The Reading Room - 2021-02-19

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12:20 AM

0

Q: Did Thoreau respond to claims that he was an anarchist?

When reading Henry David Thoreau's Wikipedia page I found that he has been called an anarchist for his essay "Civil Disobedience". Reading the essay I can see where these claims are coming from: I heartily accept the motto, — “That government is best which governs least;” and I should like t...

henry-david-thoreau

12:49 AM

@Sciborg And now you and @PrinceNorthLæraðr are on the HNQ list.

1:04 AM

this answer is technically an answer - based off Google Maps speculation, but there's a clear attempt at an answer. I can't flag as VLQ (too old) and NAA doesn't seem to fit - so just downvote?

Napoleon Wilson

The bigger question is, since when is a Grisham story not set in the South? ;-)

@Randal'Thor I assume your brain is in a vat, though?

Ooh nifty, first HNQ and first answer here :D

will this lead to, perhaps, more answers?

We could use help on the Unanswered list

Here's a search for Unanswered song-lyrics questions, which includes this Phantom question

a lot of these require more IQ points than i currently possess, but i can try

1:19 AM

this is why I offered the Phantom question, because someone was singing Broadway earlier today

not naming gays

1:34 AM

@Sciborg I'm trying hard to resist making a joke about all the anonymous profiles on Grindr

@PrinceNorthLæraðr You're got moderator tools!

@bobble what's a Trusted User?

gah, got my privilege names mixed up

Trusted User is 4k rep: literature.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user

I clearly have no idea what's going on. I thought only moderators had moderator tools?

moderator tools is 2k: literature.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools

If you follow the links, they give a description of what those names mean

1:38 AM

@verbose i wanted to be mad at that joke but it made me laugh

stick around, you'll find I always skate perilously close to the "okay, you're suspended" line.

what's the point of a chatroom if you can't gently slide along the knife's edge of suspension at all times

Precisely. You get me.

my mom just had me throw away garlic that looked weird

@bobble uh-oh. you're gonna be attacked by vampires tonight

1:47 AM

vampires? pshaw, we'll just not invite them in

Good point

but what if they ask nicely

if they're Spike my mom would say yes

I'd invite in Mitchell from the British Being Human any time. Sigh.

'borg, which fictional vampires would you let in?

Prince North Læraðr

1:51 AM

Bobble stop doing tag edits :P

I stopped for the moment, peeling garlic now

I thought one just had to put garlic in a jar, put the lid on, and shake the jar vigorously

autopeel

(sigh) what should I make for dinner, he wondered to himself

@bobble i would 100% let in any vampire who is a cutie who asks nicely, so i would be the first to die in a vampocalypse

"mick why did you let in the vampire???"
"he offered to do my laundry"

@Sciborg there's a joke in there on soft soap.

Also one on deterring gents, but I've made that one here before.

har dee har :p

Prince North Læraðr

2:00 AM

@bobble hurry up and outrep me already so I don't have to be under the constant stress of the inevitable :P

@bobble (but really @everybody), the tag edits for omar-khayyam and the-rubaiyat have me wondering whether they should also be used for FitzGerald's version of the same. This question says that FitzGerald made several omissions and insertions in his adaptation, and most of the questions we can anticipate on this site will be about FitzGerald rather than Khayyam himself

At least something in the excerpt that says "if referencing the celebrated English translation, use with edward-fitzgerald or something?

3:09 AM

Perhaps. I was trying to flesh out the excerpts, not add any unusual usage guidance.

2 hours later…

5:21 AM

0

Q: What does “withal” mean in a line in Romeo and Juliet?

“ Good King of Cats, nothing but one of your nine lives, that I mean to make bold withal, and, as you shall use me hereafter, dry-beat the rest of the eight. ” Oxford dictionary defines “withal” to be “with all”, “in addition”, or “nonetheless”. None of these meanings seem to make sense in this c...

romeo-and-juliet

5:36 AM

@verbose Yeah, it's confusingly named. They say the 2k (10k on graduated sites) privilege is access to "moderator tools", but it just means another set of tools for user-level moderation of the site (this page, basically), not the diamond moderator tools.

My "wear the cross" question has gone HNQ.

apparently ticker-ing the HNQ feed fixed it

3 hours later…

8:12 AM

@bobble Isn't that how Lucy died? Her mother threw out the garlic because it was stinking up her room.

I wonder if we need better communication about this.

@bobble Hmm. Why the phantom calls himself angel is clear enough, Christine called him angel first. But why he calls Christine an angel is less obvious.

9:14 AM

@bobble Not any more ;-)

9:28 AM

@bobble Those Tale of Genji questions are not exactly low-hanging fruit. Perhaps we should create a tweet about them, if we haven't already.

@Randal'Thor When I saw that question, I thought, "Oh, I can quickly answer that", and then I saw Gareth had already answered it.

@bobble The downside of the ticker is that the HNQ message doesn't remain visible.

9:52 AM

@b_jonas yes! That's what I was thinking about too. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for @bobble. There's a lot at, er, stake.

10:09 AM

@bobble maybe @Randal'Thor or @Tsundoku have thoughts about this?

excerpts are for usage guidance, so if there's a special case or something that should definitely go into the excerpt

2 hours later…

12:44 PM

This answer is basically correct. I don't know why it was downvoted and had a -1 score. Upvoted. — verbose 2 hours ago

@verbose I was the downvoter, although a year later I've forgotten why ... I guess because the answer is so short and not very well explained.

1:08 PM

Inspirational quote of the day:

> REFUSE
to be stored in
black plastic sacks
and placed in the
containers provided

Or do you think that's just rubbish?

I refuse!

Does that mean you end up in the green wheely bin?

That reminds me of the joke about the dustman and the homeowner who just came back from a holiday.

> Where's your bin?
> I've been away.
> No, where's your wheely bin?
> I've really been away!

Two friends who haven't met each other for a long time:
- I've become engaged to an Irishman!
- Oh, really?
- No, O'Reilly!

1:26 PM

Nice, a joke about Irishmen that doesn't play on the stereotype of them being stupid and/or drunk.

In Flanders, we tell jokes about the Dutch. Example: How do the Dutch prepare tomato soup?

They pour hot water into a red plate.

Meanwhile, up in Scandinavia they tell jokes about each other.

Norwegians: Why do Swedes take sandpaper with them to the desert?
In case they need a map.

LOL. Apparently also translatable into English but not in other languages that I am familiar with.

The French call sandpaper "papier de verre" (literally "glass paper"). But in Québec they also call it "papier sablé".

1 hour later…

2:49 PM

Our QPD is currently at 10.3.

So many pings while I was sleeping...

No vampires came in the night

Napoleon Wilson

@Tsundoku It translates quite literally to German, too, though. Unless you included that in Scandinavian languages already.

I see. I thought it was just Schleifpapier.

Napoleon Wilson

I see. I find Sandpapier a lot more common. But...I'm also not a woodworker.

So no DIY experts coming out of the woodwork here ;-)

3:18 PM

@Randal'Thor 'tis unfair, I ran out of poetry questions. Perhaps I should take another look at his poems - I've no intention of starting a novel.

Question: do we wat tag excerpts for poetry collections to say "use with [poetry]"? How about long poems that have their own tag? It seems this information is in some of the excerpts but hasn't been followed consistently

aha! found another question to ask. I'll wait until the new UTC day, but it might now matter since my latest question isn't "positively received" anyhow

3:37 PM

> Use this tag with the [rene-goscinny], [albert-uderzo], [comics], and [french-literature] tags.

I was updating this excerpt and now I realize - that's all five tags, counting the tag you put on the question originally

I'll tag a break from tag-excerpt edits for now, since I have 5 in the queue

2 hours later…

5:28 PM

0

Q: What does "if the court knows herself" mean?

In In the Midst of Alarms (1894) by Robert Barr, Yates was camping with his unkind friend in Canada, when the police issued a warrant against Yates. “Stilly,” cried the reporter cheerily, “there’s a warrant out for my arrest. I shall have to go to-morrow at the latest!” “What! to jail?” cried hi...

meaning robert-barr in-the-midst-of-alarms

1 hour later…

6:28 PM

Um... I'm confused over this rejection

> This edit copies a significant amount of content from an external source. Generic descriptions such as encyclopedia articles and ad copy do not provide useful guidance; try creating something useful to this community specifically, and be sure to attribute the original author.

Yes, I copied part of a list of kinds of literature from an "external source". The "external source" is the Help Center. How is an excerpt that says "works of literature as defined in the Help Center" better than "works of literature as defined here <gives our definition from the Help Center>"?

Also, it is useful to this community specifically - it's from our community Help Center

Prince North Læraðr

@Tsundoku?

tangentially related: what does "ad copy" mean?

Personally I would remove "and ad copy"

6:43 PM

@bobble I think the copy belongs to the whole (Generic descriptions such as (encyclopedia articles and ad)), but it is phrased unfortunately.

Still confusing for me

It's talking about copying long parts of text from encyclopedia articles or from ads.

then "copy do not provide" is stilted grammar

6:56 PM

@PrinceNorthLæraðr You rang, m'lord?

Prince North Læraðr

Oui, oui. Bobble's asking about why that edit above was rejected

Two reasons: (1) If we ever change our definition of literature, do we want to go through all the tags that contain a list of genres? (2) I don't know where "Should not be used for asking about specific illustrators." comes from.

Well you'd want to use a specific-name tag for a specific illustrator

@bobble I don't understand why that reason is there, though; I thought I had picked something else.

well thanks for clearing the reason up; yours makes more sense than the displayed one

7:03 PM

I find that none of the provided rejection reasons sound nice. There is almost no way to reject a good-faith edit without giving the impression that the user did something harmful.

You can do "causes harm" and type out a custom reject reason

I think I have never chosen that reason because "harm" sound completely over the top to me. Or is that because I'm not a native speaker of English? After all, it's just a tag wiki edit.

@Tsundoku I don't think "causes harm" will actually be displayed to the user on the reject reason: it will just show a custom reason as whatever you typed in the box.

@Randal'Thor I was not aware of that. If that's true, "Causes harm" is a misleading label.

19

Q: Edit reject reasons: replace "causes harm" with "other"

When reviewing edit suggestions, I often use the custom reject reason. This allows me to give the editor some personalized guidance, so that in their next edit they can do better. For some reason, this custom reject reason is called "causes harm". I'm not sure why it is given this name, and no...

feature-request suggested-edits rejection-reasons

7:20 PM

What a ridiculous defence of the words "causes harm":

In a certain way, rejected edits cause harm by diverting people's time. So no, I don't think a change in wording is warranted. — Deer Hunter Feb 3 '16 at 20:37

7:51 PM

27

A: What guidance should be given when edits are rejected?

Big thanks to everyone who offered feedback here! I've reviewed it along with a heapin' helpin' of custom rejection reasons, and the following reasons are now live on all sites: spam or vandalism (all post types) This edit defaces the post in order to promote a product or service, or is deliber...

there's where the "custom" reason was replaced by "causes harm"

Thanks. I think that was a rubbish idea.

"thanks, i hate it"

8:13 PM

Causes harm to the post being edited, I suppose? Not to people.

Maybe that phrasing was introduced before the existence of sites like Medical Sciences or Law or Interpersonal Skills where a bad answer could indirectly cause real harm to people.

> But the text on the last reason exists only for the reviewer. The editor will see what is typed; the text on the dialog is entirely for guiding the person rejecting the edit.

Good, that confirms what I thought.

8:35 PM

Congratulations to @PrinceNorthLæraðr for becoming our 35th 2000+ rep user. How many reps from edits do you have now?

Prince North Læraðr

@Tsundoku :D thank you! 948 reputation from edits

I am at 1995 rep.. grr.

Prince North Læraðr

Mwahahaha

I got exactly 1000 reputation from suggested edits.

Prince North Læraðr

I'll give you an upvote :)... or not :P

@Tsundoku I can still edit tag wikis. I am so close!

8:38 PM

I think you'll get withdrawal symptoms once you can no longer get reps from tag wiki edits.

Prince North Læraðr

sigh, yeah

I won't get my highs... I'll have to earn the remainder of my reputation from posts like normal users! Oh no!

And wait for 2k more until I can edit tag wiki excerpts without needing approval

You, know, I think I'll grind out my 26 edits today

Better watch your "suggested edits" tab :P

I have a measly 202 rep from suggested edits

Prince North Læraðr

We all have to start somewhere

It's been almost a full year of just making tags. It's a bit crazy to think about

I've been doing these things called asking and answering

Prince North Læraðr

@Randal'Thor I forget... were we going to get rid of the comics?

I guess not

8:51 PM

argh... I see a post with tables-as-images... I can't edit it... if I'm not still banned I would get myself banned again. cries

Prince North Læraðr

Where?

2

A: How common is it for male children to masterbate in early childhood (before kindergarten)?

According to one 2010 paper, which actually tried to identify the correlates of the behavior, albeit in a small sample (n=13, 3 males, 10 females) that was referred to a clinic: The median age at the first incident was 19.5 months (range, 4-36 months); the median masturbation frequency, 4 times/...

Prince North Læraðr

I can't tell if questions about comic strips like Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes need the comics.

If the work has a title in which it runs by, does it need the comics? Maybe?

I'm having trouble understanding this answer's... answer. Can someone else parse the comments & answer itself? literature.stackexchange.com/a/17698/11259

Prince North Læraðr

Hm

@bobble I'm... not really sure at all

9:09 PM

Can you at least tell what the quote is doing?

Prince North Læraðr

Kind of. I can tell the user is trying to say like "oh, the German here is 'has' rather than 'wearing'", but like I'm not sure what the spiel about "wearing vs having" is necessary

"what" -> "whether"?

Prince North Læraðr

Yeah

is it an answer? As in, is it enough of an answer for NAA to not apply?

Prince North Læraðr

I can't really tell. I personally think they're nitpicking on words, but I'm not a German expert

9:12 PM

I've got my new glasses today. It's the same as my old glasses, but I'm happy about it.

Prince North Læraðr

@b_jonas Nice!

@bobble You can ping Tsundoku and ask him about it, he actually speaks fluent German so

@Tsundoku the Prince said to call thee

Ja, hallo, was ist los?

Prince North Læraðr

I would respond in German but I forgot so I won't

15 mins ago, by bobble

I'm having trouble understanding this answer's... answer. Can someone else parse the comments & answer itself? https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/17698/11259

Prince North Læraðr

9:15 PM

I'm not a German expert, but I feel as though that answer is unnecessarily nitpicking at words

That answer objects to the translations "wears the cross" because, translated back into German ("ein Kreuz tragen"), it would mean "to carry a heavy burden", i.e. something that makes your life difficult.

The German verb "tragen" can be translated to "wear" (for clothes etc) or "bear" (for many other types of objects).

But the English translation says "wear", so it does not have that association with "a heavy burden". So it should be fine.

Prince North Læraðr

So is the answer okay?

The answer worries about something that it needn't worry about. And the answerer has just deleted it.

Prince North Læraðr

Oh, okay

The answer would have had a point if the translation had read "bear his cross".

9:30 PM

North, enjoying your abilitiy to see invisible things that I can't?

Prince North Læraðr

@bobble Very much so. Mwahaha

North: "bobble, look at the answer!"
bobble: *confused face*
North: "oh, that's right - you can't see it!"

Prince North Læraðr

@Tsundoku Hm, do questions about Plato's works need the greek-literature tag?

Anyway, you can perfectly use the phrase "eisernes Kreuz" with the verb "tragen". E.g. "Das Eiserne Kreuz 2. Klasse wurde seit der ersten Stiftung am Bande im zweiten Knopfloch der Uniform getragen." (militaria-berlin.de)

@PrinceNorthLæraðr Why wouldn't they?

Prince North Læraðr

@Tsundoku Wasn't sure, because technically, none of Plato's works were published

But that's a dumb technicality and I'm overthinking it

9:33 PM

There is a valid argument for removing it from question that specifically discusses the features of a translation, but otherwise, they get tagged greek-literature.

*from

@PrinceNorthLæraðr There weren't printed until many centuries later, but that's not the point. It's the language they're in.

Prince North Læraðr

@Tsundoku Right, right

My brain is kaputt tonight.

did your alarm go off yet?

Prince North Læraðr

9:35 PM

Urm... Plato wiki will need to be updated in the future, but for now I took all the junk info from plato's excerpt and just shoved it into its tag wiki.

@bobble Yes, and I'm still here...

Prince North Læraðr

I have so many to-do for tag wikis

@PrinceNorthLæraðr Bury it in a cave.

@PrinceNorthLæraðr That edit mixes two things: the form of those works (dialogues) and how they have come down to us. AFAIK, these are unrelated.

Prince North Læraðr

@Tsundoku Oh, those were just directly taken from the tag wiki. I didn't fact check them

Now tell me to sod off because my alarm went off.

9:42 PM

sod off to nod off!

Prince North Læraðr

Aye, go to sleep

zzzzz

Prince North Læraðr

Meanwhile, found another genre-tag: post-modernism. Tricksy little tag, aren't you

Prince North Læraðr

9:58 PM

YES

?

Prince North Læraðr

Once my remaining thirteen suggestions get accepted, I will finally have reached 500 edits

500 approved edits

you surely have rejected ones

Prince North Læraðr

@bobble Pfft why would they be rejected?

@bobble Fine, yes 500 approved edits and other edits which count towards the gold badge

You have 13 rejected edits

I just checked through every page of your suggestion history, and collected all the links for myself

I think I'll save these somewhere

Prince North Læraðr

10:04 PM

@bobble That's not creepy, like, at all

Just in case I need to present these as evidence

The stats are public

ish

user image

Prince North Læraðr

Well you've rejected more edits than approved them :P

(In PSE)

oof, really?

Prince North Læraðr

Yeah, actually

> bobble has approved 44 edit suggestions and rejected 52 edit suggestions and improved 6 edit suggestions

wow

Prince North Læraðr

10:09 PM

user image

I think that has something to do with me being active a while back when we were getting a flood of tiny edits

Prince North Læraðr

Honestly, yeah

Hey, you've had 3 edits rejected

My approve-reject ratio is higher... I think

Haha!

13/500=0.026, while 3/104=0.02884615384

I tend to edit with a "if this is too far then they'll reject it and that's fine" mentality

I need 12 more approved edits to pass you in ratio

hmm, and I have a Friday afternoon

and there are always more tags

however, I must be Good Student Crown and do this homework

Prince North Læraðr

Well, once my 13 edits get approved, I'll be even more ahead

However, I must also be doing homework and eating

eating?? lunch at this hour?

Prince North Læraðr

10:15 PM

Yeah -_-;

I was busy tagging, and my school ends at 1:15 with no real "lunch" break

the tree should eat lunch at a more respectable time, methinks

Prince North Læraðr

But that's either during break (9:40) or after-school (1:15+)

your school has a weird schedule

Prince North Læraðr

I agree

this special for hybrid learning or regular?

Prince North Læraðr

10:18 PM

Hybrid

Our regular schedule is usually from 7:45-2:45 with reasonable break and lunch times

*Our

1 hour later…

Prince North Læraðr

11:33 PM

Hmph, well I may have jinxed myself

Five more edits because 3 of them got rejected

@Randal'Thor I disagree with the reject here personally

are hymns [poetry] or [song-lyrics]?

Prince North Læraðr

The Artemis Fowl stuff is already in the tag wiki, and I didn't really think the "best-selling" portion was exactly necessary. Rather keep the tags simple, especially with how the stylistic changes were made

@bobble Fascinating question

@PrinceNorthLæraðr Why is "Questions about the works of X or their life as a writer" any better than "For questions about X or about any of their literary works"?

(Backstory: the reason both of those phrasings exist in the tag system is because Benjamin and I were creating a lot of tag wiki excerpts back in the early days, using respectively those two templates for author tags.)

I always tried to add some extra information as well, e.g. some of an author's best-known works, so as not to make it too formulaic with all the tag wiki excerpts looking the same as if they were produced by a robot.

I've been wondering if I should try to standardize the phrasing once I get full editing rights

Prince North Læraðr

Standardizing is a bit... complicated

11:39 PM

(also, I should sod off to nod off soon, so if I disappear, it's not because I'm unwilling to discuss this)

Prince North Læraðr

@Randal'Thor I personally didn't find the little blurb about the best-known works useful, especially considering that it was already in the tag wiki

It's obviously not important enough to bother the review queue with, so I only change the phrasing if I'm doing something else

"find"-> "like"? or did you forget a "useful"?

Prince North Læraðr

Well, for one, Tsundoku and Rand disagreed already whether it should be "questions about" or "For questions about"

also I think the "already" should be italicized if anything, not the "in"

being very helpful to the conversation over here

Prince North Læraðr

Meh, italicizing is up to style

11:41 PM

(I still have the [poetry] vs [song-lyrics] question)

Prince North Læraðr

I'm leaning towards poetry

Hm, wikipedia seems to disagree

@bobble I saw one edit (can't remember if you or North) which I almost rejected as "no improvement whatsoever" before noticing that it added a missing right parenthesis as well as some stylistic stuff. Can't have that.

Prince North Læraðr

@Randal'Thor That was mine

Yeah, I wouldn't do that

I bring up tiny edits like that in chat because I feel guilty about the rep

Prince North Læraðr

@Randal'Thor Yeah, even I wouldn't have normally made a small change like that, but having an unclosed parenthesis is... very very irritating

I have two suggestions still pending

11:46 PM

well I've skipped a bunch of your edits, such as this one

@PrinceNorthLæraðr I skipped a couple while reviewing, will leave them for Sleepy Stonehead or someone else.

I mean, there's some useful stuff added, but you also removed interesting things from the excerpt

so Skip

@bobble I skipped that one too :-)

Prince North Læraðr

@bobble Because I added them to the tag wiki, where it should be

But I already approved the main wiki edit before seeing that excerpt edit.

11:47 PM

Well there's no way for me to know that, because you didn't put an edit description

Prince North Læraðr

If I added greek-literature to that, the tag wiki would've seemed very long

@bobble My apologies

*seemed

user image

also there's a display bug - the two versions are running into each other!

Prince North Læraðr

Hehe

And why in the world is there a vote counter?

Prince North Læraðr

Okay here's my thing with the mike-carey tag

Personally, as is, it's too long

Just get all the relevant info, and any extraneous information can be put on the wiki tag

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Feb '2119

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