Perhaps all the "I'm new" posts is more indicative of what beginners want to get out of the site - It seems as though they are looking for more than just answers, but some type of social interaction with fellow newbies as well.

I think the more advanced you get, the more you just participate in answering questions or asking them.. and on the highest levels you typically ask hard questions that you already have done some research on. These guys aren't there yet.. they want to find common ground with each other. The tough part is dealing with the arrogant know-it-all types though who ask for help and give advice to more experienced folks in the same breath.[/quote]
I agree.

I don't know offhand what a good answer to this is.. but perhaps we need to do something to help the beginners share stuff with each other easier. Hell, maybe we need that everywhere really.[/quote]
Obviously, I'm biased. But I like my idea..

I think what bothers me the most though is the beginner that comes here and gets quickly discouraged because they feel mistreated - even if their behavior is a violation of our faq. It seems as though these guys need more kid gloves in terms of how we welcome them into our community. These are the same folks that grow up and if they remain active go on to help other beginners like they once were. I know as a high school teacher that it isn't necessarily that these are dumb kids - but that they just don't know how to conduct themselves yet or even necessarily have the skills they need to do proper research. Part of teaching beginners involves making them aware of how to solve their own problems in a thoughtful and constructive way.
[/quote]
Well of course we all (and yes I'm including in this) get a bit frustrated or numb to the " I want to program my great MMORPG HALO 3-D game in HTML in variables! ....So what's a pointer?" However, that just means we need a break and should go to the Lounge or some other forum for awhile before venturing back to the Beginners section.

I think the other challenge is figuring out who is qualified to write articles. I think it's extraordinarily easy on this site in particular to put such an emphasis on experience and professionalism that people find it easier to avoid the hassle of opening themselves up to criticism when deciding to contribute articles.

We used to accept articles from anyone.. but now people use blogs to do the same thing with zero hassle.[/quote]
I'm probably getting a little off topic here, but that 'zero hassle' is exactly what makes the blogs useless to me. Information is only useful to me if I can trust the source.

Under the old system, articles were (at least in theory) peer-reviewed. At the very least, Drew had run a spell-check on them - this granted articles a certain level of trust. Blogs, on the other hand, only have whatever trust has been established by the particular author of that blog. And there are only handful of users on GameDev who's blogs have gained my trust, largely because gaining that level of trust takes a significant amount of time and content: Drew, ApochPIQ, Ysaneya, Danny Green... maybe a couple more.

This is purely a culture issue here, but just like wiki's we have to encourage people to just get something started.. and then the rest of us help to fix it and make it better and correct the errors.[/quote]
I keep hearing the phrase 'user generated content' thrown around in connection to GDNet's current direction, but the fact is that user generated content only works in a moderated environment - and we don't have that, at least not in the right sense. Our software doesn't support arbitrary edits, change notifications, versioning of content - I can't just go in and fix factual errors in content posted by another user (well, as a moderator I could, but that's not the point). I am not quite clear why we think that wiki-style content generation will work without the infrastructure of a wiki?

Also, most parts of the site have the ability to save revisions - articles can easily be turned into a wiki-style system. It's literally one click of a setting...

And if we have six people who can generate quality articles right now that entirely explains our problem - there is no reason that we should assume that only the most seasoned veterans have any worth in terms of what they bring to the table.[/quote]
We likely have hundreds of members who could generate worthwhile articles. On the flip side, we have a small handful of users who generate interesting blog posts (from my perspective). Part of my issue with the current direction is that I'm not sure there is much intersection between 'worthwhile articles' and 'interesting blog posts'.

Now, that's probably as much an education issue as anything. But there is a a certain (partially stylistic) gulf between articles and blog posts: blog posts assume you are familiar with the context of the rest of the blog, they tend to be written in an informal style, and most importantly, they rarely claim to be 100% correct.

I guess my question is how we go about encouraging people with interesting blog posts to expand them into full-length, stand-alone, peer-reviewed articles?