@Sobachatina same exact is best, and deviations in any directions are equally bad - like a normal distribution, a few centimeters don't matter, much taller or much smaller is not so nice.
@Cerberus lol by kicked off it, i didn't mean i was kick off of the work. I meant the remote connection broke(probably because someone carelessly kicked me off without checking if i was actually doing something important first)
I delete comments if they: (a) mention Community Wiki, (b) are arguments, (c) refer to issues that were already corrected/edited, or (d) just stupid/irrelevant.
@Aaronut OK. I wasn't sure whether to do something, because it seemed like such a small matter on such an old question, and comments are allowed to go offtopic. On the other hand, you are right, it was very very silly.
Seriously though, don't think too hard about decisions like that. Comments are disposable entities anyway; if it looks stupid or doesn't seem to belong, turf it.
i'd suggested asian-cuisine but that created an uproar because we might get indian cuisine questions mixed with chinese cuisine questions...heaven forbid
@rumtscho The technically-correct but politically-incorrect term is Oriental cuisine. Asian cuisine may technically include Saudi Arabia and Cyprus but practically it means Oriental + Indian (and surrounding regions).
And I can assure you that there is only a chance overlap between people who are specialists in near eastern cuisine and people who are specialists in oriental cuisine
The problem is that all of the Asian cuisines borrow from each other; quite a lot of traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Thai cuisine is similar to dishes from Indian and Indonesian cuisine.
@Aaronut my point was that there are cuisines which are similar and can be lumped together because they use similar principles and ingredients and are cooked by the same people, and that "asian cuisine" includes several such clusters, and we should choose one of them for the contest
Obviously, Japanese curries are also somewhat similar to Indian curries (although Thai is closer to both of them).
And Japanese cuisine has a ton of confections that are quite similar to Indian ones, although I'm not too familiar with the specifics (never made any of them myself).
There will always be some degree of similarity between any pair of cuisines - roasted duck is known in China and in France - maybe we should look into the degree of similarity.
@Aaronut You could say it for any other place, it is maybe less known. For example, many foreigners are surprised to learn that Germans eat noodles as often as Italians.
@rumtscho shrug well, in this day and age we're all connected, I'm talking about traditional cuisines.
There's actually a word for what happens when recipes and techniques get imported from one part of the world and then re-imported back there in a different way, but I forget the name. It's very common.
Question: can we just call the most recent salt/chicken question a duplicate of the original one? Aaronut's answer there mentions the dependence on time: cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/18889/…
@rumtscho Only on meta; on the main site, downvoting is supposed to mean "not useful". And quite honestly I find those questions to be not useful; nobody cares about how much salt gets absorbed into the pores of chicken meat when it's cooked. Not even medical researchers because it is completely meaningless.
@Aaronut I rarely downvote questions. But if downvoting is meant to be applied to the same questions which should be closed, it doesn't make so much sense.
@rfusca Yeah, the logic is so twisted if you actually try to follow it; I have gut problems, and one day I made chicken soup, and it turned out really well, so that must be because it absorbed a lot of salt, which made me feel better afterward, which means that salt absorbed INTO meat (but not in broth!) aids digestion.
@rumtscho Downvoting is just more of a blunt instrument; it's true that useless question would ordinarily be closed, but a downvote might also be used for questions that are poorly-written, start with a false premise, etc.
You know the saying, a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for his client? I think you can replace lawyer with doctor or dentist and it would still make sense.
I remember that EL&U has it, and some other site wanted it (they wrote about it on their meta) and the decision was not to use it (or at least not to codify it in their faq)
Simply put, we're a Q&A site, not a dictionary or encyclopedia. If you're looking for a definition or a generic explanation of a thing or concept, use one of those.
Same as we do for recipes, right? You want a recipe, use a search engine, not what we're about. Off topic.
There have been various people over the years saying things like "but we want to provide a good search result" - but I think that pretty much falls apart once there already is a good one (or 30).
@Jefromi Hence why people asked for "general reference" - the idea being that a dictionary or encyclopedia is already good enough and trivially easy to find.
Anyway, the end does not justify the means; it's not pertinent whether a question would "provide valuable information" or be better than other search results.
well, the accepted and highest-upvoted answer on the general reference request suggest that the quality of the answers a search engine gives does matter...
FYI, this close reason was implemented for testing on http://scifi.stackexchange.com and http://english.stackexchange.com
We're still evaluating it. For background see
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/
And specifically
Per the discussion in Stack Exchange...
@derobert Yeah, but it was Jeff who wrote that and Jeff who declined the feature (and, more recently, Jeff who left the company)... so, take it with a grain of salt.
given, it was implemented on Scifi and English, which seems to say that different sites can have different close reasons, maybe we can get some of our own. Or get it turned on here. It'll not be turned on network-wide, but if we ask for it, maybe we can have it
@derobert I saw Google results as more of an heuristic than a rule. A perfect hit in the first 3 Google results proves that the question doesn't need better research, but it's still possible for people to ask questions that are easily answered by references sources and just don't happen to be prominent Google hits.
For some background on the broader topic, see: Are questions that are easily answered with Google appropriate for the site? This is essentially a smaller subset of that.
I want to state for the record that I am an ardent supporter of "Google questions" because the whole idea of Stack Exchange i...
I think over a long enough time, every Q&A site eventually gets to the point where all of the really easy questions have either already been asked or are no longer interesting. It's not just general reference but also the vast sea of college-Freshman "how do I learn to cook" questions.
@Aaronut of course, when we get to the point where they've already been asked, they should be closed as duplicates (not as off-topic, not-constructive, etc.)
@derobert It gets tricky when the repetitive AND bad ones also get deleted; that's the point at which you need to create canonical resources, like we did for [food-safety].
Sure, nothing wrong with deleting a completely worthless question—but gotta keep in mind, that leaving them open lets Google find them, and direct people who search under those weird terms to the real question.
But yeah, a lot are so bad that no conceivable search will ever hit them
Somebody should tell James that if he wants to really get salt into his chicken, he should grind it up to ash consistency and then just mix it into a paste.
Then he'd have just one huge massively-salty chicken nugget.
FYI, this close reason was implemented for testing on http://scifi.stackexchange.com and http://english.stackexchange.com
We're still evaluating it. For background see
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple/
And specifically
Per the discussion in Stack Exchange...
