ko_osaga's blog

About the word "Editorial"
By ko_osaga, history, 8 years ago, In English

I'm not a native English speaker, so I mostly learn English by books or internet. When I look up Collins English Dictionary about the meaning of "Editorial" :

"An editorial is an article in a newspaper which gives the opinion of the editor or owner on a topic or item of news."

That's something we call as "사설" in Korean. In Korea, people write editorial about our recent president impeachment, thoughts on foreign policies, or the Chinese food restaurant nearby their office. If someone uses that phrase to describe solutions, it will be really awkward.

In Codeforces, when we say "Editorial" it mostly means "Solution" — that is, mathematical facts. So, according to dictionary, this post is more likely to be called as "Editorial" than the usual one we know.

Then, why does CP community uses the word "Editorial" for referring solution? Does it have some other meaning related to "solution"? If not, is there some history for using that phrase?

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8 years ago, # |
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About the history — the word "editorial" was used in TC in 2002. https://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=match_editorials&d2=archive

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    The old ones (SRM 78 ~ 102) are real 'editorials'. :)

    When I was writing my first editorial it still include ' Match summary', so it is more like an 'editorial'.

    Nowadays they are only about solutions.

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8 years ago, # |
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An 'editorial' can be taken to mean somebody's reflection on an event — so indeed, it can be an opinion about the current news as you suggest. However, blogs giving solutions for contests are also an editorial because they are an evaluation of a contest.

In Codeforces, when we say "Editorial" it mostly means "Solution"

My opinion (not necessarily factual, of course) is that editorial does not mean solution in this context — instead, refers the whole blog post following a contest, rather than the actual solutions inside the blog.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Thanks for sharing your opinion!

    I think most people use word "editorial" as just a solution, not a whole blog post. Two direct example of these are IOI 2015 editorials / Atcoder editorials.

    Actually that IOI 2015 part is quite interesting. They are the most prestigious CP contest in the world, but somehow they adopted the word "Editorial" from Codeforces.

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8 years ago, # |
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It is also funny that when you open a problem, in the left right panel there is a button saying "Tutorial" which forwards you to the "Editorial".

Edit: Thanks, babin :)

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8 years ago, # |
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Tradition is when you do something for so long that you forget why :)

The use of the word "editorial" in this context is an example of a tradition started by TopCoder some 15 years ago. Even back then it wasn't (IMHO) the correct word, but it somehow stuck.

Feel free to rebel against the tradition. When you publish solutions, call them solutions.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Cool. I decided to be a rebel — even I have no contests to set :D

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      even you if don't have contests to set you can still rebel about that, for example when editorial of CF round is late you can post comment: "When will the solutions be published?"

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        8 years ago, # ^ |
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        For some reason I associate the word "solution" with the source code that gets AC on that problem :)

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8 years ago, # |
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Also, I'm wondering why USACO people use "Analysis" as the meaning of solution. Example When I first saw "Analysis", I imagined that the page had miscellaneous data such as score distribution.

Of course a lot of native English speakers watch USACO webpages, so it might be a correct usage.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    In Bulgaria, analysis is also used this way but it analyses the problem, possible approaches and solutions so I don't see why this term is not good enough.

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8 years ago, # |
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In Korea, people write editorial about our recent president impeachment

Off-topic
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8 years ago, # |
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Chinese food restaurant....

Soy sauce... Chosun... yeah...

Only Koreans will get it :)

Edit; So what happened was there was this chinese restaurant that apparentlt decided to give less soy sauce trays(?) (I don't recall perfectly) and some person decided to write an editorial about it and published it on one of the most well known newspapers in south korea. Oops.

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