either the community will agree with you, or it won't

that's what vtcing is for

this is also a private beta where "the community" barely exists and hasn't decided what its norms should be yet

I started to vote to close first on that ridiculous embrace googlers question that tries to define scope without example

so it really is worth the effort to get everyone on the same page about what questions we feel should or should not be closed

Until then meta says we want that shit

@Helmar just review meta.lit.se CVs, voted to close both that and the opera one :)

thanks for starting that

it's pretty necessary

@DForck42 Until that meta questions are closed those amount of upvotes is a ridiculously high vote of community consensus born out of misplaced enthusiasm

which highly-voted meta question are we talking about? the non-googlers one looks about average

@Ixrec For a 200 user page?

Those are ridiculous votes

+12/-5?

consider that most questions on main have about 12 as a max

Have a look at this numbers from ELU.meta a fully established site with thousands of users

It's my post though

Don't mind the topic just have a look at the numbers

tbh I think "Googlers" is a strawman the same way "homework questions" is. The terms are meant to capture some kind of low-effort, non-interesting category of questions that is potentially a detriment to the site, but it's easy to show that actually being a "non-googler" or a "homework question" is not an accurate description of whatever that category is.

ye, but the point still stands

which point?

@Helmar ^ I made a (attempted) humerous paint drawing

Just gotta star that paint effort :)

@Helmar lol

Freehanding the words, just great :)

@Helmar IMO, he has a point about don't close bad questions, but he stated it a bit confusingly I think

@DForck42 did you mean to say "They are currently bad but allowed, and we should disallow them"?

Close was changed to on-hold for the first few days to give an incentive to make questions better

If we don't vote to close we lose that incentive

As just down voting keeps questions answerable

@Riker what I mean to say is that the question in particular isn't great, but ti's also not terrible enough to warrant closing (it's still open, after all). if we are going to provide answers to a question, we should be providing EXCELLENT answers to questions, regardless of the quality of the question itself

ah, okay

it is more of a downvote than it is a close

having a meta precendent that says "be lazy" is a terrible way to run the site, which is the way I interpret @Helmar 's answer

@DForck42 but isn't CHEESE's answer pretty excellent

@Helmar it's good, it could go a step farther like I said earlier and provide a synopsis of how the ring got there, to add QUALITY to the answer

I'm not saying be lazy, I'm saying it's a lot to expect people to answer more exhaustively than CHEESE

The quote and where he found it is an exact answer to the question, even the expanded after the OP edit

longer answers aren't necessarily better either, it's entirely possible that the "best" answer to a question like that is just a quote block rather than a hand-written plot summary

@Ixrec Once in a while, yeah, but not at a high rate.

And if so, then the question might not be that good.

I may be biased toward sites that tend to err in the direction of providing way too much detail

@Ixrec That's why I am asking for examples in my answer too

We are—again—discussing quotes without proper precedent.

Because that Lotr question is as everyone agrees at the very best mediocre

So the whole meta question is currently not very helpful

@Helmar I'm cleaning up my comments on my answer cause we sound like assholes not listening to each other

I'm satisfied with the state of that lotr question because the question has a negative score, and the question has a good answer with a positive score

that's about as much as we can hope for in that scenario

@DForck42 did the same

@Helmar :-D

@Helmar FWIW, I added some examples in my question.

@HDE226868 yup. you linked my lemony snicket question. it has a decent answer, but I'm waiting to see if i get a better answer

Guess I'll expand my answer then :)

@Hamlet literature.stackexchange.com/questions/421/… Could you take a look at my edit?

Would a question about the writing process of a specific poet be on-topic?

Probably.

@Benjamin Likely

@Emrakul your answer was much better than mine, deleted my answer

@CHEESE Thank you for your much better answer, I have deleted mine.

@Benjamin which question?

ahh, the one i commented on

and yes, @CHEESE that's a good answer

no votes left for today though

I feel like I've been more conservative with my votes than most people. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I think part of the issue is that I've only been voting on posts involving works that I know and/or have read, because I don't feel comfortable evaluating others that I really don't know well enough. I'd just be guessing.

I don't think I've voted on anything yet for exactly that reason

@Emrakul I already read that and upvoted it.

It's exactly how I feel.

Why is everyone so obsessed with that wheelbarrow poem?

what poem?

I've answered what, 8 questions? That's not a lot. But I'd be able to answer more if I knew more. And I can't bring myself to write a sub-par answer if that's the case.

o_O

@HDE226868 Good, we have way to many people voting for the sake of voting

And by everyone, I mean benjamin. :P

@Emrakul We went through that in Mythology, too. Quite a few of the private beta questions are still unanswered.

@Emrakul Difficult != Intriguing ;)

I think it keeps people going back to them. And reading.

Anyone have a copy of A Handmaid's Tale around?

Just by asking about a virtually unknown work of literature I can make a very difficult-to-answer question even though it might be actually trivial.

I'm trying to determine how good my digital copy of the book is... it has lots of spelling errors (likely due to the scan quality being poor)... but it also doesn't use quotes at all for dialogue. :/

I can't decide if this is a question that would actually succeed on the site.

@Catija We are private beta, ask it and see how it fares

@Catija yes what do you need

If it's disputed take it to meta

@Riker Does the book use quotes?

?

@Catija I am just being loose with my votes at the start, not just voting for the sake of voting. I am voting on more than I normally would, but I think that is part of beta. I am also avoiding downvotes as part of beta.

You can even argue against your questino

like, literal "?

yes

@Helmar I know how it works... I just don't want to lose the non-existant rep I have.

it's a spanish/english combo version also, (english translated into spanish)

just a interesting note

@Catija what do you need me to quote?

@Catija That's why no one downvotes shitty answers either

OK... @Emrakul says no (with qualifications) and @Riker says yes (with qualifications)...

Meh.

Gotta sacrifice some for the site ;)

Are questions about reading on topic? Like, the act of reading?

@Benjamin The first part, I agree with. The last sentence, not so much.

Are questions about translations of works on topic?

@Benjamin For example?

@Catija no qualifications, just I can also provide spanish language quotes ;P

@Benjamin yes meta agreed

@NapoleonWilson I know, its just I don't want to encourage people to leave.

what passage do you need me to quote for you?

@Riker On the availability of translations

@Riker I don't need a quote... I'm trying to determine how crappy the scanned copy I have is. The spelling errors I can understand but the lack of quote marks is annoying.

ah okay

@Benjamin What do you want to know regarding translations?

@Catija ah okay, yeah mine has literal quotemarks

@Benjamin I think that the people you most want to stay are those that are okay with accepting downvotes.

@Benjamin Fortunately, in private beta you can assume most users know how SE works and don't give up from a few downvotes taken more personal than they are meant.

Generally it's hard to judge by a buzz word if something is on-topic

@Helmar About how to read. Like, whether a book is better read in one sitting.

If you think I wrote a crappo post, great! Downvote away.

@Emrakul Maybe we have the same version :P

lol

@Helmar What are the limitations, then?

hm, mine has both quotes an no quotes

@Helmar The closeness of various translations of a single text?

@Benjamin Honestly, only one way to find out

@HDE226868 I had never thought of that.

Actually ask

> "Who?" I say, resisting the urge

@Helmar I will test it then.

@NapoleonWilson Okay.

> Love?, said the commander

Thanks for the quick answers.

@Riker That looks terribly inconsistent

it is

I'll look into another book of hers, one moment

OK, I'm going to ask since it's weird.

@Catija this is the copy I have

found an online pdf here

has commentary on the left side, english in the middle, and then spanish on the right

@Emrakul in my copy, there's no consistent quote/no quote characters

Oryx & Crake uses quotes

the narrator uses both styles and so does Rita

And italics for imagined voices and flashback remembering voices

Seems consistent

and they use them from the start, it's not like it starts in the middle of the book

yeah, I don't get why

same type of dialogue

Asked... I'll try to post an excerpt from the book shortly... I have to do it from my iPad rather than my desktop.

ah okay

Does anyone remember what the question about the faked source of a novel was about?

Like claiming for the text to originate from some older transcribed source, while actually just being made-up by the author.

@NapoleonWilson it wasn't a tolkein thing, was it? i recall tolkein had this meta-narrative going on through his stories that he wasn't simply writing them but was merely an interpreter translating existing texts to English.

Tolkien did it, but Goldman is the contemporary master example with Princess Bride.

@doppelgreener It was answered with Tolkien indeed. But I just found an older example and wanted to see if the question is framed as a "first of" thing.

And presumably the ur-example is the Voynich manuscript.

@BESW my favourite interpretation of the Voynich manuscript is the "it's a tabletop RPG" one from XKCD

@BESW that one's got the same metanarrative, truly?

@doppelgreener Oh, Goldman doubles down on it.

Oh well, I guess I'm out again. I don't even know what that manuscript thing is. ;-)

The introduction is about how his dad read Morganstern's epic to him as a kid, and he loved it, but when he got it for his own son he realised it was a horribly boring political satire and his dad had only read him the good parts.

So The Princess Bride is Goldman's own abridgement of the original Morganstern, the "Good parts edition."

@BESW That's fabulous.

And he regularly breaks into the body of the text to comment on Morganstern's style or politics, or to explain what happens during the bits he's cutting out.

The Princess Bride film is great, and adheres to the broad spirit of the novel surprisingly well, but it's a tiny fragment of the glory of the novel.

(And now you know where they got the "grandfather reading to a sick kid" framing narrative.)

Actually I remember reading about a bit of this now! But the only bit which really stuck in my memory was that even the publisher got in on it -- there's a theoretical reunion scene that Goldman says he removed from the books, and people who wrote in asking about it got replies about legal troubles with Morgenstern's lawyer

Yup.

@Emrakul I have a pdf of the Voynich manuscript in my RPG resources file.

@BESW I do! They just reframed Goldman as the old man, explaining the story to the son rather than to the reader.

It's pretty much the sick kid is Goldman, and the grandfather has better optics than how he described his dad reading the "good parts" to him.

Yeah, doesn't make much sense to add to the existing answer.

@BESW OH. right. that part immediately skipped my mind somehow despite being completely obviously what was going on. nice.

@NapoleonWilson You may also want to look up "epistolary novel."

It's a whole genre of novel composed of fictional earlier fragments supposedly collected by the author.

Dracula is one of the best-known examples.

@BESW I'll just throw my examples (which are downright made-up claims for translating an older manuscript) as a comment on the existing answer. ;-)