas about what we could do better at WUWT, I’m going to air mine about those of you who comment here.
What I’d like to see different about readers and commenters on WUWT:
1. Saying “off topic” and then posting an off topic comment doesn’t actually make it OK. We have Tips and Notes (see menu below the header) for that.
2. I’d like to see less cryptic comments (like from Mosher) and more in-depth comments.
3. I’d like less name calling. The temptation is great, and I myself sometimes fall victim to that temptation. I’ll do better to lead by example in any comments I make.
4. I’d like to see less trolling and more constructive commentary. One way to acheive that is to pay attention
5. I’d like to see more click-throughs on science articles. I note that articles that discuss papers sometimes don’t get as many click-throughs as articles that discuss the latest climate inanity. While such things can be entertaining, bear in mind it is important to keep up with the science too.
So, tell me, what could we do better, do different, add, or remove from WUWT?
Please be thoughtful and respectful in such comments.
Thanks for your consideration – Anthony
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I’d like to say a word in praise of Mosher’s cryptic, drive-by, snarky, annoying comments. They do generate a lot of blog comments. Poking the hive gets the bees buzzing even if it does no real good.
Got only a second now, but the very first thing that comes into mind: don’t allow fallacies. Don’t go down to the level of the opposition. Keep on the high grounds.
I have two things, one very minor and one not so minor to me.
1) First the very minor issue. Please, someone, figure out why I can not make a comment with my wordpress account like I have done for at least two years. Now I have to use my Twitter account. (I have never tried anything else but the buttons at the bottom)
2) My more important change would be for there to be less censoring and name-calling of those who just don’t buy the present “greenhouse” theory at all. I have not bought the CO2 warms us since the 80s and don’t see any reasonable reason to accept it other than to make arguments more acceptable to the majority. —- But the majority is wrong. See the predictions of those who think the sun is not the main driver of climate on the earth.
Mainly, I think the site needs no real change. Hell, look at how popular it is now. Look at the Bloggies it has won.
In your articles, don’t trash talk anyone. Ever. Don’t just be professional. Set the standard for professionalism. Just present what the other side said and then present the facts. e.g. ‘He/they said…’ then, ‘Here are the facts & here are the references and resources.’
Offer opinion pieces separately and identified as such.
Regarding “can’t change No. 3”, advertisments, since I cleared my cookies and browser and started using DuckDuckGo, instead of Yahoo, via Firefox, I haven’t had any ads following my browsing behaviour. I seem to be getting ones from Sky for some reason, though, and I have no contact with them of any kind. Strange.
Otherwise, just keep up the good work.
Thank you.
It’s hard to find things here. I hope you can activate the Relevanssi plugin.
There is a lot of old unorganized information, but I don’t know of a way in WordPress to weave it together other than by creating pages which summarize and link to stuff.
[wordpress.com does not allow third-party plugins. if they did we’d have a comment editor. the wuwt toolbar (see download link on the right sidebar) has a better search engine – mod]
Would it be possible to construct a textbook “Guide to What We Know of Earth Climate Systems,” with subsections discussing things like CO2 forcing, solar forcing, anthropogenic forcing, historic climate records, evidence from geologic investigations and ice cores and tree rings, and so on? If such a textbook book already exists, would somebody point me in the right direction?
Does not offering post facto editing without a pro account include not being able to preview comments before the “Post Comment” button is pushed? I jump back and forth between many different blogs and forget which ones require greather than/less than to bracket HTML, and which one requre braces to bracket HTML, so a simple preview would at least let me see the folly of my ways.
As far as format, content, and presentation, don’t change a thing. Your last tweak to leave more headlines on the home page was good, but since I use an RSS reader to see new posts it never affected me one way or the other.
What could you do better? I’m gonna bang on about a bete-noir I have when viewing the blog on a tablet (I have a Nexus 7 as well as a laptop).
When the comment string is 100s of comments long, on my laptop I merely press the ‘end’ key to get to the bottom and continue reading (up) or leave a comment; but on my Nexus I have to finger scroll (for evah!) to get to the end.
So, why can’t WordPress come up with a screen that allows the user to navigate to the top/bottom of l-o-n-g comment thread? As I have said before, I know I can use ‘find in page’ but I’d need a unique ‘find word’ to use to get me to bottom or top. It might help, as a work around, if such a word(s) would be identified at the top of the blog so that users can do a ‘find in page’ with confidence.
I second Mark Stoval’s comment #2. I don’t buy the CO2 greenhouse gas theory – at all. I have a science and engineering background.
I would like see a constant effort to encourage exploration and proof, or disproof (is that a word?) of this theory. At inspection, in pure geometry terms, it doesn’t pass muster.
Two simple changes…
1) Change the site’s theme to a Magazine style theme.
2) remove every advertisement. Pure annoyance.
Harry Passfield:
re your request at June 15, 2014 at 8:56 am.
I suggest you use the Ctrl-f function to find specific words or phrases.
The top of a thread can be found by going to Responses to
and
the bottom of a thread can be found by going to Leave a Reply
I hope that helps.
Richard
Is it possible on WordPress to offer ’emoticons’ for inclusion in posts? It may not add much intellectual value, but it would be more entertaining and people could use a /sarc emoticon or others to clearly identify their intent.
I often find myself quoting Lt Savek from one of the Star Trek movies, “Ah, humor, it is a difficult concept.”
It works. So dont change it.
If you want to improve comment quality, best way would be stricter moderation of off-topic, cryptic or namecalling comments.
I’d like to be able to reply directly to a comment and/or read a thread of replies. I think it would focus discussion.
1-Stick to science more so than personality or politics. The science speaks for itself.
2-Encourage more scientists to participate in article discussions.
Dr. Leif Svalgaard does that and most of us learn more from his comments than from the article they were made about.
3-Encourage climate scientists to author their own posts explaining their research and results.
tteclod,
see http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/2011report.html
Here’s another one: thread the comments. Even my site manages that trick.
WUWT is, in itself, a topic of discussion among the Crusaders of Climate Doom. When a WUWT article is criticised somewhere notable, it should be rebutted, imho. I’m not saying such rebuttals never happened, but the Crusaders should feel that they’re on notice just as much as the idiotic mass media who parrot alarmist pseudo-news, which are made fun of regularly here. There could even be a ‘WUWT on the web’ section in the WUWT site. I’d expect this strategy to limit the sheer amount of comments after WUWT articles.
To tell you the truth, I like it just the way it is. Yes, the ill-supported references to things like, “It’s all the fault of public education…”, riles me endlessly. But even that is part of the beauty of this blog. We get to see the badly written comment as well as the thoughtful one, regardless of who’s team you are on. The range of well-supported and not-so-well supported comments is as useful as the post they arrive from to cleanse the real issues. They are the mixed bag of real and fake that, when burned by the fire of so many eyes and ears, destroys the fake from the real and now hardened metal thus solidifying a more defensible and lasting conclusion.
It works 100% but I advise not to make comments about other skeptical sites which may seem to be a bit extreme especially on other skeptical/lukewarmer sites. There is one site in particular which has minions to record the fraudalent activities of NOAA, BOM ect with 90% accuracy using graphs ect and 100% accuracy with old articles of what was said and done (ie “there will be no more ice” quotes just as an example etc. Its easy to get excited especially after a few drinks.I number 1 guilty. Mistakes can be made occasionally with data but they should be seen against the invaluable services provided by such sites (ie SG) LOL
Grant has an important point: it should be possible to reply to comments.
I’d like to thank Dennis Wingo for his excellent article in WUWT a few weeks ago, describing his plan to re-activate the International Sun-Earth Explorer Satellite as part of a joint project with fellow NASA employees. As I understood it, the ultimate goal included using the experience as part of an educational exercise for young STEM students.
Dennis’ project was recognized on the front page of the NY Times this morning.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/science/space/calling-back-a-zombie-ship-from-the-graveyard-of-space.html?_r=0
As host for such articles and such people, WUWT can’t do much better than that.
I thought wordpress DOT com allowed disqus/livefrye code/plugins as it pushed site loads away from their servers and onto the disqus/livefrye servers.
I would like a resource that I could share with folks who fully believe in CAGW, but really no nothing about it. Just the basics. Most of the folks I talk to think Co2 makes up some large % of the atmosphere and it’s increase alone is what is warming the planet. Also they fully believe the whole extreme weather thing. It would have to be easy to understand and accurate without question. One of your guest writers might volunteer to start the page and readers could fine tune it in the comments section. Here’s an example, I told a friend who thinks he knows a bit about global warming that no scientist on either side thinks that CO2 increase by itself can create enough warming to warrant any fear, that the little bit of warming it can generate has to leverage water vapor through positive feed-backs to create the kind of warming to be fearful of. He refused to believe this. So basic, but so important when you talk about models.
What Warren Bonesteel said, I agree