Jaami'at StackExchange al-Islamyya

Islam.SE

16:45

0

Q: Is it OK if one asks about dream interpretation over here?

I can't find a proper scholar in my locality. Will it be okay if I ask what my dream meant on this site?

discussion

Tamer Shlash

20:32

Salam brothers :)

goldPseudo

wa 'alaykum assalaam

haven't seen you around for a while.

Tamer Shlash

Yeah I'm currently working on my survival

I feel guilty for not contributing here as I should

goldPseudo

don't feel bad. survival is pretty important.

Tamer Shlash

Sure :D

goldPseudo

i'm reading up on logical fallacies. plan on working them into a meta post.

we're still attracting way too many poorly-argued answers that exploit common fallacies and get heavily upvoted.

which is pretty much a perfect way to convince experts that this site is not at all useful.

Tamer Shlash

20:39

The bigger problem about Islamic Q&A websites is that "experts" in Islam is not something common

goldPseudo

that's not entirely true, it's just a matter of what constitutes "expertise".

Tamer Shlash

If there is to be an "Q&A website for Experts in Islam" then its main language cannot be anything other than Arabic

goldPseudo

sure, there aren't a whole lot of masters, but expertise is more about "knowing what you are qualified to answer" than mastery.

Tamer Shlash

Hmmmm that might be true, so what do you thing constitutes expertise?

(y)

I agree with you very much, you really point directly at the biggest problem

goldPseudo

we have plenty of users who write good to great answers when they're able, and know better than to even try answering questions they're not at all qualified to answer.

an expert generally knows the limits to his own expertise.

2

too many people treat this as a fatwa site. yes, we have pretty much nobody who is an expert in formulating fatawa, but there's a lot of viable research questions that don't require that level of expertise at all.

Tamer Shlash

20:45

A community Q&A website can never be transformed into a fatwa website, a fatwa website shouldn't allow anybody to contribute at all

goldPseudo

i mostly agree.

i've hated fatwa questions pretty much from the beginning.

4

Q: We need to set a standard for fatwa questions

The issue of allowing fatwa questions on this site has been brought up before. The two most pertinent examples I recall are, Islam: Should requests for rulings and/or fatawa be permitted? A higher standard for “fatwa” questions? In summary, despite us explicitly not being a fatwa site, we do...

discussion quality-control fatwa

"Many if not most of the fatwa questions I see show no indication that the user is even aware that they're asking random strangers on the Internet for a ruling rather than a team of professional scholars."

Tamer Shlash

21:03

Probably we should show a lot of warnings telling that this site is not a fatwa website and you shouldn't trust answers unless they have an amount of sourcing

goldPseudo

they used to have something like that on J.SE, but it was removed when SE updated their site design.

7

Q: Professional advice disclaimer (post-launch re-request)

Follow-up to CYLOR Disclaimer Now that Mi Yodeya has launched, I'd like to renew the request for a more-pervasive placement of our "professional advice" disclaimer. Currently, the following disclaimer is shown, in red, on the sidebar for new users only: Like Wikipedia, this site makes no gua...

feature-request status-declined design policy

in short, it's something that should be dealt with by the community (by voting/closing/fixing/commenting) rather than by tacking warnings on the site that people probably aren't going to read anyway.

Tamer Shlash

The question is: do people on J.SE know their limitations and respect the culture of adding sources, or they answer questions they're not qualified to answer just like here in Islam.SE?

goldPseudo

they're definitely a mature community by SE standards. the problem is that we very much are not.

when someone does post a bad answer that they're (probably) not qualified to answer, users who do know what they're talking about will downvote him to oblivion.

that's what we need.

and we're probably gonna stay in beta until we get that.

Tamer Shlash

I might be pessimistic, but this is not a problem of an online community, it's a problem of real world life

At least in the Arab world, few people ask about sources, and too many give opinions on things they know almost nothing about.

goldPseudo

i don't really agree with the "post warnings" idea because it's pretty much just throwing a patch on (and lampshading) the actual problem of "you can't trust this site".

when what we should be doing is making a site that people can trust.

either by building an expert community of scholars who are qualified to answer such questions, or the community as a whole refusing to handle such questions unless they're scoped in a manner that we as a site can be qualified to answer.

Tamer Shlash

21:15

If we want to make a site that people can trust, then we should focus on dealing with answers more than dealing with questions.

goldPseudo

bad questions attract bad answers. good questions attract good answers.

optimize for pearls, not sand.

Blog - Stack Exchange: Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand

Jeff Atwood on June 13, 2011

In March 2010, we rebalanced our reputation system to favor answers.

While we value good questions (and asking a great question is absolutely an art), we want to explicitly encourage people to provide the best possible answers. Without people interested in providing good answers, the questions are moot. We know that answers have more intrinsic value than questions, and the reputation balance should reflect that.

The question asker already enjoys a substantial benefit beyond reputation gain from upvotes on their question — namely, they get great answers to their question! Thus, the asker shouldn’t need as much reputation gain. …

the majority of bad answers i have needed to handle (i.e. from flags) were posted to terrible questions.

Tamer Shlash

Well with that said, are fatwa questions considered "bad"?

goldPseudo

if it's, say, a one-liner fatwa question with no scope, who's to say that a "well, in my opinion..." answer is any more "right" or "wrong" than an amateur attempt at ijtihad, or a quote from a fatwa site, or a quote from another fatwa site, etc..

Tamer Shlash

Quotes from fatwa sites should be fine in my opinion, as long as the fatwa site itself has mentioned references. In the end, it should make no difference to quote from a fatwa site or fatwa book/soundtrack/video/whatever

goldPseudo

most fatwa questions i see basically end up as (fatwa) shopping questions. that's almost definitively "bad", at least as far as the Stack Exchange model is concerned.

quotes from fatwa sites are good, but then you get into the morass of deciding whether the quote from a Ayatollah Sistani is "more correct" than a quote from Shaykh al-Munajjid.

(for example)

if there's no way to judge which one is more useful to the questioner, it just becomes a popularity contest.

too many questions attract that sort of answer, and too many users encourage it because they want to promote Truth rather than actual usefulness.

Tamer Shlash

21:29

Do fatwa questions that say, for example: "answers according to Hanafi are preffered", suffer the same issue?

goldPseudo

i personally don't think so.

Tamer Shlash

If this is the case, we probably should as a first step enforce fatwa questions to include which "school" answers should accord to.

goldPseudo

whether it's ijtihad under Hanafi methodology or fatawa quoted from Hanafi scholars, at least that level of scope provides a clear criteria for which answers are more useful than others.

but i've seen cases where that just opens floods of questions asking the same thing under different schools.

Tamer Shlash

Yes I recall that as well.

goldPseudo

i.e. a one-liner fatwa question asking for the Shi'ite ruling, then the exact same question posted immediately asking for the ruling according to a Sunni school.

which is more objectively answerable, but still hardly what i would call a good result.

personally, i support questions which are asked to summarize the major differences of opinion on an issue, but (a) very few questions get posted with that sort of scope, (b) when questions are posted with that sort of scope they tend to attract exactly the same low-quality single-school answers, (c) very few users are actually well-versed in multiple schools to objectively answer questions of this nature and (d) it is very difficult to judge when these questions would fall under "too broad".

and so many of our fatwa questions come from users who i'm reasonably sure don't even realize that there's more than one school of Islamic jurisprudence, much less which school of jurisprudence they're actually looking for an answer from.

i had a meta post on this, but the question it was attached to was deleted some time ago. i keep meaning to rework it into the fatwa-standard question, just haven't gotten around to it.

Tamer Shlash

21:38

That's right, it's because an English website attracts new non-Arabic muslims, who just want to check if doing so-and-so is allowed or prohibited.

goldPseudo

the biggest problem is that nobody's bothering to curate these things at all. all the meta posts in the world don't mean anything if nobody's bothering to actually follow them.

meta's full of highly-voted well-argued community-supported posts that people just ignore.

heck, just heeding the advice in Good Subjective Bad Subjective would solve so many of our problems, but no matter how many times i link to it it doesn't seem to make a difference.

Blog - Stack Exchange: Good Subjective, Bad Subjective

Robert Cartaino on September 29, 2010

Stack Exchange is about questions with objective, factual answers. We’ve been crystal clear about this for as long as I can remember, even back to the earliest, pre-beta days of Stack Overflow. It’s right there in the standard Stack Exchange FAQ:

What kind of questions should I not ask here?

Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!

Thus, questions that are not answerable — discussions, debates, opinions — should be closed as subjective. It seems simple enough: Fact good; opinion and discussion bad. But why? …

Tamer Shlash

LT;DR links are not useful at all if there's no core of active members that really enforce these rulings

Sadly Islam doesn't have such core, there's probably only you and مجاهد moderating the community :\

goldPseudo

yeah, the lack of a core that's both active and constructive is the biggest problem.

the only way this site scales is if the community curates itself. we've grown beyond the point where a small handful of active users can effectively handle the traffic we're getting.

i do what i can, but we're approaching 10,000 posts and who knows how many comments. i can only keep my eyes in so many places at once.

and in my experience, users who are mostly interested in promoting Truth have little interest in keeping the site constructive.

and that's a very significant chunk of our active userbase right now.

Tamer Shlash

Probably there's no core active users because it was not enjoyable to be so when the site suddenly turned into a Sunni/Shia debate forum about two years ago

goldPseudo

if the users who didn't want it banded together and actually used the tools at their disposal, it wouldn't've been near as much a problem as it became.

too many people either (a) just expect moderators to fix things on their own, or (b) leave.

that's forum mentality. neither option is viable for growing a Stack Exchange site.

Tamer Shlash

21:53

I recall preferring a two-hour research answering a single question to working on my university project - I enjoyed that, but not anymore after I had to burn my nerves arguing you-know-who on every answer...

goldPseudo

most of the most problematic users could easily be squelched with downvotes alone.

for example, when users are posting bad answers, the community needs to downvote them. if a user is consistently posting answers that are getting downvoted, the system will stop them from posting any more answers, period.

Tamer Shlash

Not if they invited their followers and become the top-reputation user on the site

goldPseudo

moderators can only do so much in cases like that.

voting is horribly subjective, and voting fraud can be very difficult to detect if the community isn't involved.

Tamer Shlash

Apart from fatwa questions, are we getting good-quality answers on non-fatwa questions?

goldPseudo

if an answer is objectively unwelcome on the site, yet getting heavily upvoted, moderators can do something about that.

but moderators can't be expected to have the domain expertise to know whether any particular question or answer "deserves" the number of votes it receives.

that sort of thing needs community involvement to deal with. which is why, as i said, the forum mentality way of handling things does not work on a site like this.

@TamerShlash in general, it's hard to judge.

quality-wise, i'd say we are better than the average Internet forum, but that's been a very low bar from the get-go.

we're still getting few quality answers beyond what can be found with a bit of dedicated googling.

Tamer Shlash

22:03

I see

goldPseudo

i try to self-answer my own questions when i'm asking things that are actually more complex than "first site in google" but i don't take much time in that level of study these days.

that's really about the best i can do. ask questions that can't be easily answered, and then answer them.

but most of the questions that actually concern me are far to subjective for the SE site.

3

Q: How is hamzat-al-wasl pronounced at the beginning of an ayah?

I know that at the beginning of a noun, when the hamzat-al-wasl in the definite article الْ is pronounced, it is always pronounced as "al-" (i.e. with a fatha). However, using Al-Fatihah 6 as an example, the hamzat-al-wasl in اهْدِنَا is pronounced "ihdinaa" (i.e. with a kasra). Visually, there...

arabic tajweed

something like that, as far as i'm concerned, shouldn't've needed to be unanswered for two months. it seems like something that would be fairly common knowledge to people who have actually studied reading Qur'anic Arabic.

6

Q: According to the Hanafi school, what goods are susceptible to riba al-fadl?

As far as I know, the prohibition of riba al-fadl is agreed upon by the four major Sunni schools. However, there does appear to be a clear difference of opinion as to exactly what goods are considered susceptible thus. As far as I know, the Hanafi school has extended the general meaning of "sil...

hanafi riba

on this one, my self-answer was explicitly downvoted by a user for the sole reason of he didn't like the Hanafi school.

Tamer Shlash

The second question is actually in my bookmarks since it was asked, but I was not able to make a decent well-researched answer, so I just didn't answer.

goldPseudo

the actually interesting questions just tend to get no love because we don't have a strong enough core of users expert enough to appreciate them.

(which is a fairly common concern on SE sites in general; the heavily-viewed heavily-voted questions tend to be the ones that are applicable to the widest number of people, which usually means the simplest)

Tamer Shlash

That's true. And similarly you don't get interesting questions because you don't have enough good contributors.

goldPseudo

yep.

and people keep upvoting the low-quality uninteresting questions because they're easier to answer.

which is exactly the wrong message to send.

community growth is basically a snowball effect. the more experts we have posting interesting questions, the more experts we get interested in those questions. the more experts we get interested in those questions, the more likely they'll stick around and post more interesting questions.

Tamer Shlash

22:17

Agreed

goldPseudo

but, basically, even from the beginning very few experts were interested enough to stick around.

Tamer Shlash

Probably because in Islam, experts don't ask on a community Q&A website but rather are able to find answers on their own, at least Arab experts.

goldPseudo

well, yes and no.

most of the uninteresting questions, yes, they'd be able to research on their own.

and that's why such questions should be downvoted with extreme prejudice for "shows no research effort".

but when such an expert actually has asks a question, it's almost inevitably interesting. exactly because it's not something that they can easily find on their own.

that's not limited to Islam. that's the case with every SE site.

Tamer Shlash

Not exactly. I'm not even an expert but if there's something I can't find an answer on, I would follow many options before thinking to post a question on Islam.SE.

goldPseudo

as would I.

but even then, if i'm spending two months to figure out the answer to mine own question, that was an interesting question (otherwise, i wouldn't still be working on it for that long). posting it as a self-answer is valuable because it helps others not need to do the same thing.

whether i post it up front before researching the answer, or post it along with the answer afterwards, the end result is that it's on the site and other users can find that answer in their own research without needing to ask.

we're as much a place to find answers as we are a place to ask questions. ideally more-so the former than the latter.

Tamer Shlash

22:27

That's true

goldPseudo

i'm sure someone in the know could write a much better answer to my riba-al-fadl or my hamzat-al-wasl questions than I did, but that information really was not readily available on the (English) Internet without heavy searching and reading more than a few scholarly essays.

but now that they're there, other users trying to find the same information at least have far more of a starting point than i did.

for me, that alone makes the site worth it.

Tamer Shlash

That's why I keep bringing up the matter of being a native Arabic

goldPseudo

now we just need to take everyone who insists on drowning out this useful information with the same go-nowhere arguments that have been running for the last 1400 years, and replace them with actual experts who will share their interesting research.

Tamer Shlash

I have had a problem convincing Arab people to contribute to an English Q&A website about Islam. They didn't feel the value of the website, and they were afraid because they're not good at writing English answers.

goldPseudo

6

Islam in Arabic | سين جيم الاسلام

Proposed Q&A site for questions and answers about Islam in the Arabic language موقع لاستفسارات\اسئلة حول الاسلام ومواضيعها

Currently in definition.

that proposal is struggling, but could end up being extremely valuable if it takes off.

but yeah, a lot of users still have trouble grasping the value of the SE model, compared to actually asking a known scholar.

but again, that's mostly because people still treat this as a fatwa site rather than an academic research site.

Tamer Shlash

22:36

Honestly, you can't stop these arguments from occurring in a website that's all about Islam. The only thing you can do is split the site.

goldPseudo

it does appear that way sometimes, yeah.

but i can honestly tell you that if we do end up splitting the site, i personally would have zero interest in participating further.

Tamer Shlash

No offense, but you're living in Canada and just don't see it in action. Living in the middle east makes you feel why people are so much concerned about proving how they're right and the others are wrong.

goldPseudo

oh, trust me, i still see it all over the place.

Tamer Shlash

And who do you think is righteous?

(P.S I'm not trying to categorize you :) )

goldPseudo

i couldn't say. not my place to judge who is or is not "righteous".

i myself always follow what i consider most right, regardless of where it comes from or who tries to convince me otherwise.

i put my faith in God to guide me, not other people.

Tamer Shlash

22:42

It's not about people, but about beliefs. You have to choose your beliefs explicitly so that Allah accepts you.

goldPseudo

and i explicitly believe that putting my trust in God is the best thing to do.

Tamer Shlash

Yes, but for example, you can't believe that Jibreel has mistakenly contacted Muhammad instead of Ali, and still be believing that Allah has the ultimate willing, such belief couldn't be accepted.

This is what I mean by "you have to choose explicitly", I didn't mean choosing from options, but rather having a clear and cutting beliefs.

goldPseudo

i choose to neither believe or disbelieve such things. Jibreel is part of al-Ghaib, Muhammad and Ali both died well before I was born, there's no value to me in committing to a belief that I am in no way qualified to judge the rightness or wrongness of.

Tamer Shlash

This, of course, is out of the scope of discussing about Islam.SE, but a personal chat :)

goldPseudo

the burden of proof is basically on the person making the claim. if one wants to convince me that Jibreel made such a mistake, and especially that it's fundamentally important that I believe that, then it's on him to actually argue that case to me.

and if it actually is important, I put my faith in God that that will eventually become clear to me. whether that information comes to me from someone arguing, from my own research, or what have you.

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Jaami'at StackExchange al-Islamyya