Is it an undulating twill?

I think pm-ing a person to correct a terminology mistake would be appropriate rather than writing a comment on their project.

Perhaps some people just don't think it matters-''a rose by any other name.........''

I certainly don't have any urge to ''get down and dirty'' but we can all learn by having our mistakes politely and discreetly corrected. I am here to learn and would like to think that I am learning the correct names of all these structures that are new to me. Likewise I would hate to think that I am putting the wrong info out there and would appreciate being told if I get it wrong. 

Laverne

i would have thought a pleasant PM would be the way to go rather than public humiliation. I think most of us know who the heavy duty weavers are on here, and the standard of our own weaving and the techniques and technology we use in comparison to their work - its a fine line between pointing out an error in an encouraging manner, and being downright rude and belittling, and with the number of different nationalities on here, its very easy for the written word to be taken the wrong way. There is also the problem that many of the older drafts now have a generic name in some of the newer books, then things are called by different names in the New World and the Old World, and there are some nations that have almost no traditions of weaving at all, or all learning is done in isolation, and by book, or even via blogs and websites, that may be inaccurate. 

I feel that if we come down too heavily on someone presenting their first or second piece on a handmade loom, we can put them off altogether. Many of the new weavers are not interested yet in the technological aspect of weaving, and may come to it naturally provided they are encouraged, not corrected. Theres an old saying that if you cannot find anything nice to say about something/someone, you are better off keeping your mouth shut. Its probably the best policy at the moment, and hope that by joining groups the new and enthusiastic members can learn to extend their skills, and their knowledge of the craft, and by having WALs we can encourage weavers to learn the various weaves using their proper names.

This is a social networking site, not a Guild, and I think I can speak for many members in saying that in the half year or so that I have been a member here, my knowledge has increased by leaps and bounds, and I am encouraged to take a more formal approach to what I am doing. Encouraging members to hunt out decent books, and join weaving groups and Guilds so that they can meet other weavers in person, is probably the best way to go. We should be encouraging people to improve their techniques, not squashing their hopes and feelings of self-worth. If you are isolated and learning to weave, its a major triumph completing a piece and it takes a lot of courage to post it on the projects page when you have no idea how good it really is - lets praise in public, and encourage weavers to learn behind the scenes, and keep this a friendly outgoing community we can all participate in.

I agree with the above.  It sometimes is no easy to translate and know all the correct weavingterms and names.so I would rather  have a pm to correct me than to be told in public but even then if it is in a polite way i would not mind. And here i want to quote one off the saori-weaving "rules": Lets all learn from each other and enjoy weaving!

with all due respect for profesional  weavers, but most of us are just hobby weavers and we weave just for fun but I want to admit that i learned a lot and am thankfull for all the help the profesionals are giving us.

KInd regards

jeannine

I think the concern is not that a person didn't get a term right, but that misinformation is being spread - someone else might look at the project and think that that is what an undulating twill is, and get confused later on discovering that an undulating twill is something completely different.  In that sense, I think it's good to get things corrected.

I agree that a private message is better than a comment, not least because a PM generates an email notification to the recipient and a comment (I think) does not.

 A private message to the poster would certainly be in order.

Hobby weaver or not, it is imperative to speak a "weaving speak"  that is recognizable by most of the posters here. I'm not referring to extremely advanced techniques, but the more straightford projects that appear frequently.

Weavolution has gotten off to a nice start - it would be sad if interest fell off because experienced weavers felt that the information was too inaccurate or that beginning weavers felt misled by incorrect information.

Caroline, very well said. But, I would think the correction needs to be made in the posting and with a PM. If it is not made in the posting someone reading it later would not know a correction was PMed to the writer. Your correction would need to be done in a courteous manner. Maybe in a form of a question.

Just my thoughts

Michael

As a brand new weaver and new to this forum, I would be very disappointed if no one corrected me when I was wrong with my weaving terms or processes.  And, I agree with Tien that it's sometimes important to give a public correction.  If I see something written here, I believe it to be true as I have no reason to believe otherwise.  That said, how the correction is made is very important, especially to the new and fragile weavers.  So far, I haven't seen any posts that would hurt my feelings or make me shy away, so, please, correct (and encourage) away!

mkjn

Partly on topic: I have noticed that the more broadband there is, the less information... I did a quite ambitious search for links to put on our guild site, and could not help noticing the gazillions of 1.original poster posts a photo (quite often out of focus), 2. about 25 comments saying "how FANTASTIC your  X  is!!!"  -  about 2 screenfuls of words, but no information whatsoever.
I am not saying there should never be nice comments, but... so far, I am glad that weavolution mostly *is* about information.

OTOH - and back on topic - what looks like erroneous info might be there for a reason. For example, I was looking in Davison (among other Am book) for an article in the Swe guild paper. On p 31she has something she calls Herringbone mixture. From my Swedish point of view, at least three of her examples would never be called "twill"... So, for short, different cultures/langages yield different "names". So, how about some discussions on why what sounds like "technical names" differ so much in different cultures?

Claudia, something that would really help is to put a useful description in the title of a comment...for instance.  This thread might serve us better by being titled

Terminology improvements

or

Feedback critique discussion

or

Honesty in postings

rather than "Is it an undulating twill"

That would help people who search or look thru the threads to identify the ones that they want to keep up with....

On the subject at hand I believe we should help each other get better publicly but nicely.  We should all know we are dealing with different languages,cultures and income levels and be tolerant.  Weavo offers a unique opportunity to see the weaves AND the words together and we should leverage that.  It is a unique opportunity and I love seeing how everyone is using it to communicate. 

It would take an entire monograph to address the terminology between museum folks, production weavers, hobby weavers, beginners and manufacturers which I just am not up to for the moment.  regards  Deb

I like Kerstin's idea. 

There are many names for some structures and the cultural reasons for them would be facinating.

I believe these forums are a good place to discuss this.  Perhaps the results of those conversations can go into a summarized format and be posted in resources.

Alison

Cofounder

I would like to pick up on what Kirsten Froberg has said: about the adulation problem. This is something that is happening frequently on other social sites, and has spread to many of the Yahoo groups I belong to. Personally I don't have the patience to deal with this trend, and its why I don't visit Ravelry, but many of the younger members do expect this brown-nosing by the bucket-load and create sycophantic fan clubs to perpetuate the custom. I suspect that a few of the recent weaving books that introduce the craft, and web-sites that provide descriptions and how-tos for making simple looms may inadvertently be responsible for some of this ( and I'm just as guilty on this point) as the emphasis is on how easy it is, and technique doesn't get a mention or appear to be important in the early stages.

The dabblers are going to fall by the wayside sooner or later - its all suddenly going to become too hard, or they will move on to another craft, but there are some people who have invested a lot of time and ingenuity into what they are doing in the belief they have mastered the art of making fabric. There have been a few glaring examples here that I have seen where not only has the identification of the pattern been wrong, but the interpretation of how the pattern is woven has been more than novel, and the praise and encouragement is resulting in more of the same being woven in the belief that this is how its done.

I'm not sure how we tackle this younger generation of crafters who believe that what they are doing is good without coming across as jealous old fogies who are scared of losing out to younger fresher ideas, beyond trying to recommend books to further their skills and understanding, and encouraging them to participate in the Wals where we can point to a source of easily obtained information that may or may not influence them. The idea that doing something once, no matter how badly, and that makes you an expert, has been instilled in them since pre-school and they have grown up with the idea that near enough is good enough. Constructive criticism of their work has been avoided to the point that its now seen as an unwarranted attack on them personally, and so is often not really helpful.

Basically there is a choice; continue with this sycophantic behaviour and try and steer them gently in the right direction behind the scenes and raise the standard that way, which risks driving away many of the serious weavers without whom this site has legitimacy, or being  more pro-active and risk driving away many of the dabblers, and therefore reduce membership numbers, but retain a hard core membership who are interested and committed to weaving.

You have my vote to help steer these folks in the right direction. Weavolution has never been about the numbers. I know, I keep talking about how many members we have. Mostly because I am surprised and thrilled that hand weavers have found us.

We are here for hand weavers which may include some dabblers but I cherish the experienced weavers who dare to steer the younger, less experienced weavers in the right direction.

As Michael said earlier, there are many ways to make a comment. It is not required that you always comment and it is not required that your comments always be sweet. Here are the rules we have set for Weavolution:

Please play nice!
Please respect copyright
Don't spam
Avoid flame wars
If someone makes a mistake, please assume they meant well and be gentle with your comments and suggestions.
Weavolution can be viewed by everyone, even non-members. Like anything on the Internet think before you post and don't post anything you wouldn't want to show up on Google where it will live forever. Please use appropriate language.

We want this to be a good, enjoyable place and one that everyone will want to join.

Claudia, Weavolution co-founder       

 I've been involved with fiber experiences online since I joined Fibernet in early 1991. For anyone who wonders, that is Ron Parker's online group, begun as a dialup bulletin board from rural Minnesota. Messages were downloaded in batch format as quickly as possible before the next Midwestern thunderstorm interrupted traffic again. Topics were (and still are) anything fiber related and not specific to any discipline. Because of the difficulties and delays in traffic, if you wished to post, you gave it some thought and tried to make your communication worthwhile.

The quality of those early posts was higher than today's chat/special interest groups where anyone can post within seconds. Me too's, Oooooh and Aaaaaah posts were more rare as they took too much time and trouble to send.

Since then, Fibernet has moved to a Majordomo site and recently to Yahoo groups. Other online information sites have come, gone and split into even smaller groups. In some cases, there are Yahoo groups for owners of branded equipment with fewer than 20 members - and others with 2000+ members where posted information has greater circulation.

One thing that seems to follow formation of any group is that there is a definite tendency for beginners and those who are not yet knowledgeable to constantly plead for the group to slow down or simplify the information exchanged. This then drives the original group either into silence or into moving to another location where advanced topics can be freely discussed - until the beginners catch up again and beg to slow things down.

Weavolution is a broadband group in that there are many forums for expression and information. It harms the reputation of the group when misinformation is too often the case, or corrections are never posted. Claudia's list of etiquette should rule and perhaps there should be somewhere in the introductory material for Weavolution that thoughtful, careful posting is most appreciated. Perhaps there should be a polite statement requesting that idle chatter is not the norm, that both questions and answers be of quality and something that is of interest to at least a small group of people, not just the original poster.

It would be nice if Weavolution became a respected reference site - something like handweaving.net is - for its own style and reasons - and that discussions, q & a and projects would contribute to that quality image. Not that every entry need be encyclopedic or every project museum quality - but at least "edited" by the contributor for relevance to the rest of the members.

One way around the "me toos" would be the ability to send the poster something that privately says to them "I like it" Not a vote to be counted or displayed,  but something that tells a weaver that someone likes and appreciates their work, like a smiley button, and totally anonymous, to avoid red faces and embarrassment.

As for the rest of it, there are facilities for advanced weavers to have their own discussion groups here on Weavo, just as there are facilities for others such as the backstrappers and the rigid heddlers to express their views. We do need to recognise that for anyone who has just discovered weaving, or who has been battling along in isolation for a while, finding Weavo is like finding a free candy store - all these people with the same passion and interests! Its a heady experience! We also need to recognise that many newbies have had looms and techniques marketed to them that do not have the outcomes they are looking for.

Many newbies probably don't even realise that there are highly skilled professional weavers around who do commission work, teach, work within the weaving industry and who are respected by more than just their peers. Weaving, like a lot of other skills, has been dumbed down to appeal to the masses, so that everyone can become an expert in a few hours.  There are not many areas where newbies can meet and mix with experts as equals, and learn from them as we can here. While newbies are full of the new things they are learning and the new ideas they have come across, they are brash and will be noisy and their remarks may appear mundane and irrelevant, but they will never learn how little they know and how much they want to learn while the more experienced weavers quietly move on elsewhere. This problem has has also been helped by segregation; to solve it we all need to learn to interact in a social setting, and remember that one day, a long time ago, we too were brash and inane, only because we did not have the technology at our finger-tips we were limited to annoying our parents and the people around us - not the rest of the weaving community. A polite but firm reminder that its not good internet manners generally gets the message across, and we do have the facility to PM between a group of us at a time so the conversation or debate can continue without interruptions.

Perhaps, in the future, there could be a forum moderator who could take on the role of guiding newbies to more appropriate forums when necessary, and reminding them of netiquette, but until then it would be nice if we could rub along together, because we can all learn from this experience, whether its how to solve a knotty warping problem, or a more saintly skill. ;-)