The Reading Room

3:27 PM

@EJoshuaS Done. (Also, welcome to chat! Haven't seen you in here before.)

5 hours later…

Bookworm

8:26 PM

Q: For whom the bell tolls?

For whom the bell tolls actually?

poetry ernest-hemingway

8:51 PM

@Bookworm ...huh?

@Mithrandir It could conceivably - at least to someone who hasn't read the book, like me, though maybe @steeler or someone will correct me - be a legit question (whom does the bell toll for?) - but the image of what seems to be a totally irrelevant bell makes me wary.

Yeah, I'm writing a comment

Even then it seriously lacks context to make it look like a reasonable question.

If you need heavy acquaintence with the work to even judge if the question makes any sense at all, that's...a problem.

@NapoleonWilson why?

@Mithrandir Because questions are supposed to provide reasonable context and make sense?

9:00 PM

@NapoleonWilson I'd disagree with that as a general rule. If you don't know the work well enough to judge the question, then presumably you wouldn't be able to answer it either, so just don't do anything with it and move on.

(Agreed that that specific question seems fishy though.)

I'm pretty sure that this is one of the things that @BESW was talking about a while ago, that a question shouldn't have to include basic information about the work in the question itself for it to not not be received well.

That thing neither mentions the work it's about nor, if we're generous and take the tags as additional context, gives any signs of the asker even having read it (i.e. even the most basic "what have you tried").

Yes, but that's about this specific question, while your comment seemed to be a general message about all questions.

@Randal'Thor There's nuance there and that thing is way beyond any sensible threshold. It's a one-liner without the slightest context. I have not read the story, but feel confident to say this question in its current form doesn't make any sense at all.

A: Reading requirements

There shouldn't be any strict requirements about this. Some questions, such as reading-order questions, are best asked before someone has read the books. But even for plot explanation or literary analysis questions, it shouldn't be necessary to have read the book before asking questions about it...

9:05 PM

"Live and let live" is an honourable attitude to live by. But it fails when you see a genuinely terrible question.

Based on experience with the site, the community's attitude seems to be not that reading the book is the most basic form of research, but that uncritically believing anything on Wikipedia is.

If anyone is in the position to know that the question at its core does make sense, that person should rather improve the question into a proper one.

@BESW If that answer (which I totally agree with) is used to defend questions like that one, then there's some nuance that got lost in the meta discussion.

@NapoleonWilson Again, I agree that that particular question isn't good, but still think the general principle you expressed goes too far. They're not equivalent.

@NapoleonWilson The question above is absolutely a poor one, but not having read the work is not its problem. Bringing that up is at best a distraction from the subject at hand.

@Randal'Thor Then maybe I didn't express it properly.

9:08 PM

If I asked the question Why does Merion like cupcakes?, and repeated just that in the question body, and tagged it short-stories and nino-cipri, would that be providing enough background for you?

If a question is confusing to you because you haven't read the book, that's totally fine. If it's a one-liner that makes no effin' sense, it's not. Maybe that distinction got lost in my statements.

@NapoleonWilson You're expressing your problems with that question as broad principles which just don't hold up to scrutiny as broad principles even though they're at least tangentially accurate for the particular question. People are responding to your statements of principle.

@Mithrandir It's a little questionable really. You could mention the work it's about (which afterall isn't even in the tags) as well as some context about the character liking cupcakes and what it adds to the story.

@BESW Yeah, I expressed those broad statements less nuanced than I should have indeed. I used the existing context of the question we were discussing and wasn't aiming for a broader meta discussion.

For example, requiring questions to explain things that qualified answerers ought to already know is a fast and easy way to get a lot of bad answers from people who think a brief overview of a complex topic replaces expert knowledge.

(oh, if anyone wants to write a tag wiki for nino-cipri go ahead)

9:17 PM

For RPG.SE I've made a set of pre-constructed comment segments for addressing common subjects. Some of them seem relephant here:

> - Titles, while useful summaries for questions, do not replace the question itself.
- Please describe the problem or challenge you're facing, rather than [just asking for help with the solution you've decided is best](http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66377/244929).
- Please [edit] your question to tell us about your own research, and specifically what you're confused by in what you've found.