@YeZ, if you are still interested and may have time to do some proofreading some time soon, could you please take a look at the document linked here? What's worked well in the past has been for proofreaders to post corrections as they find them to the project chatroom, one correction per message.
@IsaacMoses OK - coming in at the end, where are the main places to read that might have already addressed my questions, such as "do we want a consistent spelling of "Chanuka/Chanukka/ect..."
@YeZ chanuka-project, I guess. But it really can't hurt to post your thoughts to the chatroom. To that point in particular, we've maintained a diversity of transliteration schemes in our publications before, like on MY, though that needn't preclude discussion of whether that's appropriate for such a central word.
Sometimes a Web page off-site — or a passage in a book, for that matter — answers a question perfectly. How should I refer to or quote that external source as my answer?
@Shokhet Good catch. FWIW, my practice is to edit immediately to remove the copypaste and leave it to OP or other, more generous/interested editors to come around and add in a good summary, rather than leaving it up and waiting for someone to come around, read the comment, and edit it down. If it means the answer later gets commentified for being link-only, so be it.
2
@msh210 I think that @MonicaCellio's right that the atheism angle deserves to be addressed, even if only with an explicit dismissal. However, I think that's done already here:
I am an atheist who happens to be Jewish, and would like to work for a business owned by a religious Jew.
Is he allowed to pay me for my work on Shabbat?
What if the payment is global (e.g. 10% of a full time job), and not for specific hours, but the owner knows that most likely, a lot of the w...
Should faq posts be locked, with a note saying that if you want to discuss this content, please make a new Mi Yodeya Meta post? (Re: conversation here, which looks sloppy on a FAQ post, IMO)
@IsaacMoses I don't think so. Locking prohibits voting and good comments, and it hasn't been implemented on the SE-wide FAQ over on MSE. They have some comments there on FAQ posts and it's ok.
@msh210 Does protection mean anything on Meta? Is the rep threshold for Meta participation lower than the threshold for protected-question-answering?
@DoubleAA The point of these posts is to freeze a current version of site policy, based on already-established community consensus. I'm not sure how voting or comments are valuable, on them, rather than elsewhere on Mi Yodeya Meta.
@Scimonster It can be unlocked by the mods. We already trusted them to bestow official status on these posts; we can trust them to change them if community consensus shifts.
We have a bunch of posts here on Meta of official FAQ content collected under the faq tag. This tag has special official status, as indicated by its pink color and by the fact that its use is restricted to moderators.
As these posts describe official site policy, it seems that they are the wrong...
@Scimonster Yes. That's what Meta's for. But if someone wants to know what the current policy actually is, they shouldn't have to read through pages of commentaryde novo if we've gone to the trouble to codify and official policy based on it. ...
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... (Note the coda to the policy post linked above.)
s/and/an
Like @msh210, I disagree with your final paragraph. FAQ posts need not end the discussion; they just have to crystallize the current state of it in implementable language, so that it's clear what people should do in practice. As I noted in the question, it's confusing to point to the middle of a discussion as a description of policy, even if it is the valid source of policy. The faq posts could include a line like This policy reflects the current sense of the community in this ongoing discussion. You're welcome to join in! — Isaac MosesJan 30 '13 at 23:07
One problem with voting on old meta posts (like faqs) is that it's completely invisible unless somebody goes and looks. There are no notifications of any kind. I've seen such voting change the apparent consensus without anybody noticing, until somebody actually follows the "see this in the FAQ" link and asks about it. Policy changes ought to be more intentional, I think.
I don't know what the solution is; I'm just raising the issue.
Child metas don't have rep, so there's no point in tracking a rep stat or reporting changes. But one of the things rep updates do on main sites is to alert me when there's activity on older posts. On metas, unless I revisit a question I'll never notice that there's been a bunch of voting (which...
This two-year-old question was just brought to my attention again. It was never closed, but in the past attracted four close votes that then aged away for want of a fifth. It's a pretty bizarre question (and its score reflects that), but as someone who answered it anyway I don't feel it's proper for me to unilaterally close. Anybody have any opinions on this? Not a big deal, but I came across the discussion in comments & wanted to ask.
@IsaacMoses Unclear what you're asking? .....thought bizarre, I did kinda understand what the question was. .....on seeing the title, I thought it might be "State of Israel;" but it isn't.
@IsaacMoses last time the dominant reason was "not a real question", which has since been retired. "Unclear", maybe. But I also see your point that it could be a real hashkafa question based on wrong premises.
I'm not agitating for closure so much as asking for input, by the way.
@Shokhet The site founder was @IsaacMoses. At that time high-rep users with mod-like privileges were called "moderators" and included a few others; also, some were appointed by @IsaacMoses unilaterally. (I no longer remember who was in either group, though I can probably look it up.) After that we became a SE 2.0 site and [cont'd]
[cont'd] got IIRC first @IsaacMoses then also @HodofHod and myself as mods, all appointed by the SE employees. Then came elections, and our current moderator group. If I'm misremembering something, someone will no doubt correct me.
@msh210 Ah. I think I've seen some old questions that were closed unilaterally by @IsaacMoses, so I think I figured out that he was a mod at some point.
@msh210 @Shokhet Found it. WAF, Yahu, and I were appointed by @IsaacMoses; Shalom and Alex were high-rep. (That's as of my appointment. If any became mods later, I don't have a record of it.)
@Scimonster Another answer of mine (score 5) was deleted from the Profile page MSE question again. :( ....my score is still >1K on MSE, though, so I'm okay for now.
@IsaacMoses though you probably wouldn't swear by, or to, much of anything, right? :-)
@Shokhet did it at least get deleted because they fixed what you were posting about? The double whammy of deleting things they've declined is particularly annoying.
@msh210 ... and I guess it'd miss any cases in which all three of you answered, only all three of you answered, but one of you answered more than once.
@msh210 yeah, that would be helpful. I think I've seen the suggestion on MSE, but don't know if it was in an actual post or just a passing comment that I've somehow remembered.
@IsaacMoses A quick skim of his linked article shows that it says exactly what my answer says, except it's citing R Niehaus instead of R Ribiat.....though there is that one point at the end about foaming soap which (IIRC) R Ribiat doesn't address
I'm doing a paper about Judaism online and would love to interview anyone from this website. The paper is due tomorrow so this would have to be done ASAP!! Email would be preferrable, phone calls too! Thanks so much!
@DoubleAA I sent the question to a relative who is in a Jewish music group to see if he could provide an answer as well, from the opposite point of view.
@Scimonster I've heard that Shlock Rock is careful to only use pessukim in their proper form in their songs, after someone mentioned to them how they were very confused about a passuk that skipped two words in a passuk. (I don't think that Lenny Solomon is a good enough source for an answer, though ;-)
@msh210 inner join p2 restricts the results to answers by one of you three. having count (distinct p2.OwnerUserId) = 3 restricts the results to questions that have three such answers with different authors. Together, they mean that we'll only get questions with at least one answer by each of you, but ignore other answers to those questions.
@msh210 Ah, the joys of partial denormalization. :)
@msh210 The answercount column is redundant, given that you can get that information by counting associated answers, so it's an instance of denormalization that takes up extra disk space and makes the db-populating scripts do extra work, but makes life easier for people who want to know how many answers a question has.
Sometimes a Web page off-site — or a passage in a book, for that matter — answers a question perfectly. How should I refer to or quote that external source as my answer?
I am an atheist who happens to be Jewish, and would like to work for a business owned by a religious Jew.
Is he allowed to pay me for my work on Shabbat?
What if the payment is global (e.g. 10% of a full time job), and not for specific hours, but the owner knows that most likely, a lot of the w...
I'm doing a paper about Judaism online and would love to interview anyone from this website. The paper is due tomorrow so this would have to be done ASAP!! Email would be preferrable, phone calls too! Thanks so much!
