The Reading Room

6:38 AM

@ChristopheStrobbe I think your edit is too drastic, and assumes a definition of "poetry" which may be completely different from what the OP wanted. IMO, you should roll back that edit and post a new question instead, rather than what's essentially putting words in the OP's mouth.

Bookworm

6:49 AM

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Q: Why are the names Rumi and Mevlana respectively used for the famous poet?

This famous Persian poet and mystic was named Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī (جلال‌الدین محمد بلخى‎) or Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (جلال‌الدین محمد رومی), where Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad was his actual personal name while Balkhī and Rūmī were nisbas referring respectively to his birthplace and the plac...

Gareth Rees

7:09 AM

@Randal'Thor I think Christophe's edit is fine. OPs very rarely return to fix problems with their questions, so it's better for site regulars be brave and try to make questions answerable, than to leave them to languish in an unanswerable state.

Rand al'Thor

7:35 AM

@GarethRees But those bullet points are completely made up by Christophe, not the OP's at all. If Christophe is able to ask a more clear/answerable question on this topic, it would be better for him to post it than to so drastically rewrite someone else's.

Gareth Rees

7:47 AM

@Randal'Thor That seems to be predicated on the view that the OP's intention is paramount, and that the only permissible edits are those that can be seen as preserving the OP's intention, yes?

I disagree with that view. The OP's intention (insofar as we can guess what it is) is just one factor to be considered.

Rand al'Thor

Well, it's their question. They have the right to roll back any edits if it turns the question into something they didn't want to ask.

I don't think this should be equated with the issue of authorial intent in a book.

If I'm asking a question on a website, I want an answer to the question I'm actually trying to ask, not a question that someone else created out of mine.

Gareth Rees

@Randal'Thor If you asked a question, and people couldn't figure out what you meant, then you would come back and respond with clarifications, or edit your question to make it clearer, yes?

Rand al'Thor

I would, yes.

But I don't think someone sacrifices the right to ask their own question just by not logging in and responding to queries for a few days.

Gareth Rees

How long do you think they should be given?

There is a group of posters, who are new to the site, and possibly for whom English is not their first language, who are simultaneously unable or unwilling to post a clear question, respond to queries, or edit their question to clarify it. This presents the site with a choice between (1) preserving the OP's intention and closing the question as unclear; or (2) clarifying the question, taking the risk that the OP's intention is not preserved. It is my opinion that (2) is better for the site.

Rand al'Thor

8:09 AM

There's another option which doesn't involve hijacking someone else's question yet still puts good content on the site, which would be closing the original unclear question and posting a new clear one.

@GarethRees It's not about a time cutoff (who knows, someone could log back in after years, even though that hardly ever happens). For me the boundary line to draw is between editing to clarify a question and editing to turn it into a completely different question.

Gareth Rees

You're exaggerating the scope of Christophe's edit — it doesn't "hijack" the question, nor change it into a "completely different question". The edit merely attempts to clarify a point that was ambiguous in the original.

Rand al'Thor

OK, not a completely different question. But it adds significant new material to the question, which might take it in a completely different direction from what the OP actually wants to know.

Let's say someone answers the question as it now stands, and then the OP comes back and says "no, actually that wasn't what I meant" and edits the question to use some different definition of poetry. What do we do?

Tell the OP "it's not your question any more" and roll back to Christophe's version? Delete the answer posted in good faith as "not an answer"?

Gareth Rees

8:30 AM

That's the risk I referred to. But the existence of a risk is not justification by itself for doing nothing. The risk has to be compared against the reward.

In this case the risk is small: OPs rarely come back to dispute clarifying edits, and in any case, what other definition of poetry could they have in mind?

Napoleon Wilson

8:46 AM

@Randal'Thor But if the OP's authorial intention is to ask a question that is ostensibly inappropriate and will get closed, it becomes rather moot.

@Randal'Thor They sacrifce that right already by getting their question closed. You don't have a right to get invalid questions answered anyway.

@Randal'Thor I wanna see the face of the OP when he does come back to see his question closed and some dude "stole" it and reasked it.

At that point he can't edit his question in any way to get it reopened anymore either, be that in a way it was already edited or in some other way he intended to ask it. It won't ever get reopened if some power user already asked a duplicate. So even under the viewpoint of protecting the OP's intention this solution would seem worse.

Gareth Rees

I doubt that a rights-based analysis is going to be productive — before you can argue in terms of peoples' rights you need a shared idea of what those rights are. And I don't think there is general agreement about that

Napoleon Wilson

Sure sure.

Gareth Rees

Hence I have always tried to take a consequentialist approach

Napoleon Wilson

I'm just trying to dispel the authorial intention myth when it shatters against the site's scope.

A closed (and ultimately deleted) question that was intentional doesn't seem preferable over an open (and ultimately answered) question that might compromise that intention slightly.

(Of course all under the assumption that it would get closed, which isn't far off with how the question looked and the 4 close-votes it already had.)

Gareth Rees

I agree with that. There have been several good questions that have been closed and deleted partly due to reluctance to make clarifying edits.

For example, this question was closed for lack of a clarifying edit even though it would have been fine with the edit.

Napoleon Wilson

9:06 AM

Hmm, that's...an odd one. But yes, editing it would be preferable over downright assuming it's a literary question because it was asked on a literature site. In times where a lot of users is not in the slightest aware how they even end up on a site, that's a dangerous assumption in the context of deeply religious works that the next best guy believes to be factual.

Gareth Rees

Here's another example — downvoted and automatically deleted when an edit could have saved it

I made a clarifying edit to that last one — please vote to undelete!

Christophe Strobbe

9:24 AM

@Randal'Thor The OP actually did come back after the comments were posted (I checked the "last seen" on their profile before I edited the question) and did not bother to clarify what they meant, neither by posting a comment, nor by editing the question. In such a situation, I assume the OP either does not care or needs some help. They can always roll back the edit, of course.

Bookworm

11:07 AM

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Q: What do the lines in bold from ‘Pride and Prejudice’ mean?

Mr Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty;he looked at her without admiration at the ball;and when they next met,he looked at her only to criticise.But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face,than he began to find i...

jane-austen pride-and-prejudice

New Topic Challenge Suggestion

1:58 PM

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A: Suggest your Lit.SE reading challenges here!

The Tale of the Genji The Tale of the Genji, written in the early 11th century by the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, is almost consistently described as the oldest novel in Japanese literature. Depending on how you define "novel" it may be the world's first novel. There are En...

Bookworm

6:04 PM

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Q: In 'Pride and Prejudice',why was Mary's performance bad compared to Elizabeth's?

Mary,who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, and was always impatient for display... had neither genius nor taste, and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited ma...

meaning jane-austen pride-and-prejudice

Rand al'Thor

@ChristopheStrobbe My concern is - in terms of consequentialism as Gareth put it - what happens if they do come back and roll back the edit, or change the question to a different specification of their original post, after your version has been answered?

10 hours ago, by Rand al'Thor

Tell the OP "it's not your question any more" and roll back to Christophe's version? Delete the answer posted in good faith as "not an answer"?

@GarethRees Pretty sure I voted to leave that one open. Seems like some of the close votes came from an idea that the question was "theological" and shouldn't be on-topic here.

@GarethRees This one I'd already upvoted. Now got it undeleted.

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