Codeforces is arguably one of the best judges online. It has a really great problemset. But one of it's big problem is the quality of editorials. Topcoder and Codechef, the two main competitors of codeforces have much better editorials overall. I feel like taking some steps can drastically improve the quality of editorials. These are only suggestions I am sorry if I have offended anyone through this post.
1) Improving the language of the editorial — Being from a country whose 1st language is not english, I know it's not easy to be good in english so I think the editorialists who are not good in english should take help from people who are in writing editorials. I am not talking about focussing on punctuation, etc. just checking the if it's easy to understand what you are trying to say.
2) Names of standard problems — Many times I have read the line "this is a standard problem". Just mention the name of the problem so that we can google it.
3) Implementations of the problem — It's hard to just read the editorial and then implement the solution correctly. Sometimes an implementation can help quite a lot in learning. If you give an implementation, please make it as clean as possible (ex — good bye 2014 editorials). If you don't want to write an implementation then just give some kind of pseudocode in the editorial and mention the edge cases so that we can also implement it. Or give the link to a (clean)implementation of a participant who has the same idea as given in the editorial.
4) It's easy to prove — Many editorials skip the proof by saying this statement. It's actually not easy to prove many times. Please add proof to show that your solution works.
I believe that these tips can make the editorial a lot better. Again, I am sorry If I have offended anyone.
I agree, sometimes I can't figure out why the solution works, because author wrote "It's easy to prove". Though I really appreciate fast editorials.
I absolutely agree with both of you!
I also agree with you !
I agree with your points, and want to share examples of good and bad (in my opinion) editorials:
Round 223 editorial by Sereja — very poor one. Personally, I find it very hard to follow Sereja's thoughts (but problems are great, really).
Good Bye 2014 editorial by .o. — an exceptional example! Very good formatting, many pictures, links to implementations, explanation of testcases for first two problems. This is one of the best editorials I've seen.
I really think doing some of these things, especially number 1, could help make this place much higher preferred than it already is (it's already a wonderful place/community). Thanks for posting!
You're welcome! :)
Somebody must check the editorial before it is being published, I think..
Yeah that's my first point.
Here is my idea about editorials. It might not be too realistic at this point, but I just wanted share my idea.
So I always wonder if it's a good idea to let people edit tutorials. If the explanation has very bad English, someone with good English can fix it. If the explanation is unclear, someone can make it clear. If someone came up with better solution, he can add it to share with everyone. I think it's kinda close to wiki. I came up with this idea since I often find someone's comments more helpful than actual editorials.
I think it's hard for one person to write the perfect explanation for several problems. But it might be easy to find someone on CF community who can explain solution really well for each problem :)
That would be really great in my opinion. To avoid spam and/or abuse, restrictions could be applied based on rating/contribution points.
I like short editorials, which give you just an outline of what needs to be done. This way, you have not entirely failed on the problem, because there are still many things you can do on your own. Trouble with long editorials: Long descriptions get boring and I avoid them. I just skim through it, looking for the basic idea. A good editorial should, however, contain a list of different ways a problem can be solved instead of any one, among others. In short, i prefer a less worded editorial that has a complete description of the solution, but in less words.