The Reading Room

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1:52 AM

@bobble That's fantastic! It's quite unusual for answers to be accepted on this site, in my experience. I don't know why that is.

bobble

According to my sample size of 1, question askers always accept and upvote answers.

verbose

haha

I hope your perfect record is maintained even with further answers you provide!

bobble

I highly doubt it.

verbose

Now now. That is no way to think.

4 hours later…

bobble

5:56 AM

Is there a particular reason that only the end of the tag excerpt shows up on the main tag page?

I've only noticed this for character-analysis - the main tag page shows a section of the excerpt which makes no sense by itself, and you have to click through to see the full excerpt.

3 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

8:59 AM

@verbose Hamlet used to have a policy of not accepting answers here because many analysis/interpretation questions can have multiple correct answers. At some point Mith decided to be Hamletty in the same way.

Of course there's the usual SE phenomenon of one-shot users asking a question on an unregistered account and never coming back to accept, but here that's amplified by some of our most active askers choosing to have low accept rates.

Tsundoku has a low accept rate too, IIRC, though I don't know if that's for the same reasons.

@bobble Yeah, the system automatically removes certain starting phrases, like "[Tag name] is ..." or "Use this tag for ...", from the excerpt preview. In the case of character-analysis, I'm not sure exactly why, but that's definitely an excerpt that needs updating.

verbose

9:41 AM

@Randal'Thor yeah, I think that's actually not helpful to the site. It depresses reputation, for one thing. It's also discouraging to new users if they work painstakingly on an answer and it gets a couple upvotes but no actual accept.

Unrelated, I just saw (and edited, and answered) this question. I don't have the rep to edit tags. But kabir-das is a terrible tag. The poet is universally known as Kabir. Please fix!

Srsly, nobody who is looking for info about Kabir would ever think to search for questions tagged kabir-das. That is not a thing.

kabir-das isn't even his name. das means devotee or servant. Since he's a religious poet, it means "Kabir, the servant of god."

Rand al'Thor

9:59 AM

@verbose You do have the rep to edit tags, but it's easier with mod powers. (You'd have had to edit out the old tag, create the new one, and transfer the tag wiki excerpt across; I could simply rename it using the moderator tag-merge tool.) Anyway, done. Thanks for the information!

It's easy to make mistakes with such things, where naming customs are different in different cultures. Another example where my knowledge of Turkish naming customs helped to avoid an answer referring to Mehmet Bey (= 'Mr Mehmet') by his 'surname' and just calling him "Bey".

verbose

@Randal'Thor so he’s Dr Mr Bey?

@Randal'Thor thanks for fixing!

Bookworm

Q: Title roughly translates to Way to Oregon

The writer of the book was a person of color. The story is about a group who were involved in trade when Europeans first arrived in America. There were frequent killing of bison and natives to clear land for new settlements. The book was a Bengali version translated from English. I do not remembe...

story-identification

Rand al'Thor

10:43 AM

@verbose I don't know what honorific would be used for a doctor in Turkish. In academic settings, "hoca" is used for professors and PhD doctors, but that literally means "teacher" so it wouldn't be used for a medical doctor.

@bobble Oh, and it's Shokhet! He used to be a regular around here. I miss his contributions, and our chats about so many books we had in common.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Wouldn't that leave the tag wiki for the old tag still existing, and so the old tag not vacuumed, and the next person who asks might find that tag by name?

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas The old tag would still be vacuumed as soon as it no longer appeared on any questions. (The orphaned tag wiki would still ghost around somewhere in the system, but wouldn't show up on a tag search.)

4 hours later…

b_jonas

2:31 PM

I see. I thought tags aren't vacuumed if they have a description.

Knight wants Loong back

2:50 PM

@verbose Forgetting what happened between us before, thanks for giving me the answer for that Saint Kabir question.

2 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

4:35 PM

Congratulations to @GarethRees on a very well-deserved 20k reputation!

2 hours later…

Eddie Kal

6:47 PM

I think "Dr." is pretty common in Turkey

Doktor

Rand al'Thor

7:12 PM

As a word, yes, but I don't know if it's used as a form of address like "bey" or "hoca".

Eddie Kal

Dr. is

Prof. Dr. Süheyl Ünver

Gareth Rees

7:53 PM

@Randal'Thor Time to offer some bounties then

Napoleon Wilson

@GarethRees Who was your profile picture modeled after, if anyone?

Gareth Rees

@NapoleonWilson It's a photo of a bust of Arsinoë IV of Egypt (half-sister of Cleopatra VII) in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen

Napoleon Wilson

8:16 PM

I see. Thank you.

Rand al'Thor

@EddieKal That's a title, not a form of address. I don't know who that person is, but assuming an academic from the "Prof.", he'd only be called "Prof. Dr. Süheyl Ünver" on official documents or announcements, while in everyday life his students and less-close colleagues would call him "Süheyl hoca".

Bookworm

9:00 PM

Q: What does raw in this context mean?

Good evening! I have just started reading a book written by one of the most distinguished authors around the globe- Charles Dickens. It's entitled "Great expectations. I wanted to pick up my English for the next level and due to the fact, that I'm not a native speaker, I've met difficulty underst...

meaning

b_jonas

9:36 PM

@Bookworm Reading Dickens to improve your English? strange.

Is that recommended?

1 hour later…

verbose

10:44 PM

@b_jonas Whatever works. I know a Serb who learned English via those RPGs back in the days where you played by typing in green letters on a black screen. It's fun to chat with him because of the disconnect between his command of English (quirky but perfectly adequate) and his cultural references.

Like, he asked me if I'd seen Les Mis, and I said, "No, but I've read the book." And he said, "Oh, I didn't know they had made a novel from it."

Rand al'Thor

Is Les Mis an English cultural reference? :-P

bobble

Is it okay if my answer just paraphrases/quotes other analyses of the same line? I Googled the specific line of the poem that the question is about and found some quite decent ideas already out there.

(About the "Caged Bird" question)

Rand al'Thor

@bobble It's OK to draw from other sources, but the quality of the answer would depend on what those sources are. Shmoop or CliffsNotes, meh. An academic research paper or thesis, great.

bobble

I ask because I'm planning to use similar arguments as those I found, and I'm not sure how to structure the answer. Could I just cite those sources as inspiration? Because I plan to expand on the interpretations I found online.

ah darn, just noticed I forgot to edit the title of that "raw" question. "What does "raw" mean in this context?" is more grammatically correct than "What does raw in this context mean?" Could someone with full edit privileges fix that?

Rand al'Thor

11:08 PM

@bobble Sure. Something I've often seen done (e.g. by myself and Matt Thrower) is to write an answer based on some arguments in the answerer's own words, and then include a list of sources at the end, saying something like "this answer was based on / inspired by ..."

That sounds like a great answer, btw: expanding on the arguments convincingly in your own words and also citing the sources that inspired you.

bobble

Sounds like a plan!

Rand al'Thor

Examples of this approach by me and Matt (randomly found among our recent answers).

@bobble The raw text has been edited ;-)

bobble

I like how in Puzzling I can just fix other people's grammar. Here I have to wait through review queues

Rand al'Thor

Full editing privs are at just 1k reputation on a beta site like this.

You're almost halfway there already.

bobble