This is a recurring topic here but I've not seen a meta post that calls out "seek legal advice" as low quality much of the time. I would suggest the community consider this type of advice more carefully and be aggressive in discouraging the vaguest of these answers.
Legal advice that we do engag...
I recently read this answer. It was pretty good, except there were a couple of cases of gender bias being used. "He" was used instead of "They", the question didn't indicate any specific gender.
So I put in a very small edit to change this. This edit was rejected as
This edit does not make ...
If you put [Some Text](http://stuff) then it will still convert to the same hyperlink, but it will appear as the text in the square brackets rather than the URL.
If you get the syntax wrong, it won't do the square brackets thing but will still convert the URL to a hyperlink as per usual.
@Kaz as someone who has experienced REAL bias, including being beaten and told that my employers shouldn't be allowed to hire people like me, smarmy, virtue signalling like that post drive me up a wall.
@RaoulMensink There are a couple special words that you can use in comments. I don't remember where the full list is, but [edit] and [help] are two of them.
@RichardU I don't think it's necessarily virtue-signalling, or a bad thing. Language is powerful, and subconscious bias is a very real thing. It's the "I'm going to unilaterally change your post to make it "better" (according to my definition of the word)" that I want to discourage.
@Kaz Calling the OP "biased" and then changing it to make it "better" is virtue signaling. IMO, but we agree on principle, so I won't nit pick (a rare occasion!)
I was somewhat surprised by the (apparently shared) answer to this question. Is a very slight improvement to an answer not worth an edit? Or, is an answer which (in the absence of a particular reason for either) using gender-neutral language not even very slightly better than one using gendered language?
I don't really get how that is more neutral, but either way, should edits not be about improving answers, no matter how the wording of the original answer came to be?
Does changing "he" to "they" in an answer, which is not in any way apparently about gender, and is an answer to a question which specifically uses "he/she", change intent or context?
@MeesdeVries If you can find a way to consistently, accurately and objectively tell what people intended to convey by their language, then you'd save the human race a whole lot of trouble.
@MeesdeVries The general rule is that you shouldn't change the meaning or intent of a post without good reason (generally because it goes against rules/policy)
Any edit that you think is an improvement that satisfies that condition is fair game.
That's unfair. In the case in question, it is pretty clear that changing "he" to "they" does not change the actual content of the answer. For basically any rule there are difficult-to-judge examples, but that does not mean that you can never act in clear cases.
Or do you mean to suggest that the answer was only intended to be about men, and not about anyone?
When a post sometimes uses a singular gender pronoun, and sometimes uses a gender neutral pronoun, how do you know which one was the intended one?
In this specific case, the original question uses "only to have him leave suddenly", "no idea what she/he was doing" and then more in various comments / follow ups.
You might judge it as obviously supposed to be gender-neutral because of the "she/he"
Except later on the OP comments "I did try to contact the old programmer. He has moved on to a bigger, better project."
@MeesdeVries So tell me, which gender pronouns did the OP intend to use in their post and are they any different to the ones they actualy used?
Something that apparently is getting lost here is that the site has rules and guidelines. Whether 5 people want to chat in comments is irrelevant. It's against the guidelines.
@MeesdeVries this is the perfect answer to your question :)
I intended to leave, but apparently you can get pinged back across all of SE. Kaz, your framing is weird, and I hope you agree that the answerer did not specifically ponder the question "should I use he or they", and chose "he", because they intended their answer to be about men. Clearly the intent of the answer did not hinge on the choice of pronoun. Raoul, I don't see how that answers any of my questions at all -- and also, I haven't actually found any rules and guidelines.
I guess never generate usernames based on *anything*. I remember the story of a university which took the first 4 characters each from the first name and last name. (People like "John Doe" had their user names padded with numerals).
That arrangement worked fine until a student named Abigail Button came along. Bonus points because completely coincidentally, she happened to have a fairly large posterior, making her the (you guessed it) of many jokes.
@RaoulMensink LOL! In all seriousness though. As someone who was actually beaten up for just the ASSUMPTION that I was gay. in addition to being told that my employers shouldn't be allowed to hire people like me because of my hearing (on several occasions), I find this indignation over pronouns to be highly offensive.
I recently read this answer. It was pretty good, except there were a couple of cases of gender bias being used. "He" was used instead of "They", the question didn't indicate any specific gender.
So I put in a very small edit to change this. This edit was rejected as
This edit does not make ...
Please go back to any place where I have used "he" and change it to "they", if there is no reasonable reason to assume that I meant my answer to refer only to men, and if you feel the need to do this.
@RichardU well, the mere fact that he said small edit makes me think we arent supposed to do that. And going back to the older discussion of rep farmers using small seemingly useless edits
I think that, apart from in very few cases, the vast majority of people are able to judge when someone posted an answer to a question using "he" pronouns, when they meant this to be specifically about men or a specific man, and when they meant it to be general advice.
Of answers to posts where someone used "he" pronouns, even though the question was gender-neutral, and it is not clear whether their answer was meant to be an answer specific to men or supposed to be general advice.
So you agree with the following: if we send the writer of that answer a message, asking, "did you mean for your answer to be only about men", that there is a non-negligible chance that they send a response, "yes, it was supposed to be about men only"?
So your estimate is that for, say, the answer that started this conversation, there is a 5% chance that the answerer wrote an answer about men specifically, and that is why they chose the pronoun "he"?
To take some actual data from my own country: The British Social Attitudes Survey: Attitudes Towards Equality found strong opinions (that would generally be considered sexist) towards Women, Work and Childcare from 3% of respondents. And some leaning in that direction from 20%.
@MeesdeVries 5%, +-4%, with a 95% confidence interval.
Huh. I have to admit that I had not even considered the option, the answerer believes that all progrmamers are/should be men and therefore used masculine pronouns.
But then I have a question that is really more central: why do we have to respect the intent of the answerer? Why does that take precedence over question quality?
*answer quality?
Also, I disagree that that is an alternative. I find it much more confrontational to leave a comment on someone's question about something really minor than to just edit it. Same with things like fixing typos.
You keep dragging it into generalities. Of course there general objective way to decide an answer's quality, but that does not mean that in specific cases there can be wide consensus.
Voting is not fine-grained enough here. There might be improvements to be made to an answer without it needing to be downvoted. That seems to me to be exactly what the edit function is for.
So, the way I'm coming at this: I mostly post on math.SE, and have mostly read meta there, and not here. But there the overall opinion seems to be: math.SE should strive towards the goal of being a comprehensive mathematics FAQ. In particular, the question and answer quality is the most important.
In particular, that includes making tiny edits to answers to improve them.
I disagree, math is much less objective than that comment makes it out to be, and explaining mathematics is even moreso.
*comic, not comment.
For example: even if the mathematics in a math.SE answer is technically right, I think math.SE mods would approve of edits that improve notation. And, if you are a mathematician, I think you can agree that such changes can be controversial.
@MeesdeVries Help Centre, On/Off Topic, every meta question ever asked on the subject and everything the mods have ever said in chat on the subject. Collectively.
@MeesdeVries Everything on meta under editing, a bunch more question with *edit* in the title. Also *change*. Search chat for "editing". And for moderator actions.
I'm a little disturbed by the edit history of and comments on the question originally titled
Male seinor [sic] architect bullying junior female developer. What to do?
Edit #4 has the comment "Took out gender from the question. Based on quotes given, no basis for the assumption that it is a sexi...
I have conceded earlier that there are many cases where it is not clear whether someone thought gender was significant in their answer/question. I am now asking a more general question: whether one is, in principle, allowed to use the edit function to improve answers.
@MeesdeVries my personal thought (and I see this on SO meta a fair bit) is that the older a post is, the more meaningful edits should be, since they bump the question
@MeesdeVries My contention is that you can't know without asking the OP. And it is better for the site to avoid potential conflicts by suggesting changes, and seeing what the OP does, as opposed to just making the changes, and seeing how the OP reacts.
Ah, I finally managed to find the right page in the help center. workplace.stackexchange.com/help/editing I feel vindicated in that this page does not say anywhere that the original intent or content of a post needs to be preserved.
Your answer is in here: •To fix grammar and spelling mistakes •To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning) •To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place • To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages •To add related resources or hyperlinks
@MeesdeVries Just for future reference: You can be pinged in any chatroom, even when not there, as long as you've been present at any time in the last 7 days.
This is almost assuredly trolling at this point, unless your company is absurdly dysfunctional. Nearly no respectable company will "let a manager go" over a single, unsubstantiated and uninvestigated report of a single employee. Let alone immediately promote a remote employee to replace that manager. In the off chance this is true, this advice is still horrible for anyone else in a similar situation. — enderland ♦14 mins ago
@enderland A manager being displeased with remote employees is quite common. The primary reason for that, though, is usually that the employee is not easily reachable to others. That makes the answer all the more absurd. In particular, the point about OP being "promoted" to the manager's role. Things don't work like that in any place with sane people.
One of the rare instances (across SE network) where I have downvoted both the Q & A on a self-answered question. :) I tend to be lenient with those.
@Kaz Of course, insane people do exist in upper management, though I doubt they would fire a manager and let his subordinate take his place within a day. But hey, I have seen so little of the world, who knows what else is out there? ;)
@muru Uhm, I still see the coworker's name as well as various variations of the username in the edit history. I am afraid this still has potential to harm the OP (especially since they seem to be in a foreign country/culture). Depending on the employer, the OP too could get fired over it if this question becomes "popular"! — Masked Man2 mins ago
@MaskedMan you see the person's last name in there somewhere? Could you please point out what we've missed? (I'm not worried about a first name without a last name.)
@RaoulMensink oh, I see. No, redaction is a serious matter and can't be undone, so I think it's perfectly reasonable that it requires two people at the helm. I mean, even new custom close reasons require two mods, and that doesn't involve data destruction. But the interface is a smidge confusing and it took us two tries to get it.
Interface could be improved as we have relatively few mods and even less times that 2 mods Need to do this, so when they do it should be relatively easy. but then again I and many others cant judge it so :D
@RaoulMensink we each learn it once and then we know. There's also a private chat room for all the mods from all the sites. This didn't slow us down a lot; it was just a bump along the way. There are other mod tools I'd rather they spend the time on, and plenty of things that help more than ~500 people that are probably higher priority. :-)
@MaskedMan The first time I heard the name "Ashook" (sp?) I thought someone was cursing in German. Then the Indians in our group asked why I was confused
@RaoulMensink somewhere on MSE I have a request to apply the 10-rep entry fee on protected questions to all interactions on the question, most especially comments but also voting.
I just saw this question and wanted to add an answer. While I was composing my answer the question was closed as off-topic.
I'm a bit puzzled: although the question could have a slightly broad answer scope, it is fairly focused and it is about a real, concrete problem.
Maybe I misunderstood the...
I recently read this answer. It was pretty good, except there were a couple of cases of gender bias being used. "He" was used instead of "They", the question didn't indicate any specific gender.
So I put in a very small edit to change this. This edit was rejected as
This edit does not make ...
I just saw this question and wanted to add an answer. While I was composing my answer the question was closed as off-topic.
I'm a bit puzzled: although the question could have a slightly broad answer scope, it is fairly focused and it is about a real, concrete problem.
Maybe I misunderstood the...
The Water Cooler
The Water Cooler