@JonEricson anyways, if you take nothing else away from this conversation - know that I really do appreciate your feedback more than you realize (if you read a lot of chats in here, you'll see that @JackDouglas has persuaded me that I'm wrong on several occasions and I've deleted/edited posts to address this - not to say we agree on everything but I am at least open to solidly reasoned arguments that disagree with me)
It seems that many of the arguments I've gotten lately are not actually responding to any of my points, but basically just emotional disagreements because this is not the site these folks want
i.e. rather than explain why the use of first person is not applying doctrine, all I get is that this would be a tough burden for new users
So are many things. We edit and comment and they learn and we move on
And even if my posts are all DV'd into oblivion (but they haven't been thus far), if I do nothing other than compel others to actually write definitions that the community does agree on then I've accomplished my mission
But the complete absence of clear definitions and references to basic questions is not acceptable IMHO
@Dan I'm emotionally disagreeing with you because I think you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Ask @MonicaCellio: meta posts just don't change things on a site automatically.
I don't want to whine and complain about something that isn't here (which is honestly what I've been doing up until recently) if I'm not willing to do something about it
I'm doing something about it
And if I fail, oh well
I still get a lot of use out of this site. I'll just go on ignoring the stuff I don't like (doesn't bother me much)
But I will be sad because I will know we are chasing off a lot of non-Christian participants who would have been great contributors
bmargulies stated it well: "I think that this is a very hard problem, since the people who show up to ask are not, reliably, going to be very sensitive to this topic. Chasing people away because they enter questions that have unstated doctrinal assumptions doesn't feel very friendly, but a front page entirely composed of questions about how the Hebrew Bible prophesies Jesus isn't going to keep people like me around, either."
Believe me, I know there is a balance here
I don't actually expect the community to completely run with my extreme positions and ideals at times
But I do hope to spur the community on towards clearly defining when they will take various stances, and when they will not
This way new users will have clear cut guidelines and references to learn more
They won't have to read polemics and get confused and frustrated as I've been for over a year
Especially those who think about these things deeply and recognize the underlying conflicts (I understand that many do not)
@JonEricson as you well know, we are witnessing the failures of postmodernism itself, but we are attempting to use a postmodern system to moderate a group of religions that reject postmodernism :P
I'm just getting us to think more deeply about that and address the dissonances
And I can say confidently that several users have merely given up on this site. Some still participate as they please, most (especially Jews) have left altogether, at least one Orthodox participant has pretty much stopped answering (although I admit he had some issues with his tone), and one actual scholar showed up and decided it wasn't worth sticking around (partly because he was busy, but also because he felt he's be wasting his time after scanning the questions and answers)
@JonEricson not on this site, because if you try to do anything that anybody objects to the mods say "bring it up on meta" knowing that it will die there. That's not how it's supposed to work; on other sites where I'm active meta posts mean something, like the guidance from SE says they do.
And it's all fine and dandy to tell @Dan to just act instead of discussing (I wish people would do more of that too), but you can't ignore the history when some of us have done just that. I can understand Dan not wanting to sign up for days of angst because he tried to fix a post.
So, instead, people drift away and those who are left get to say "hey, no problems here - no one's complaining". Fine. No site can be everything to all people, but it still feels like there is a lot of room for improvement here. We'll see.
I'm Grace Note, I'm a Community Coordinator for Stack Exchange. I've been asked to give some words on how the general policies of editing are handled across the network as a whole, and the theory of editing etiquette.
Edits are to improve and fix posts, not to change them. This is the core of w...
Look at the bold bits.
@MonicaCellio I agreed with you at first with your proposed edit, but I didn't notice that it failed to "Respect the author's voice and content." That's really important.
As a result of recent debate over whether certain answers would be considered acceptable on this site, we posed the question "What are we looking for in answers?". In my foray into the issue, I noted that of the two main classes of questions we field (questions about the field of hermeneutics and...
And this doesn't have a lot of upvotes, but a) it doesn't have DVs either and (b) it's newer so in our time of meta slump, so consider the merits of this:
Sometimes personal belief, not dispassionate analysis, governs actions.
We all have biases; it's part of being human, and it's certainly part of participating on a site about religion. But we're looking for questions and answers that start from the text and follow some logical path to answers. ...
The only answer to this has moderate support but requires something from SE. Any chance of advancement on this
We want answers to show their work, and of course we want answers to be useful. We've now got a fairly clear idea of what our standards are and what we should do with answers that fail on both counts.
Slightly trickier is answers that are useful but do not meet our standards for showing their wo...
I'm Grace Note, I'm a Community Coordinator for Stack Exchange. I've been asked to give some words on how the general policies of editing are handled across the network as a whole, and the theory of editing etiquette.
Edits are to improve and fix posts, not to change them. This is the core of w...
The Library
The Library