I am conflicted. If I vote for the clever people they will stop answering questions. But if I vote for the solemn people they may become even more zealous and continue answering questions.
It's sort of like Who do you make head of the department? Obviously, the one who contributes the least research - which means the research people lose a voice in administration.
Over on ELL three of the four mods have virtually disappeared since they were appointed.
I think it is and has been on topic already. However, there's only so much punctuation, and I think we have a rich source of answers punctuation. We have many posts on commas, full stops, and semicolons; colons, ellipses, etc. So I think they would be answered as dupes, mostly, and not if the question asks only to proofread.
@phenry I believe that's true, and those that aren't should be educational for all. I will not accept them if they are merely requesting proofreading, though. Admittedly a fine line.
@medica If the question is useful or interesting, sure. I don't see a purpose behind "How do I use interrobangs properly?" but asking what to call a particular symbol or punctuation mark in English is fine. It can be hard to look those up. We also get a bunch of questions about whether this or that comma is correct. I don't have a problem with those either as long as the question hasn't already been answered elsewhere.
@MrHen If you could sum up your entire platform in one phrase, what would it be? My most valued "contribution" would be to make this a user-attractive site, to hopefully attract and keep potential good contributors. You have many well-thought-out positions. Do you have one that most represents you?
@AndrewLeach Here’s a thought-experiment for you. Can you think of any manner of (non-duplicate) punctuation-related question that would not be a good fit for ELU? If so, why would it not be a good fit?
Anyone with questions they'd like to ask the candidates, here is the place to do it. Just leave your question; we will answer them as soon as we are able.
More seriously: I think that really simple, introductory questions about punctuation such as question marks, periods, commas and so on wouldn't be a good fit for ELU. I'm not sure if we'd really need to close them, though.
I believe we have a rich store of answers from which to mine an appropriate response. Some might be a better fit for ELL; the '#' question, though, was very interesting to me, and on-topic.
@MrHen GR was originally meant to cover any matters too basic for a site intended per the charter for linguists, etymologists, and serious language enthusiasts. Limiting it to linkable online wordbooks or treasure-books would be a major departure from that.
@tchrist That was my original impression, too, but it makes me wonder why the reason wasn't listed as "Too Basic". Would that have been too inflammatory? We had a discussion earlier in this chat about what various candidates think fits under GR and no one I heard was using what you wrote as their starting point.
"Do I really have to end a sentence with a period?" "Why do I have to bother making subjects and verbs agree?" "Can I just use only regular verbs so that I don't have to learn the irregulars?" "Is it ok to write in only all-lower or only all-upper case?" "What's wrong prefixing a past-tense verb with a modal?"
@MrHen That bothered me.
I read it.
Hence my timidity regarding firearms.
The reason I bring this up is that the number of possible questions of the "TOO BASIC" mold is without bound, and as more and more nonnative learners of low experience, education, and basic mental firepower gravitate here, the numbers of such questions will only keep rising without bound. We already see that happening.
@tchrist I can understand that. I think GR is the current representative issue that splits people between the "be nice" camp and the "avoid crappy work" camp.
@tchrist Yes. Right now, I am of the opinion that close reasons like GR have helped stem the worst of it. We have a very good answer rate and most of the questions that get stuck in the Unanswered queue aren't the stereotypical Too Basic questions.
But I would like to hone the system a bit to try to keep questions interesting enough to read.
The quality of questions just gets worse as these proliferate. The initial culture of a well-crafted question being rewarded with an equally well-supported answer has given way to one-and-done drive-by questioners that do little if anything to help people who come later. They are too simple and too localized and infinite.
@Cerberus Il bianco e dolce cigno / cantando more, ed io / piangendo, giung' al fin del viver mio. / Stran' e diversa sorte, / ch'ei more sconsolato, /Ed io moro beato. / Morte che nel morire / M'empie di gioia tutt' e di desire; / Se nel morir' altro dolor non sento, / Di mille mort' il di sarei contendo.
Something I really do want to help focus on is giving the "bored old timers" something interesting to play with. Part of that will be continuing to tune the closing patterns and part will be finding a way to get the few interesting questions we do get some better visibility.
Not that I have great ideas on how to accomplish that just yet... but it is certainly something I care about.
@MrHen Something I really do want to help focus on is giving the "bored old timers" something interesting to play with. Part of that will be continuing to tune the closing patterns and part will be finding a way to get the few interesting questions we do get some better visibility. - MrHen
I maintain that if the question is one that needs nothing but the ear of a native speaker to make a judgement call on regarding its viability, that it is of no interest here.
@Cerberus Well, I did not say that I did or that I did not. But since you have asked, I am not certain (for want of research and inquiry) that such would be welcome there either. They still show no research, propose no theories. They're just one-and-done gimmes.
@tchrist I think that is too harsh, personally. I don't have a problem helping people with questions like that as long as the question would likely apply to future visitors.
For instance, prepositions are a bitch to learn and I don't have a problem helping people get answers for those.
@medica It only shows up after you submit the chat post.
We have somehow lost the former cultural expectation that a questioner will have done their homework on the matter first, and present that to us in their question.
@tchrist Are you talking about things that are actually in a dictionary, or things like the oh, to... question? Because I think the latter would certainly interest people on ELL.
@Cerberus I confess that I don’t have a dozen exemplars of such questions at arm’s reach, and that I have therefore not done my own homework to back up what I am saying.
I really wish that I could sort this query such that the shortest closed questions came up on top. This would give us a set of possible too-short-to-bother-with drive-by questions to examine.
The one on the tools page doesn't tell you whether you are eligible to cast a delete vote on it, since it doesn't know whether you already have done that.
There's an MSE question on this, long unfulfilled.
Some high-rep users regularly go through the recently-close-voted and recently-delete-voted queues accessible from the 10k tools. You can tell this is happening because you often wind up putting the final delete vote on postings whose first two delete votes are from the same small set of delete-v...
No, that's too broad a statement without discrete points.
Now, regarding flags.
The LQ review queue now gets not just auto-LQ stuff thrown there, but also NAA flags and I believe LQ flags as well. This was done to try to get nonmods working the bulk of those so take some of the burden off them.
I don't know how well that has turned out, nor whether it might be different here than elsewhere.
EL&U 2014 Election
EL&U 2014 Election