Comments

From WebGenreWiki

Randomness of collection

Serge: There are serious issues with the coverage of webgenres in this collection. 27 pages out of 50 are index pages linking to content pages. While such index/home/about/information pages are important in their own right, we can assume that the number of content pages they link to is far greater. This suggests that the procedure for their collection does not reflect the balance of genres on the Web.

Comments about individual webpages

- Georg=1: I don't understand the "Homepage" label. A hypertext consists of nodes, one of which is always a homepage, i.e., the first node to visit (as specified by the hypertext's author). As a consequence, you could label every single node as either "homepage" or "embedded node". The label "homepage" doesn't mean anything in this case. Point being: it's not a genre label.

- Georg=2: "Explanation" and "informative" are not genres (same goes for categories such as "Law" or "Scientific" or several others mentioned later on).

- Georg=3: The label assigned by the second person is a very nice example where someone focused on a specific _part/component_ of the document to assign a genre label for the _whole_ document. What is "Content Delivery" supposed to be? Practically every single document on the web could be categorised as "Content Delivery".

- Georg=5: Almost all genre labels assigned have some correspondences. This is a nice example, but it is also a very conventionalised and established one.

- Georg=6: Good example for different levels of abstraction/generalisation assumed by the seven people who assigned the labels.

- Georg=7: I don't know why two persons mentioned "wikipedia" in their labels. There are also several other online encyclopedias in addition to Wikipedia. Would articles or entries in other online encyclopedias get different labels?

- Georg=12: I don't understand why someone would claim this to be an "About-page" or "Commercial/Promotional". I don't get "composite informational" either.

- Georg=13: Now it gets really interesting. To me, documents Georg=12 and Georg=13 have exactly the same genre (two other persons thought so, too, but they assigned different genre labels). It speaks volumes that two documents that are even adjacent in the sample get completely different labels by four annotators: - "composite informational" vs. "table of contents with snippets" - "newspaper, portal" vs. "portal, link collection" [interesting: this annotator didn't recognise that this web site belongs to a research journal; he/she thought it's a newspaper] - "About-page" vs. "Bibliography/List of Articles" - "Commercial/Promotional" vs. "Index, Content Delivery" These results can only mean one thing: even experts in genre theory make very, very serious mistakes with regard to genre assignments. Furthermore, they create inconsistent assignments.

- Georg=15: Very interesting, very consistent (except for "Scientific").

- Georg=16: I don't understand "presentation" in "tv program presentation". Why not simply put "tv program"?

- Georg=17: This document is clearly not a "blog post". The difference between answers 1 and 5 is interesting: "Discussion forum" vs. "a thread in a discussion board". The first label refers to the website label, the second label refers to the page level. I don't understand the "Community" label.

- Georg=18: Why "Shopping"? The different levels of abstraction in the other labels are very interesting: "shop" vs. "eshop" vs. "product description" vs. "a product page in an online bookstore"

- Georg=20: The consistency is very interesting.

- Georg=21: The consistency is very interesting.

- Georg=25: What does "article (explanatory)" mean? What would other types of articles be (other than "explanatory")?

- Georg=27: Very, very interesting for several reasons. I don't understand the "toc with snippets" genre label (because this document is, in my opinion, clearly a patent). I don't get the indefinite article and the "page" bit in the label "a patent page". This person seems to have a problem distinguishing between the genre on the one hand and the current document or web page on the other. I don't understand why someone would put "Law" or "Scientific" for this document. Are patents so unusal? (Doesn't it even say something like "Patent No. ..." in the document itself?)

- Georg=29: Interesting consistency among the genre labels. Why do we have rather consistently named genre labels in this case but not in, for example, Georg=27?

- Georg=32: It's very interesting to see that someone put "diary" instead of "blog". Otherwise, almost perfect consistency.

- Georg=37: Why did someone not recognise that this is a list of job advertisements? Shouldn't that be totally obvious?

- Georg=38: What's with the "(orbitz)" in "search page (orbitz)"?

- Georg=39: Why the additional context "in a personal website" in the genre label "an article in a personal website"? Why not simply "article"?

- Georg=46: The "product information" label is interesting.