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Tonepoet
Tonepoet
11:37
@AndrewLeach Well, protection is the only course of action which can be argued to be prejudiced because it is a course of action taken directly against a post sight unseen (closure also prevents answers, but it is an action taken against the question). Supposing every positive contribution a person could possibly make is to a protected question, then it might bar them from making any of those contributions, on questions that are otherwise considered worthy of being open.
The other thing that needs to be considered is that for the sake of an effective comparative peer review, we are supposed to have some bad answers published on Stack Exchange websites), because otherwise we are only receiving half of the information regarding the subject matter that we otherwise could.
Andrew Leach
Andrew Leach
11:56
@Tonepoet That supposition does not hold water. And protection does not apply to every question, so it still allows bad answers on the site. It protects questions which might actually attract bad answers. But it doesn't even stop bad answers on those questions.
 
2 hours later…
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
13:58
@AndrewLeach The supposition does seem rather unlikely, but not impossible. Indeed, I could imagine a situation where somebody has specialized knowledge pertaining to a category of questions. Perhaps a concrete example or two may be in order:

Aside from a lucky accident (I read such and such article recently, and it just so happened to address this), maybe somebody has years of experience in the military and became accustomed to the slang, and much of that is offensive in nature. I know that Paul Beale was one such man, and such a major contributor to the Partridge Dictionary of Slang that…
Slight correction: I meant A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by Eric Partridge.
 
7 hours later…
Dan Bron
Dan Bron
21:23
@MetaEd Just coming to this now. Only responding to your first set of messages where you pinged me, because haven't had time to read full backlog since then.
My general take is: we have all sorts of questions attract bad answers.
We don't seem focused on protecting all sorts of questions which can attract bad answers.
We do seem focused on protecting or golden-hammer-closing questions on pejorative language.
That feels to me to be a focus on policing the types of questions which can be asked, rather than premptive moderation of questions which cause undue messes.
And, separately, but importantly. I'm generally not in favor of pre-emptive moderation in general.
It is too easy to confuse with censorship.
I think the costs of leaving most of these questions open and unprotected are so low as to be negligible. And the few that do cause problems are so immediately remedied as to be free.
I suggest when we see a question has actually attracted a set of bad answers, or hit the HNQ and caused a mess, then we take action.
And we do this fairly and without prejudice, regardless of the topic the question asks about.
In fact, we know this to be the intended design of question protection, because as a non-mod I can't even protect questions until after they've attracted a low-rep answer or two. That is, after the problem has actually occurred.
In all, I worry about (a) actual censorship and raising barriers to new users and (b) when there's no actual censorship, then even the perception of censorship.
(b) is even more worrisome when a certain class of questions is pre-emptively acted upon by mod(s), but all questions not falling into that class are left to the community to decide on, in the "mods are human exception handlers" way.
Hope all that is clear.

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