Hello Codeforces.
I want to propose a large scale cooperation for writing Editorials for all of Andrew Stankevich Contests. They are amazing contests and it's a real bummer that they don't have editorials. But so what? If all of us contribute to writing editorials for problems that we are able to solve, then it is easily possible to prepare full editorials for all of the contests.
It might have been tough in any other circumstances, but I think with a strong community like Codeforces, this project is easily feasible. So here is what I am proposing:
- A blog post will be opened for each of the ASC contest, with title "Andrew Stankevich Contest XYZ Editorial".
- In that blog post I will write down the Editorials for the easy problems, so that "Big Guys" don't need to waste their valuable times with trivial problems.
- The problems I fail to solve ( and there will be plenty of those ) will be marked "Missing".
- Eventually, a kind soul will post a comment with an editorial for missing problem. I will simply link that comment with the corresponding problem.
- Eventually people might comment related problems, more resource or better explanations. I will link them too.
Once full editorial for contest i is complete, we will move to i+1. It might take some time to cover all of them, but slowly and eventually we will be able to build something that will come useful to so many programmers :)
Now, how can we make this project better? Do you have any suggestions? I am already working on ASC1. I will be publishing it withing few hours.
Also, is there any way to make a blog post "Community Wiki" or something similar. So that even if I am the one who is posting the blog posts, other people ( perhaps above a certain rating ) are able to edit the posts.
UPDATE
marat.snowbear suggested to use Codeforces groups. Seems like Codeforces Groups is going to suit this project better. A public group has been created ASC Editorial Writers. Those who are interested, they can join the group. All the editorials will be published inside the group so that all the editorials can be found in one place. The blog posts can be edited by Managers, regardless of who created it. Non-managers can contribute by commenting. So it's a fusion of Wiki + Comment.
Good idea, I'll probably join sooner or later.
Why? Let's work in parallel. It's slightly more disorganised, but when crowdsourced to begin with, who cares anyway...
Okey. Doing things parallel will be needing more organization then.
How about we do it this way:
The above would be tedious for a single person to handle. So lets use this blog post to distribute the work. Who ever is interested in writing a Editorial for particular contest, comment on this blog post. And I will update the blog post with:
X. Andrew Stankevich Contest X Editorial ( XYZ is working on it )
When he is done with the blog post, he comments the link and I connect it.
This way, two person won't start writing same editorial. The work load gets distributed somewhat.
Or we could do something else. Open for suggestions.
I like the idea of crowdsourcing these editorials. Though I'd like to avoid publishing half-empty editorials and then using comments to collaborate because after you embed the solution into the post previous comments are not needed anymore. I'd propose to do it a bit differently, we can create a group here on CF ("ASC editorial writers") and put editorials under development there, comment there and only publish them outside once they are ready. I think there is a feature on CF that multiple people can edit same post (not simultaneously though) and I'm wondering if this feature is enabled for group admins. If that is so then we can create blog post there and edit it altogether which will make things much simplier.
This sounds interesting. We could do that. And if we find that CF groups doesn't allow that feature, we could move outside?
But if we create groups, are we making the potential size of "Crowd" smaller in any way?
Btw, when I said embed the comment, I meant simply embedding the link. That way the comment is still useful since they will click the link and read the comment. This way, the person who contributed the analysis gets proper credit.
mayble a google doc or a github repo with a file for each editorial?
The problem with google doc is that somebody will need then to convert the document into CF blog post which takes some time to preserve formatting in case if your editorial is not a plain text. And whoever will write the editorial in google doc will also have to handle the formatting so basically you're doing the same job twice. More or less similar concerns are valid for github, I think it will work fine only if you have simple ready to use visualiser so you can have CF markup in repo rather than some other document format.
We've just tested groups functionality, I think it works fine, group managers are allowed to edit blog posts created by other users so if somebody creates a template for contest editorial the rest of the group's managers can contribute to it without any obstacles. And in this case you write directly on CF so you know for sure immediately how it will look like when it will published, I think that's useful.
You may use markdown both on cf and github, I think.
Bit they have differences anyway
I don't understand the need for using CF blog posts for editorials. Surely it looks nice if everything is in the same place, but the most important thing we must take care of here is to make co-operation as good as possible. And also CF allows adding resources as URL, so people can still access it from contest page.
Anw, I'm not big fan of GG docs or github, they have different issues (e.g. github is not easy to use for some people). What I'm trying to say is that we should not limit our choices to CF blogs and try to work around it.
Well, true, we're not absolutely limited to CF blogs, but what's the problem with them? We've already almost finished the first editorial, and CF blog system doesn't seem to be a problem.
I see. Previously I didn't know/fully understand features about multiple authors of blog posts & revision history. Now when I just checked it out, it seems cool & is definitely a good choice.
Since it's crowdsourcing then doing this in any fixed order seems very uncomfortable for me
I don't know how much it is available, but on last training on UW, tomasz.kociumaka showed us video of andrewzta describing solutions in English to all problems of ASC 47
I've been looking for these videos around with no luck at all. It would be great if we can get them.
FYI: here you can find editorial of some ASC in Chinese: http://blog.watashi.ws/tag/andrewzta/
If you already agreed to doing it in an organized way — doesn't it make more point to do this in a descending order (47, 46, ...) than in ascending (1, 2, ...)? I didn't see that old ASCs but I think that a typical format of a problem changed throughout many years and that problems from 4* or 3* ASCs are more up-to-date. Moreover, more people train on ASCs in a descending order, so more people will be interested in newer editorials.
Maybe he can do 1, 2, 3... and you / someone else can do 47, 46, 45... This way everyone is happy.
Actually, we didn't agree to any order. In the group, any manager can open a blog post and start an editorial. I am doing them in ascending order cause I thought earlier contests would be easier. I wanted to learn from lower numbered contest and then attempt the higher ones.
If somebody starts from the back it would be interesting too. Then we could meet-in-the-middle :D
What ever happened to this initiative?
The group is open for everybody to help with editorials, unfortunately at the moment nobody has time to work on it.
why it's inactive :(