A while back we burninated the exegesis tag because it was being applied to questions that asked for exegesis -- which is an awful lot of them, so the tag wasn't useful. Today I saw that the tag had popped up again and detagged the two questions that had used it, in favor of hermeneutical-approa...
I'm noticing a rise in questions that could easily be answered with a Google search and/or Wikipedia article. For instance:
What Is The Aorist Tense Of A Verb?
What sort of “slave” is Paul referring to in 1 Corinthians 7:21-23?
The second question at least begins from a specific text but coul...
Hi @Caleb, question for you. (I'm making an inference that you're the right person to ask.) What does it mean when a flag about comment cleanup is marked helpful but no comments are cleaned up? Not a complaint or anything; just trying to understand. Thanks.
As mentioned over at C.SE when dealing with this very same issue, this has been addressed by SE before. Jeff Atwood posted the following helpful chart in a blog post:
Jeff further elaborates:
The key distinction to make here, in my mind, is that all questions
are ultimately in service of...
@MonicaCellio Yup yup, and I know which flag you're talking about. To me that means "I see why this flag made sense and it was a valid concern to raise, but to me it's not over that magic line and I can't bring myself to delete, at least not yet."
In the specific case one of the factors was that none of the comments made sense without the whole thread, and there was at least one point of criticism on the answer that seemed to be a valid comment (not judging whether it was right or wrong, just that it belonged. Also one of the parties being a mod made me think they could cleanup the mess if they felt it was dealt with in the answer.
@Caleb none of the combattants in this case are mods, actually. I'm not sure which comment in the set I identified is valid, but I could be missing something -- or it may well be that there's a valid point under the rudeness but I'm having trouble seeing past the latter to the former. Anyway, just wanted a review, so thanks.
Oh I see; perhaps your mod reference applied to a different flag, which was declined. Same question, different flags.
@MonicaCellio Hmm, I haven't actually declined any of your recent flags.
@MonicaCellio Jon? Well technically he's an employee now but I'm still counting on him around here and at least figure he can clean up his own comment messes if necessary.
@Caleb huh, ok. There was a batch that all got handled around the same time (or so it appeared), and in some of those cases you deleted answers, so I thought you'd done all of them. Hang on; I'm not afraid of bringing things into the open.
@MonicaCellio Yes, I found a pile up the other day and cleared it all out. I do remember dismissing the comment flag without actually deleting. I would have thought twice before declining -- not that I'm afraid to just that I carefully think about my reason for doing so when I do.
@Caleb oh, I guess with comments dismiss turns into a decline. With comments you can't leave an explanation, unlike with post flags. Ok, that makes sense.
@MonicaCellio Huh. As you suggested, there is no such thing as decline, and dismiss auto-removes it without asking anything further. I really thought there was still an option to decline but apparently not.
@Caleb @JonEricson I flagged this as offensive for the first sentence (declined). Separately but on the same question I flagged this answer to suggest that the Ron-et-al comments be flushed (keep everything after mine, and I leave mine to others' discretion). That was marked helpful but no other action.
(I started to flag individual comments on the latter -- "just-so story", really? -- but then decided the problem was larger and figured mods would prefer a single flag.)
@MonicaCellio I'm fine with the first staying. I think Mr. Jones once opined that not deleting was helpful to show the commenter's character. But I wouldn't object to it being removed either.
@JonEricson yeah, in a lot of cases, with both Ron and Mike Bull (different pathologies), I've opted not to flag or VtD just so the drek is there for all to see. But even so, we strive for a certain level of civility and when I came across those comments last night I thought they were on the wrong side of the line. If others diagree that's fine; the point of a flag is to get eyes on something, not (always) to assert a strong position.
@MonicaCellio Ron's question isn't terribly civil either. If we are going to make him look better in the comments, let's improve the tone of the question too. ;-)
@JonEricson true. To be clear, my flags on the comments weren't to make him look better; they were to make the site look better, as a place that doesn't tolerate that sort of thing. The question is also problematic, though. I wasn't here for the big kerfuffle with the last one of his questions that somebody edited for tone; are we signing up for grief by fixing this one?
@MonicaCellio I was sorta kidding about making people look good. I wouldn't touch his answer, for instance. But this question does get a fair number of views, so it's a good goal to clean it up a bit. If Ron complains, I think we can deal with it. ;-)
@Dan Slim to nil. But that doesn't mean that we can't decide on community policy and close them anyway. I'd be inclined to see it refined into a sub-set of that -- not just general reference but also somehow off topic.
@Caleb slim to nil because you're opposed or because you think SE won't grant it? Remember that with custom off-topic reasons we can make our own now, while before "general reference" had to be specifically requested as an exception to the standard close-reason list.
I'm not completely opposed to it, which is why I suggesting we might be able to hack it into off-topic, but I'd like to see a more nuanced definition for that other than just "too easy" or "already first google hit".
I'm noticing a rise in questions that could easily be answered with a Google search and/or Wikipedia article. For instance:
What Is The Aorist Tense Of A Verb?
What sort of “slave” is Paul referring to in 1 Corinthians 7:21-23?
The second question at least begins from a specific text but coul...
