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1:02 AM

Q: Policy on questions based on homework or tests

Recently, a member of our community asked the question In what way is the poem 'Tissue' by Imtiaz Dharker related to power / conflict?. This question was based on a question from what I think is a practice test for a national exam. What's our policy on these sorts of questions?

discussion

Napoleon Wilson

@Librarian Excellent question. I despise the practice of downvoting questions just because it's "homework". If it's a bad, poorly worded or broad question, fine. But if it's good, don't base your votes and the asker's motivation. If you don't want people to profit from your hard work, SE is the wrong place for you

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson I'm writing up an answer now.

And there we go.

Wow, composing a good meta answer with a suggested policy can take almost as much research and reading as composing a good main-site answer!

Napoleon Wilson

You don't say. ;-)

2 hours later…

Shokhet

2:45 AM

@Mithrandir IMO, it's more helpful to (also?) leave a comment on the post with your thoughts. This allows the OP to see the criticism of the question, and fix if possible. It also allows users who aren't in chat, but who do see the question, to hear what you think of it.

(Then you can paste the comment here)

This is done somewhat often on Mi Yodeya, eg judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/80248/… + chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35691796#35691796

Call it a "non-binding close vote" in the comment if you like :)

Eg chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/468?m=19021172#19021172 + meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41062/…

@Randal'Thor "References rand related reading:" bad pun? :P

I don't have rep to edit on meta, so you're going to have to fix that one yourself

8 hours later…

Mithrandir

10:39 AM

@Shokhet I fixed it

3 hours later…

Bookworm

2:01 PM

Q: What is the greater meaning of the thrush?

In 1984, Orwell devotes a few lines to a singing thrush that lands several feet away from Julia and Winston during their first secret meaning. A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in ...

george-orwell nineteen-eighty-four

2 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

3:39 PM

@Bookworm I'm sure I remember a line later on in the book revealing that the thrush was actually a listening device, but now I think I must have imagined it.

@Shokhet No comment on whether or not that was deliberate.

Standback

@MartinEnder : I'm in and out, but happy to chat, however asynchronously :D

@MartinEnder In brief, (A) I don't think we've made practically any headway into finding useful tagging besides author/title; (B) I think author/title tagging adds an immense amount of cruft to the taglist, (C) author/title are easy tags, which discourages use of any other tags. So, I feel like your use-case is well-covered by text search, but other use-cases are not. That's in a nutshell, happy to continue in chat :) — Standback 27 secs ago

Martin Ender

@Standback I'm with helmar on the text-search issue. The tags that might be problematic (because they're short and ambiguous) are specifically the ones where a text search will fail you. And regarding easy tags, if we drop title tags, then the easy-tagging behaviour will be using only author tags which seems even worse.

Rand al'Thor

4:12 PM

I'm with @Gallifreyan and @Helmar on the "tags for individual books" issue.

I can answer questions about 1984 but not questions about animal-farm. Abolish per-book tags and there's no reliable way for me to distinguish between those questions either by tags or by text search; I'd have to actually read each question to tell what book it was about.

That's just one example. Although author tags are useful to attract some kinds of expert, so are per-book tags. It all depends on the particular work/author/series/universe in question. I think the only time when individual books don't deserve their own tags is when they're either too short to get many questions or part of a longer series.

Gallifreyan

4:50 PM

@Randal'Thor It's been so long, I don't remember what you're talking about.

Rand al'Thor

A: Should we be tagging questions with the names of specific books?

Do these tags do harm? Unlike very broad tags like short-stories, individual book tags will hardly be abused. In fact, they will considerably improve the process of searching, especially for prolific writers. Think about it: Stephen King has written 54 novels. Surely, some people are expert in...

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor I guess I couldn't defend my position very well, though I still stand by my opinion.

Standback

5:22 PM

@Randal'Thor @MartinEnder On the post that the comment was on, my point was much less "title tags bad." It was "i don't think we have a very clear conception of what tags are even meant to mean here."

I mean, tags for author and title are pretty much a hack to begin with :-P

Martin Ender

are they?

Standback

In an ideal world, we'd have something Goodreads-ish, so each book and series are uniquely identifiable.

(Not being able to even fit a full title into a tag is one example of how silly it can get.)

Not being able to differentiate between author, title, and anything else makes it... a very unstructured system.

Gilles

@Standback SE have always said that they wouldn't do structured tags.

Standback

All I'm saying in that post is: we should be devoting some attention to user-stories, to non-title tags, to how this works for books that aren't squarely in the popular, mainstream, cannonical spotlight.

Gilles

Given that few sites would benefit from structured tags, and each of them in different ways, I don't dispute that decision.

Martin Ender

5:30 PM

@Standback that's a good point, but I'm not sure it's an answer to that question then? (which asks specifically whether we should use titles for specific books or not)

Standback

@MartinEnder I know :-( Hence the "this is not an answer" section.

Think of it as a framing challenge :-)

Martin Ender

sorry, it's been a couple of days, I forgot that there was a "this is not an answer" section

Standback

@Gilles I said "ideally," not "plausibly" :-P

@MartinEnder no worries.

Mithrandir

5:43 PM

Well, we have a Lord of the Flies expert in town now :D

Rand al'Thor

@Standback Flagged as NaA :-P

Hamlet

6:12 PM

Y'all know that there are books other than 1984 and The Lord of the Flies, right?

Mithrandir

@Hamlet Sacrilege!

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet I have a few questions about 1984, but I'm kind of reluctant to post them since there are so many already.

I've also been somewhat turned off posting questions about Tess of the d'Urbervilles after what happened to the last one :-/

Might try asking about some of the more obscure Poe stories.

Mithrandir

@Randal'Thor Post them! We'll work everything out better this time.

Rand al'Thor

I recently read Eleanora and it struck me as ... odd ... but I'm not sure if there's anything I can turn into a real question there.

Mithrandir

(And I'm just pretending I've heard of anything while waiting for my copy of the original Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them... )

Riker

6:35 PM

@Hamlet have you considered editing this into "when was the first occurence of black being evil and white being good" or a similar question?

seems like an interesting question to me

Hamlet

7:33 PM

@Riker editing what into what?

Riker

7:45 PM

Editing the question I linked into asking about the first occurrence

Hamlet

7:57 PM

@Riker yeah, what do you want me to change about that question?

BESW

8:29 PM

.@AlasdairStuart is excited to recommend "the best locked-room mystery IN SPACE" that you'll read this year:… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/838479234519691265

Tweeted by tordotcom on March 5, 2017 at 8:00 PM

1 hour later…

Bookworm

9:58 PM

Q: What is the significance of Mr. Swales in Dracula?

Mr. Swales plays a small role, but his interactions with Mina and Lucy seem to suggest a deeper significance. What is the significance of Mr. Swales if any?

symbolism dracula bram-stoker

Mithrandir

@Bookworm hah, edited it in time :P

1 hour later…

Rand al'Thor

11:06 PM

Question: we have the symbolism tag to ask about symbolism of particular aspects of a work of literature, and the meaning tag to talk about their direct meaning, but how should I tag a question about the overall message of a story? It's not quite symbolism and not quite direct meaning, IMO. Do we need a message or moral tag as well?

Oh look, we already have a moral tag. I guess I'll use that then.

Bookworm

Q: What is the message of Poe's "Eleonora"?

I recently read Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Eleonora", a thinly veiled self-portrait in which the protagonist falls in love with his younger cousin, who later dies and leaves him alone. He (the protagonist, not Poe) vows that his love for his cousin will be undying and that he will never love ...