Hub of Reason

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1:23 AM

Further to this chat, I find topics about non-notorious individual victims of crime distateful. I understand it may be in the public interest, and/or relevant to public policy (e.g. because of police involvement), to ask a question about Eric Garner's death; conversely I dislike a question of th...

Q: Can users close questions regardless?

Is the community of users allowed to vote to close a question for no particularly good reason? For example if a lot of people see a question they don't like (and want to close it), and none of the existing close reasons seem to be a perfect fit, can they pick existing close reasons anyway and vo...

discussion close-reasons

7 hours later…

Andrew Grimm

8:03 AM

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/posts/34362/revisions
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/37674/was-a-class-of-dutch-school-children-required-to-learn-muslim-prayer/37675#comment148656_37675

meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3858/… — Andrew Grimm Mar 9 at 8:11

I don't like mods moderating content when they appear to be engaging in the same stuff themselves.

3 hours later…

Sklivvz

11:00 AM

@AndrewGrimm Is rolling back an bad edit on my own question "moderating content"? Any user has the same right on their own posts. I already said clearly that I wish that word to stay and gave a motivation: what the word actually means - Propaganda: information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause

I understand you may feel it's leading, however, it is my question, the word means what it means, one of the leading exponents of the coalition sending that leaflet also calls it "propaganda", so I think the word should stay. Please be respectful of my wish and don't edit it.

Also, please don't conflate my moderator status with simple user matters, I find this attitude quite inconsiderate and offensive.

Sklivvz

11:16 AM

If you want to make a point, you can give a clear, well reasoned and convincing argument in favor of the edit, instead of attacking me personally on a false accusation of being a bad mod.

Andrew Grimm

@Sklivvz rolling back an edit on your own post isn't moderation, but is an example of appearing to post content which, when done by others, you use moderator superpowers on.

4 hours later…

DVK-on-Ahch-To

3:03 PM

You know you sold out when, in a chat thread, you star 2 messages - only to discover both were posted by diamond moderators. </black_eyed_peas>

@MaskedMan I think there was even a meta proposal to ban those questions, but unfortunately it failed :(

Masked Man

3:34 PM

@DVK-on-Ahch-To That's unfortunate really. I come in contact with this site mainly via Sidebar Garbage, and the impression I have of a typical user of this site is, "Right, let me dig out some random quote today, and put people to work to find attributions." Perhaps you guys could benefit from adding a "need to know" requirement. Although it may not help much as trolls can make up random excuses, but it could cut down some of the "did some nobody from nowhereland say blah blah"?

DVK-on-Ahch-To

4:21 PM

@MaskedMan In all fairness, on MANY sites HNQ questions are typically NOT the best site's questions by far, and often among the laziest and worst. Bikeshedding effect at its "finest" :(

Granted, they may be interesting to layperson (often to me as a layperson) but even I can tell they aren't expert questions of good quality.

Case in point: the current HNQ from SFF is... not very good shall we say.

Same with todays MTV about BSG shows. Not very good as questions go, though not bad.

1 hour later…

Masked Man

5:28 PM

Indeed, that's why I call it the Sidebar Garbage. ;-)

6 hours later…

Oddthinking

11:07 PM

@MaskedMan Yes, as @DVK-on-Ahch-To points out, this has been the subject of discomfort for a while.

Q: Would the question "Did Einstein actually say X?" be on-topic here?

Would it be on-topic to ask here: Did Einstein actually say: "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler?" By my reading of the FAQ, I would think not. Skeptiks is about: Skeptics Stack Exchange is for challenging unreferenced notable claims, pseudoscience and biased ...

discussion

Q: Should we limit [quote] questions?

I'm tired and grumpy, but not sleepy. Probably not a good time to exercise mod powers. So, instead, I will have a bit of a whinge here, to see if anyone else agrees with me, or has suggestions on whether it needs fixing. Back in February, I whined on chat: I'm bored of "Did Einstein really s...

discussion scope questions quotes

Q: Podcast # 6 - Quotes

This episode focuses on Quotes. Although we do allow it on Skeptics, generally this kind of questions is hard to answer. They are too often false claims, and it is a case of trying to assert a negative position. That said, we get a lot of of these types of questions, so it is only fair that we c...

discussion podcast

Oddthinking

11:25 PM

@SKlivvz, @AndrewGrimm: If I understand correctly, you are discussing a rolled back edit which removed the word "propaganda". I wonder if your disagreement is based on differing definitions of the word.

I have noticed before that some people treat the word as a pejorative, suggesting deliberately misleading information to promote a cause.

Others (I include myself) treat it as a more neutral word, describing marketing information that may be biased and one-sided, but not necessarily deliberately misleading. I have described marketing materials that I have produced as "propaganda", without intending to suggest that it contains any falsehoods.

I think I have been caught by this in the past - accidentally offending people by saying something like "I've done my homework by reading your propaganda about this product, and I just wanted to ask a couple of questions."

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@Oddthinking Unfortunately, English language is highly inconsistent and many thing have different connotations that aren't universal. This term being one of them.

Sklivvz

11:54 PM

@Oddthinking I am convinced of the same. However "propaganda" is how the people printing those leaflet call it, and it's also the correct term to describe these leaflets in British English. Should we not use the appropriate words to describe things?

I think we should. Also, it just so happens that the propaganda leaflet in question was also pejoratively and notoriously "propaganda" in the pejorative meanings, so it's doubly correct.

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